Introduction:

I write to object to continuation of a moral and political tragedy, the failure to include Dr. Martin Luther King’s greatest speech and his antiwar advocacy in the National Museum of African

American History and Culture. The conspiracy of silence that blinds us to so outrageous an omission ought to open our eyes to how commemorations of the 1960s antiwar movement are absent from American history. 

Objections to war like Dr. King’s and the many others from the public of his era are necessary to counter the moral corruption of those nations like ours that engage in war. The most important of the lessons Dr. King left for us is our blindness to ourselves.

When Dr. King led his first antiwar march in Chicago in March 1967, he stated, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home — they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.” On April 4, 1967, he delivered a speech in Riverside Church in Manhattan of a kind never heard before from any American political leader. It was addressed to the American people, not the government. It called upon us to open our eyes and our minds to evils inherent in the American capitalist hegemonic system. He denounced the United States government, stating "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government." That speech is, Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence. It is one of several speeches that were drafted for him by Vincent Gordon Harding, an activist pastor who knew him well.

I've always seen the speech as the finest political speech in America since the Gettysburg Address (1863). He began that speech with the words, "I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice." In it, he called out the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism", asserting that, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” In its political acumen, it was in keeping with Karl Marx’s, “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present — I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.” (Letter to Arnold Ruge, September, 1843) King read a bit of Marx and Gandhi at Boston University while studying for his Ph.D. in systematic theology (1955). He was most devoted to the Biblical New Testament values of human rights, social justice, and nonviolence, but he saw all the violence we were perpetrating throughout the world. In a 1952 letter to his future wife, Coretta Scott, he wrote, “[A] warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.” 

In this speech, he asserted that there was “no meaningful solution” to the Vietnam War without taking into account the Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Here he addressed neither Blacks nor Americans, not civil rights but social justice, reaching the level of concern for humanity shown by Malcolm X years earlier. He traced America’s involvement in Southeast Asia since 1945, history about which Americans knew little, and decried the Vietnam War (aptly known in Vietnam as the American War) and its effect on the people of Southeast Asia as well as on our own soldiers, “taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem," war that corrupted our nation.

Time magazine later called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post called it “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” declaring that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.” The New York Times wrote an editorial entitled “Dr. King’s Error”, and even the NAACP objected to it. That’s what can be expected when a public figure tells the whole truth.

Even greater hostility to him on the part of the united pro-Israeli ruling class and government in the U.S. was generated two months later by his commentary on the issue of Palestine in response to the 1967 Six-Day War that Israel launched, with the support of the U.S., against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, that resulted in Israel occupying Gaza, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula. On the June 18, 1967, broadcast of ABC Sunday’s “Issues and Answers”, Dr. King remarked that, “I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation, it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory, because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.” (Mother Jones, Nov. 9, 2023)

Telling the whole truth led to his assassination on April 4, 1968, exactly one year after he delivered his speech in Riverside Church. James Earl Ray was eventually sentenced to life in prison for his role in the assassination, but there is little doubt that the U.S. government, considering the FBI’s COINTELPRO’s illegal surveillance into the private life of Dr. King, played a pivotal role in producing his death. Dr. King had earned the ire of the U.S. government when he opposed the escalation of the Pentagon’s role in Vietnam during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.

King family’s lawyer, the late William Pepper, presented a comprehensive case proving that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Pepper’s findings are detailed in his last two books, An Act of State (2003), and later The Plot to Kill King(2016).  

In 1999, after a 30-day civic trial brought by the King family, a Memphis jury found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. Once again, Time magazine and The Washington Post, dismissed the jury’s verdict as delusional. Author James W. Douglass attended the entire 30-day trial and wrote Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK (2025), in which he calls the killing a government execution as well as an assassination. Douglass’s basic conclusions are in agreement with Pepper’s. 

Mainstream media and the government have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcolm X assassinations. Today, the public’s memory of the trial has faded and most people assume MLK was killed by James Earl Ray, a white racist. 

