For many, the words “I have a dream” are the only thing they associate with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King’s legacy is mostly depicted in the context of civil rights, with history books lauding his noble achievements of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts being passed. But Dr. King gave hundreds of unpopular and controversial speeches ranging from the dangers of the Vietnam War to mass commercialization. During his life, he was attacked and marginalized from the white and black community alike. The US government coined Dr. King the most “dangerous Negro leader in the country”, routinely spied on him and even went as far as writing him a letter in 1964 urging him to commit suicide. Having been arrested thirty times, Dr. King routinely threw his body upon the gears of the machine to show that change doesn’t roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but through continuous struggle against institutionalized injustice. Dr. King spent the last year of his life fighting what he called the triple evils of the word: racism, militarism, and economic exploitation, focusing on America as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Listen to his profound speech “Beyond Vietnam”, given exactly one year before Dr. King’s assassination:
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:02:58 +0000
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