“Today is Martin Luther King Day. … In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
– 47th POTUS, Inaugural Address, 2025
“I must confess that ‘the dream’ I had that day (August 28, 1963) has … become a nightmare. Now I am not one to lose hope. I still have faith in the future, but I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years, and I would say over the last few months, and I’ve done a lot of soul searching and agonizing moments and I’ve come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial.” – Martin Luther King, NBC television interview, 1967
On the days surrounding this year’s presidential inauguration, several of us gathered for a 3-day retreat on the life and writings of Martin Luther King. One of our presenters quipped that “if you received a nickel for every time ‘the dream’ was mentioned in reference to MLK, you would be a very rich person.” His point was that the vast majority of Americans have frozen King in time, concluding his legacy at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The newly elected POTUS had just added two more nickels.
Together we watched an all-but-forgotten NCB television interview, given eleven months before his assassination, where King spoke of a “new phase” of the civil rights struggle. In the interview, NCB host Sander Vanocur asked King – perhaps baitingly – whether he had anticipated a war in Asia that would essentially undermine any effort the government might otherwise have made to realize “the Dream.” Before addressing this question, King admitted the optimism he had possessed on the Lincoln steps that day: “That period was a great period of hope for me, and I’m sure for many others all across the nation, many of the Negroes who had lost hope saw a solid decade of progress in the South, and in 1963 – nine years after the Supreme Court decision [Brown vs Board of Education] – the March on Washington, meant a great deal. It was a high moment, a great watershed moment.” He then proceeded to expound on the nightmare into which the dream had devolved, a reality precipitated by the “three evils” of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism, all of which he explained were inextricably connected, one to each other. For King, the Vietnam War, to which U.S. troops had been deployed two-plus years at the time of the interview, became a glaring window into these three evils. In an address to the National Conference on New Politics (NCNP) on August 31, 1967, King made the unflinching claim that “squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military destroys cities in far-off lands to support oligarchy [italics mine].”
King’s assertion was (and continues to be) a profoundly minority view, that is, that the Vietnam War was significantly propelled by corporate greed. Most accept the containment of communism (in fear of the “domino theory”) as the dominant narrative. However, a little-spoken reality is that the Vietnam war was a boon for a multitude of U.S. corporations, especially those producing cutting-edge technologies, for example, tube-launched, optically-guided, wire-guided (TOW) missiles (Hughes Aircraft), Agent Orange (Monsanto), Napalm (Dow Chemical), the BLU26 fragmentation bomb (Honeywell), the Huey helicopter (Bell), the C-130 Hercules (Lockheed), and the F4 Phantom (McDonnell), to name a few. In other words, Vietnam became a massive demonstration yard for advanced, lethal technologies. And myriad defense contractors made millions, oftentimes billions, in the process.
To these emergent and sobering realities, MLK had this to say: “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say, this is not just. It will look across the ocean and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia and Africa, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of these countries and say, this is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloodied battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death (1967 address to NCNP).”
For King, the nation’s turn to war in Southeast Asia was systematically undoing the Movement’s monumental gains. He conceded that much of the hope produced by the work leading up to the March on Washington was now considered “superficial optimism.” Imagine for a moment how it must have felt to see the pinnacle of one’s painfully arduous work trampled upon by the arrogance and bellicosity of a government (and the oligarchs at its behest) bent on winning and re-establishing American greatness on the world stage. And the weariness and despair that must have hounded King, after ten years of organizing, marching, protesting, lobbying, and even imprisonment, upon realizing the Movement’s need to enter a “new phase.”
And yet, what struck us at the retreat was the resolve and, especially, the humility with which he leaned into a precarious future. The 1967 NCB interview that our speaker had us watch was, in a word, mesmerizing. Here was a leader willing to own the shortcomings of his message, analyze, accept, and confront the new challenges before him, and stay true to his moral convictions as a minister of the gospel. It goes without saying – at least I hope this to be true – that King offers us a vital road map with which to navigate the current moment. It appears “The Dream” will continue to take unprecedented and nightmarish turns, but the God of hope and love shall prevail.
Dr. Craig Wong is the Executive Director of New College Berkeley (NCB), a theological “third space” to help the Church discern and contextualize the gospel in the San Francisco Bay Area. He recently completed a DMin at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI, after completing an MA at the same institution. Before NCB, Wong served on the staff of a Presbyterian church in San Francisco’s Mission District where he formed and led a congregation-based, community nonprofit that served immigrant families from Latin America and Asia. He also served for over 12 years on the board of the Christian Community Development Association and the corporate board of Dayspring Partners, a gospel-centered technology company in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. He and his wife Tina have raised four children (now adults) in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood.