Mennonite Weekly Review

On March 9, 1968, a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied damnation upon the United States.

“America’s on the way to hell,” he preached in Greenwood, Miss.

A few weeks earlier, King preached a similar message in Montgomery, Ala.: “The judgment of God is on America now.”

And before his death, from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King called his church secretary with the sermon title for Sunday’s worship bulletin: “Why America May Go to Hell.”

This is not the King remembered in the United States on MLK Day. The state-sponsored events on Jan. 18 will be sure to help us forget the King who told his people to fear the U.S. government. As he warned in a sermon two months before his murder, “a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the ’40s … will put black people in a concentration camp.”

Most of us don’t want to remember what King didn’t want us to forget: that the racial violence that birthed colonial America is remembered in the genetic code of U.S. power. Amnesia doesn’t change the past. Repressed memories always come back to haunt the forgetful. This land is populated with the ghosts of genocide.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King wrote in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait. In a speech in December 1967, King described how this initial racism unfolded: “While they refused to give the black man any land, don’t forget this, America at that same moment … was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest to white peasants from Europe.” King continued: “Never forget it.”

In The Preacher King, Richard Lischer maps out King’s changing perspective on the United States. “The so-called Christian America in which he had first believed,” Lischer writes, “[King] now bitterly attacked.” In his last years, King’s political optimism faded away. He no longer spoke of the transformation of the United States into the “be­loved community.” The rhetoric of his speeches and sermons shifted “from reform to revolution, liberalism to liberationism,” Lischer observes, “announcing a more profound critique of the American system.”

King saw that the whole system was infected with a force that kept the wealthy in power and the poor in the ghettoes. The end of slavery and the right to vote did not transform society into the promised land. Instead, King preached, “Emancipation for the black man was freedom to hunger.”

King’s last effort was what he called “A Poor People’s Campaign.” He began organizing a mass protest in Washington in order to “place the problems of the poor at the seat of government,” King wrote in an article explaining his plans. The time had come for the United States government to account for the debts incurred through generations of racism.