Forty years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Sacramento State, he touched on many of the themes and issues that would dominate his thoughts and actions in the final months of his life. King said he was happy to be in an academic setting and went on to quote Aristotle, Victor Hugo, T.S. Elliot and others. He gave a brief history of the African-American experience from slavery to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As was often the case, the tone and substance of King’s remarks that day were designed to educate and uplift his audience, and to elevate the political discourse.

Just six months earlier, on April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City, he had come out forcefully against the Vietnam War, which estranged him from President Lyndon Johnson and from many of his allies in the civil rights movement. For example, the leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) passed a resolution stating that on Vietnam, King did not speak for them, and editorialists from “The New York Times,” “Life” magazine and other influential journals called King’s break with Johnson on the war a “mistake.”

“Time” magazine described King’s anti-war speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script from Radio Hanoi.” “The Washington Post” concluded, “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” But King’s somewhat belated open opposition to the Vietnam War instantly made him the most important leader of the peace movement. His speech at Sac State came just weeks before he announced his Poor People’s Campaign where he hoped to organize thousands of the nation’s destitute people of all races to converge on Washington, D.C. King envisioned a class-based nonviolent movement that would demand a “domestic Marshall Plan” to fight poverty.

He pointed out that the U.S. government was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on each enemy killed in Vietnam, while only spending about $53 on each American living in poverty. He wanted the culminating event of the campaign to be larger than the 1963 March on Washington.

On Oct.16, 1967, King noted that during the previous 18 months there had been 58 black churches burned in Mississippi, and such violent acts “are daily reminders that we have a long, long way to go.” He decried the de facto racial segregation in the nation’s cities, the inequality in education, the unemployment and underemployment, and the “dilapidated housing conditions” that millions of African-Americans endured.

King told the Sacramento State community, “I’ve heard your governor say…that you have to change the heart and you can’t deal with the housing problem and other problems through legislation because you have to change the heart…There is some truth in the fact that we need a lot of heart changing in our country,” King continued, “but for those who say you cannot legislate morals, I would like to try to point out the other side…It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”

King hoped the Poor People’s Campaign would be a nonviolent alternative to the riots and rebellions that erupted in black communities during the previous summers, most notably in July 1967 in Detroit.

“After all,” he said, “a riot is the language of the unheard. What is it that America has failed to hear?” he asked. “It is much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to eradicate a slum. It is much easier to guarantee the right to vote than to create jobs or guarantee an annual income. These things cannot be done without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

He explained his decision to dedicate himself to ending the war and organizing the nation’s poor this way: “Ultimately a genuine leader is not a center for consensus but a molder of consensus, and on some positions cowardice asks the question: ‘Is it safe?’ Expedience asks: ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks: ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question: ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right, and there is where I find myself.”

By October 1967, King had come to understand peace means more than the absence of war. He recognized an effective peace movement must also struggle for social justice. He was greatly admired for having opposed racist sheriffs in Alabama, but when he turned his attention to the problems of poverty and war, he was bitterly criticized. He was in the midst of organizing the Poor People’s Campaign and working to end the Vietnam War at the time of his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

On that autumn day at Sac State, King had outlined his goals and ideals for the future. He would be the first to tell us he was part of a larger social movement, and that he did not act alone. Today, with the rolling back of many of the reforms King stood for, the most fitting way to honor the memory of his visit to our campus is for each of us to take his words seriously and do our part to move his struggle forward.

Joseph Palermo is a professor in the history department. The views expressed in this column are not necessarily the views of The State Hornet