Celebration of a national MLK holiday and promotion of a MLK Day of service should begin with the nation confronting the truth. Making MLK Day one of service is a disservice to MLK and a corruption of truth. After 58 years, revelation of the truth is long overdue: It is our own government that was responsible for the terrible assassinations in the mid-1960s, and for producing the conspiratorial cover-ups to hide them from us. 

Edward Curtin has given us an excellent commentary covering all of this, “Fifty‑Eight Years Later, the Truth About MLK’s Murder Still Terrifies America,” in Scheer Post, January 19, 2026. 

His Great Legacy Is Being Hidden from Us

Since his assassination, his vision of social justice has been replaced in the media by the 1963 I Have a Dream speech in which he expressed a vision for a world where content of character matters more than skin color. In a 1965 sermon, King explained that the "majestic words" of the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson, that "all men are created equal," were the cornerstone of the civil rights movement. But he devoted the final 18 months of his life to making his greater message explicit, one that promoted the solidarity of all mankind. Fifty-nine years have passed now since he delivered that visionary speech at Riverside Church. Will the nation let another year pass without acknowledging his true legacy, his best teaching? He said then that "the world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve," and fifty-nine years later it still does. In reminding us of what most matters, he was trying to save our soul, but our redemption will now require the admission of our mistakes and our responsibility for them.

Coretta had spoken out against the Vietnam War even earlier than Martin, and he acknowledged her role in teaching him about activism. Her deep commitment to racial and economic justice and to pacificism was as well established as his. Each expressed their love of country through their dissents over its misguided war policies. 

In 1965, she told a group of college students, “Our job is to save the soul of America.” On April 27. 1968, less than one month after Dr. King’s assassination, she shared his notes for a 15-minute speech he never had the chance to deliver, one that would quote his “Ten Commandments on Vietnam”:

 1. Thou shalt not believe in a military victory. 

 2. Thou shall not believe in a political victory.

 3. Thou shall not believe that they, the Vietnamese love us. 

 4. Thou shall not believe that the Saigon government has the support of the people.

 5. Thou shall not believe that the majority of the South Vietnamese look upon the Vietcong as terrorists.

 6. Thou shalt not believe the figures of killed enemies or killed Americans. 

 7. Thou shall not believe that the generals know best. 

 8. Thou shalt not believe that the enemy's victory means communism.

 9.  Thou shall not believe that the world supports the United States. 

10. Thou shall not kill. 

Our nation has long been caught up in a maelstrom of polarized conflict over issues in racial justice, and Dr. King surely devoted his life to that. But he did so much more than that. In this era of the commodification of protest, I think it is our responsibility to ensure that his being made a saint of civil rights doesn't obscure his devotion both to America and to human rights. Let his true epitaph be known.

Dr. King’s advocacy of human rights and social justice left to us a better world, one committed to truth not hypocrisy, and he is worthy of being seen as one of the founding fathers of its creation.

Let us recall one of the best-known messages he left us: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." We must no longer allow his greatest message to be silenced in our media, one that insisted that all lives matter. 

And note that time is in the title of his speech, time that is now paramount in trying to save our world from nuclear war, climate change, and other critical injustices in the use of power: 

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time.

Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood – it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”

It is paramount to add what is missing from his legacy to the Museum, not only his speech, but the antiwar activism that it inspired. Dr. King enlightened us to the many lies incorporated in the American Myth. As a great teacher, his lessons to us need to be displayed there much as his namesake Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were posted on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg. 

Like Socrates, King's life was devoted to teaching the citizenry to question and to think clearly, especially about the democracy that was first established in Socrates's Athens and was at risk here on January 6, 2021. He had a radical democratic vision committed to trying "to make America what it ought to be." (Final Speech, Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968) He shone great light wherever greed, prejudice, inequality and hypocrisy were to be found. I don't know of a better epitaph for King's life than to celebrate how he taught us all to be the kind of citizens a democracy needs to flourish, and a world needs to survive. 

After his death, it took Congress 15 years just to establish MLK Day in 1983. Sen. Jesse Helms criticized his opposition to the Vietnam War and accused him of espousing "action-oriented Marxism." I've not heard a greater tribute to King that.