Jacqueline Hart Gibson, Peak to Peak. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is bound to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dr. King is remembered as the man with a dream who had been to the mountaintop. He shared a vision with the world of racial equality, unity, and justice. What is often ignored is MLK’s activism in the last year of his life. In 1967, King began to transform his grassroots movement of citizens seeking racial equality, to citizens working across racial lines for class solidarity.

Beyond Vietnam

As the war in Vietnam continued to escalate Dr. King, a pacifist devoted to non-violent protest and compassion as a way of life, suffered tremendously. Friends counseled him not to speak out against the war, warning he would jeopardize the movement he had fought so hard to strengthen. He had President Johnson’s ear and was welcomed at the White House. To speak out against war could annihilate future opportunities to advance racial reform efforts in the north and the south. For two years MLK obliged his civil rights colleagues, who pleaded with him to stay in his lane, stating “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” 

 Dr. King became convinced his silence surrounding the war betrayed his purpose and in April 1967 he gave his least famous and most heartbreaking Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York City. 

“The US government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” he courageously announced. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.”  Dr. King explained as he traveled the country for the Civil Rights Movement, he witnessed crushing poverty and economic inequality. He realizes that as long as the US is obsessed with war, the funds and energy needed to heal poverty at home would remain unavailable. As long as US citizens and leaders focused their attention on fears and fights abroad, people suffering at home would be forgotten. 

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” he said. In the words of a Buddhist leader in Vietnam, King quotes, “It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.” The quote King repeated demonstrated the intersection of the human and financial cost of endless wars we face today. A point repeatedly made by 2019 Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, whose platform is centered around ending endless regime change wars. 

In response to the Beyond Vietnam speech, 168 newspapers denounced King, including the New York Times and The Washington Post, who had previously adored him. President Johnson, reportedly stated, “What is he doing to me? I gave that (n-word) preacher everything he wanted, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. What does he want?” King was subsequently disinvited to the White House.

Reparations for Slavery

In May 1967, 11 months before his death, MLK gave an interview with NBC to discuss the expectations of the civil rights and voting acts and King’s intentions for the movement moving forward. King suggested, in the interview, the need for reparations for slavery. Dr. King explained that when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves after 244 years of forced labor and torture, opportunities to contribute in society as other men did were withheld. Millions of acres of free land was available to arriving white European immigrants through the Homestead Act, but black Americans were prohibited from participating. Black Americans were not offered financial reparations for the labor they were forced to give over centuries.

 Imagine if Jeff Bezos had enslaved hidden workers in his warehouses and upon their discovery the workers were not awarded millions in a civil suit? There would be an outcry of course. Yet we continue to this day to dismiss reparations for slavery that actually occurred, often qualifying the issue as extreme and labeling such an action as the delusions of extreme leftists. For the last 50 years politicians and mainstream media have avoided discussions of reparations, but the debate was raised again last year by Democratic primary candidate Marianne Williamson.

Economic and Social Justice

In the same NBC interview Dr. King went on to state firmly that the US was in need of a moral revolution where values are concerned. He stated that in order to integrate the nation we must offer healing to the nation as a whole. He spoke of three evils facing the US; racism, economic exploitation or poverty, and militarism. He said, “These three are tied inexplicably together and we are not going to get rid of one without getting of the others.” Today, Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders takes up this mantle in his campaign fighting for economic justice, peace in the Middle East and equal rights for people of all races, genders, religious affiliation and sexual orientation.

Poor People’s Campaign

In December of 1967, four months before King was murdered, he announced publicly his plans to organize a mass civil disobedience campaign called the Poor People’s Campaign. The purpose of the campaign was to mobilize a grassroots movement of poor people from diverse backgrounds, to march on Washington DC and force the government to end poverty. The Poor People’s Campaign gathered 3000 people in a protest camp on the Washington Mall, and stayed six weeks in the Spring of 1968. King did not live to see the fruition of the protest. President Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” in 1966, but never put manpower, organization or sufficient funding behind the declaration. As the war in Vietnam raged on, the war on poverty and the Poor People’s Campaign dwindled into silence. In 2018 the Poor People’s Campaign was revived and continues King’s fight for economic equality today. 

On March 28, 1968, King lead a march of 6000 Memphis sanitation workers protesting dangerous working conditions and low wages. A week later he was shot and killed. 

Martin Luther King’s vision for America’s future was undeniable prophetic, though unfortunately ignored. Truth has a way of coming back around when we choose not to see, usually louder and more insistent, until we pay attention. Perhaps now, when we seem to need the message of unity more than ever, our nation is finally ready to stand together for the moral revolution Dr. King wanted for us all.

(Originally published in the January 16, 2020, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)