Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day and it got me thinking about the irony of becoming larger than life—on becoming a national icon. Despite King’s pacifism and incisive rejection of American foreign policy, he has been mainstreamed and virtually removed from the ideology he represented.

How many children are made to recite King’s “I Have a Dream” speech across American elementary schools? Millions, surely. The speech was inoffensive and by now politically neutral, but it touched upon only a selected portion of King’s ideology: the struggle against racial bigotry and oppression.

Now I wonder how many children are made to recite his “Beyond Vietnam” speech? Few if any… In this speech, he described the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. For this, he was lambasted by the media; Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi”; similarly, The Washington Post lamented that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people”.

But it is in this speech we see the true legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. The depoliticized federal holiday largely whitewashes his political activism beyond fighting racial oppression. But for King, racial oppression was merely the first obstacle symptomatic of American imperialism and aggression.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. (more…)