Opinion | Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Radical

MLK Day is upon us once again, with its choices of how to spend it — a parade, a public celebration, service opportunities, a visit to a monument or museum? And each year, when his birthday rolls around, I prepare to wince.

I was born into civil rights agitation in Alabama, sent to jail with my mother at 4 months old because she had the temerity to sit down at a lunch counter to order a hamburger — with me on her lap — and refused to leave. So I view MLK Day as more than a day of service. And I get irritated by the sanitized version of Dr. King that is presented to us, devoid of his most insistent demands.

Dr. King would be considered a radical today. And he was considered a radical when he walked this earth, contrary to his Kumbaya-I-Have-a-Dream image. For me, radical is a good word. After all, the Declaration of Independence was radical and revolutionary. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” Those 13 words penned by Thomas Jefferson signaled a founding aspiration for a potentially exceptional new nation. Generations of Black Americans, including King, including me, were able to claim and love America based on those words — notwithstanding the irony that they were, alas, written by an enslaver. The Civil Rights Movement, powered by thousands, including my mother, who were willing to put their bodies on the line in nonviolent resistance, was one of the most patriotic movements this country has known. Because these soldiers for justice agitated to make our radical founding ideal of equality true. For everyone.

Instead of celebrating that kind of “good trouble” radicalism on MLK Day, far too often Dr. King’s legacy is reduced to platitudes, or worse, weaponized by the right to advance a colorblind ideology that attacks or suppresses the transformative multiracial democracy to which King aspired. Casting MLK Day as a Day of Service is comforting. Yes, on its face, that’s not a bad thing, in that it encourages people to do something kind for others on this holiday, rather than, say, going shopping. But unfortunately, a call merely to service belies King’s positively radical agenda. He championed nonviolent resistance and spoke moral truth precisely to induce “creative tension” or discomfort — a critical step on the road to transformation and creation of the beloved community he imagined.

In this spirit, for my third annual MLK Day opinion piece for Politico, I decided to reflect on a sermon other than the famous one delivered at the March on Washington that we often hear. It’s a lesser known speech, perhaps his most controversial, because it shows his radical revolutionary vision for America and the world while also outlining his strong opposition to the Vietnam War.

On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, Dr. King addressed an audience of 3,000 at the iconic Riverside Church in Manhattan. “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” he began and proceeded to deliver a sober, multipoint critique not just of the Vietnam War but also of unchecked capitalism, militarism and racism.

It is well worth a 56-minute listen on his holiday. There are timeless lessons here for our current moment, as we grapple with war abroad and existential threats to democracy at home. I want to underscore three points of his opposition to the Vietnam War that suggest what he would say today about the Israeli-Hamas war — and America’s role in it.

First, he called for a “radical departure” from the extended destruction and bombing of Vietnam and recommended a unilateral cease-fire to create the conditions for negotiated peace, suggesting that were he with us today he would heartily advocate for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

In making his case, King allied with the Vietnamese peasants “living under the curse of war” and castigated the unconscionable scale of it, perhaps a million killed at that point, “mostly children” he noted. The U.S. military had herded them “off the land of their fathers into concentration camps” to evade bombs, then destroyed “a million acres of their crops” with defoliants. The peasants poured into hospitals “with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.”

“We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers,” he intoned. And so he spoke:

“We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. … We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.”

I have no doubt Dr. King would have brought the same moral clarity from the beginning to the Israeli-Hamas conflict. He would have decried Hamas’ unspeakable acts of violence, rape, torture and hostage taking on Oct. 7. He would also denounce the U.S. for funding the mass destruction in Gaza that now subjects the entire population to the risk of death by disease, dehydration or starvation. He would denounce the death toll of about 23,000 now in Gaza, the dropping of 2,000-pound bombs in dense urban areas they were not designed for, including in southern territory to which Gazans were ordered to flee for safety. If King were alive today, he would demand that Israel immediately stop the air and ground war, despite the Israeli military’s claim that it is in the process of shifting to a more targetedstrategy.

Second, Dr. King invoked and applied the nonviolent aims of the Civil Rights Movement — animated by a moral philosophy of universal human equality and radical love — to engender understanding of the perspectives of our so-called enemies, the Vietnamese. He called for a “radical maturity” that would give the Vietnamese agency in peace negotiations, sovereignty over their lands and reparations for the damage done to them. Of course Dr. King would demand the same for Palestinians and Gazans. Interestingly, some families of Israeli hostages have made a similar call for cease-fire and a negotiated, permanent political solution — a perspective perhaps gained because their loved ones held hostage by Hamas have also suffered the nightmare of indiscriminate bombing and war.

Finally, and most uncomfortably, King argued that the Vietnam War was “a symptom of a deeper malady of the American spirit” and demanded a “radical revolution of values” in which we transform from a society focused on “things” to one that uplifts all people and restructures the edifice that produces poverty. In 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a potentially “disastrous rise of misplaced power” by “the military-industrial complex.” At the Riverside Church six years later, King echoed Eisenhower’s warning, but took it a step further, bemoaning excessive spending on military violence and connecting it to our nation’s disinvestment in poverty reduction and policies for promoting peace.

He spoke from the deepest Christian teachings that animated his life: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

King was very aware that in articulating his empathy for the “peasants” of Vietnam and their aspirations, he risked being cast as a communist sympathizer (the FBI certainly saw him that way) and therefore undermining the domestic cause of civil rights. But he deflected this criticism by doubling down on the most American of ideals. Our best hope for fighting communism, he insisted, was to rekindle the American revolutionary spirit: Our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolution we initiated created a vacuum for the rise of communism. King, the radical, argued that we must “boldly challenge the status quo.”

Domestic transformation and peace abroad required “an overriding loyalty to humankind as a whole,” he said. And that, he argued, required the hardest work of all to show “concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.” Unconditional agape love was an absolute necessity for the survival of all humans and the supreme unifying principle of all great religions. To end war and rekindle democracy, he called on all Americans to reject the self-defeating path of hate and retaliation.

Our choice was clear then and it is clear now: “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.” The “conundrum of life and history,” King concluded, was getting this choice right. In 2024, in the Middle East, where the Israeli-Hamas conflict threatens to consume the region, and at home, where threats of violence are a regular feature of far-right politics, we may be running out of time. On this MLK Day, my hope is that we all examine King’s radical playbook and choose nonviolent, agape coexistence.