Martin Luther King. Jr. and “The Triple Evils That Are Interrelated”

If you read King’s essential writings and speeches in 1967 and ‘68, you see him repeatedly making strong connections between racism and poverty at home and war and empire abroad. He talked and wrote about the fact that many young black Americans were at the front of the imperial killing lines in Vietnam because their segregated poverty was so high and their educational qualifications and job prospects so low that service in the relatively desegregated military looked like a step up to them. He noted that America’s criminal decision to pour tens of millions of dollars into the crucifixion of Southeast Asia was undercutting its ability to deliver on the promissory note of social justice that it had started to write with the all-too-limited and short-lived “War on Poverty.” King observed how economic misery drove many poor whites as well as blacks into the clutches of the military. He also talked about how the American government’s role as what he called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” was undermining his ability to argue effectively for nonviolent resistance to inequality and racism in the United States.  In a famous 1967 speech he gave to Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City, King noted the savage absurdity at the heart of America’s claim to possess the ability to unify, liberate and democratize other nations. The self-appointed imperial savior Uncle Sam, King felt, was too deeply scarred by authoritarian inequalities and brutal class and race apartheid at home, to deliver on that claim.  [more]

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