Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for the federal and state governments in America. Many will spend the day focusing on his “I Have a Dream” speech, especially his hope that his children would live in a nation that would not judge them “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Very few Americans look further to see that he had a radical and important message of racial and economic justice for America and worldwide that is far from complete today.
In addition to working towards ending overt discrimination in the South, King pushed to support workers in America, regardless of race, and to end the United States’ current foreign policy. Long before many liberals in the U.S. supported criticism of the Vietnam War, King gave a speech denouncing the United States and its foreign policy as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He also said the war doomed President Johnson’s War on Poverty to failure. Many “liberal” newspapers, including The New York Times, denounced the speech, and it’s a great example of the fact that he was not a moderate.
At the time he was assassinated, King was in Memphis to support a black public sanitation workers’ strike for a living wage and against discrimination. It was a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign that aimed to highlight and fix the poverty and hunger many in the United States were living with. These actions make sense coming from King, who in 1966 stated “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
Many Americans have idealized King’s legacy and, in many ways, the mainstream media whitewashes it. King was far from an American moderate, and in the Cold War world of the United States, the government called him the most dangerous man in America. Our society needs to go beyond just the small snippets of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech they hear regularly and look into the important messages he had on racial politics, the plight of the poor in America and his concern for those who have to suffer through warfare.
Matthew Bailey is a third-year law student. His column runs biweekly.
