Following the widespread urban riots that had marked the summer of 1966, “I knew<br />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 today — my own government.”<br />Dr. King acknowledged how his sense of prophetic obligation had been strengthened by his receipt of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, which represented “a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man’ ” — a calling “that takes me beyond national allegiances.” Dr. King emphasized<br />that he counted himself among those who are “bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism.”<br />Dr. King then turned his full wrath against the war.<br />called Dr. King’s remarks both “facile” and “slander.” It said the moral issues in Vietnam “are less clear-cut than he suggests” and warned<br />that “to divert the energies of the civil rights movement to the Vietnam issue is both wasteful and self-defeating,” given how the movement needed to confront what the paper called “the intractability of slum mores and habits.”<br />Even some of the black press lined up against him: The Pittsburgh Courier warned<br />that Dr. King was “tragically misleading” African-Americans on issues that were “too complex for simple debate.”<br />Dr. King was unmoved.<br />Dr. King’s Riverside Church address exemplified how, throughout his final 18 months of life, he repeatedly rejected the sunny optimism of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and instead mourned how<br />that dream had “turned into a nightmare.” But the speech also highlighted how for Dr. King, civil rights was never a discrete problem in American society, and that racism went hand in hand with the fellow evils of poverty and militarism that kept the country from living up to its ideals.
