Remembering the Other Dr. King

It would have been nice if The Daily had paid attention to Tenisha Armstrong when it quoted her in its article on King (“King Celebrated,” Jan. 17): “Each year Martin Luther King Jr. is reduced to the ‘I Have a Dream’ sound bite.” Sadly, this is pretty much exactly what The Daily did.

In a March 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” King declared:

“These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. ‘The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.’ We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.”

This is the King who battled against not only racism, but also poverty and war. This is the King who demanded a “unilateral ceasefire” in Vietnam and a strict timetable for the return of American troops, and who insisted that the rich nations of the world had an obligation to launch an “all-out war on poverty.” And this is the King who insisted upon “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

King’s work did not finish with the Voting Rights of Act of 1965. He was murdered in 1968 as he tried to organize sanitation workers in Memphis and prepare for a “Poor People’s Campaign” to force the creation of a “poor people’s bill of rights.” We do King no favors by ignoring his more controversial positions and making him into a two-dimensional idol. “I have a Dream” was the beginning, not the end.

Dara Hazeghi

Senior, History