Three Evils and an Ethic of Love: The Revolutionary Life and Work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Each year on the third Monday of January, schools, municipalities, and assorted civics groups commemorate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s passionate commitment to public service and tireless opposition to the scourge of racism. Yet this exaltation of King as part of America’s pantheon of saints features a narrow and misleading representation of his political commitments, social analysis, and moral values.
King was undoubtedly a leading figure in the civil rights movement. Beginning with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, King challenged racism through effective community organizing and rousing religious sermons. He also emerged as a public intellectual uniquely capable of uniting people of conscience across social classes and ethnic identities. King not only highlighted the ways racism was perpetuated through public policy but also through cultural ideology. He offered his local community and the wider national public astute political analysis and cultural criticism centered on universal values such as human “brotherhood” and the inherent worth of all persons.
King’s Cultural Analysis and Internalized Oppression
King recognized how white supremacist notions of blackness could be internalized by people of color, fostering a cruel form of internalized oppression in which those targeted for dehumanization became imprisoned by not only political-social structures but also their own beliefs about themselves. On March 25, 1968, ten days before his assassination, King told an audience gathered for the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly that psychological uplift was a vital component of black people's liberation.
“All too many black people have been ashamed of their heritage, and all too many have had a deep sense of inferiority, and something needed to take place to cause the black man not to be ashamed of himself, not to be ashamed of his color, not to be ashamed of his heritage.
“It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man’s color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget’s Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for black, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 130 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste-right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don’t say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody.”
This denigration of blackness required more than political action. Existential affirmation of the black self as dignified and worthy of love was also necessary.
“The word black itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary. So if we see Black Power as a psychological call to manhood and black dignity, I think that's a positive attitude that I want my children to have. I don't want them to be ashamed of the fact that they are black and not white.”
King’s identity as a fierce opponent of racism and champion of civil rights is unimpeachable. Yet the failure to recognize the other pillars of his vision of a just society constitutes, at best, a partial truth born of ignorance. At worst, this narrow characterization is a propagandistic suppression of the truth.
We can begin to grasp the incompleteness of this popular and equally narrow picture of King by considering just how ubiquitously disliked he was during his life. It wasn't just his opposition to racism that made him reviled, it was also his unrepentant opposition to warfare and economic exploitation and injustice.
The Unpopular and Despised King
Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump are viewed more favorably by Americans, today, in this politically polarizing climate, than Martin Luther King, Jr. was perceived in his day. King’s unfavorability rating was 63% in August 1966. As of January 2025, Biden is viewed unfavorably by 55% of the public and Trump is viewed unfavorably by 49% of the public.
President Joe Biden is disliked by fewer people in the U.S. public, today, than those who disliked Rev. King in 1966. This despite heightened political polarization and the fact Biden has actively armed a military campaign in Gaza that human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have deemed a “genocide.”
As they exited office, in January 2025, the Biden-Harris administration informed Congress that they were approving $8 billion in U.S. arms sales to Israel. The arms will include artillery shells, bombs, and missiles. Including this latest set of arms, the Biden-Harris administration has provided nearly $26 billion of military aid to Israel since October 2023.
A January 2025 Lancet study of civilian deaths in Israel’s cataclysmic onslaught in Gaza concluded that the Palestinian Health Ministry likely undercounted deaths by 41 percent. Researchers from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University, and other institutions estimate that 64,260 Palestinians were killed by Israel's military campaign between October 2023 and the end of June 2024. More than 9,000 of those killed were children under the age of 18. In total, women, children, and people over the age of 65 constituted 59 percent of those killed.
As low as King’s favorability rating was in 1966, it almost certainly plunged all the more after he boldly denounced the Vietnam War and U.S. militarism altogether in his nationally publicized speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” at New York City’s Riverside Church.
King was roundly criticized and even condemned by many in the political and media establishment. We get a sense of how King’s speech was received from the editorial, “A Tragedy,” published in the Washington Post on April 6, 1967.
“Dr. King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies in a great struggle to remove ancient abuses from our public life; and he has done an even graver injury to himself. Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people. And that is a great tragedy.”
King is so well-liked, today, that few in mainstream politics or media have not heaped praise on his life and work. In a December 2017 ceremony marking the opening of two civil rights museums in Mississippi, President Donald Trump described King as “a man who I’ve studied and watched and admired for my entire life.” Former star Fox News commentator, Bill O’Reilly, described King as one of the “greatest” men in “American history,” and praised King for being “so calm” and aspiring to ensure people of color are “treated the way whites are treated.”
On the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination the conservative commentator, Sean Hannity described King as “one of the most captivating speakers of all time. One of the most iconic, I mean just amazing visionaries of his time.” Hannity and his guest panel proceeded to discuss the evils of segregation, emphasizing that had King lived on he would have succeeded in ensuring greater racial unity. They said nothing about the other two evils King believed worked together with racism to foster human oppression.
Political conservatives are not alone in cherry-picking the features of King’s life and work they find praiseworthy—or politically useful— at the expense of his complete vision of a just society.
Economic Exploitation
Most mainstream commemorations of King are utterly silent on King’s fervent condemnation of economic injustice and the culprit he believed was behind it, capitalism. This silence occurs despite the fact King spent the last years of his life working to bring poor people of all walks of life together to march on Washington to demand a dignified minimum wage, guaranteed employment, and broader economic assistance for the poor. King and other organizers of the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington also envisioned an encampment that would last until such demands were met.
Though King was tragically murdered five weeks before the onset of protest activities began, his wife, Coretta Scott King, and colleagues at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) including the group’s president, Ralph Abernathy, ensured that the march went forward. On June 19, 1968, some 50,000 people marched to the capital to demand economic rights. The planned occupation of the Washington Mall lasted more than a month before law enforcement evicted protestors.
Though he is, today, restrictively conceived of as a “civil rights” leader, Rev. Dr. King believed that the cause of justice required a wider scope than the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. During a 1967 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) retreat, Rev. King said,
“I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.”
Through the Poor People’s Campaign, King and SCLC intended to do for economic justice what their movement had achieved for civil rights with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965. King believed that a just society required more than an expansion of civil rights, it also demanded a radical alteration of the economic structure of society.
Rev. King believed that genuine justice would not follow so long as we were “deluded” by the myth of capitalist ideology. In his defiant “Three Evils of Society” speech, delivered on August 31, 1967, King cleverly observed that U.S. political policies favor “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.” The mechanisms of government are disproportionately used to help those with the most power and wealth rather than those with the greatest need and the least power. According to King,
“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.”
It’s hard to imagine President Donald Trump or commentator Sean Hannity sharing King’s vision of justice. We are, thus, left wondering whether these figures are ignorant of the subject they claim to have knowledge on—Rev. King—or whether they are simply utilizing his legacy to advance their own political interests.
King’s vision of justice appears at odds with political leaders across the two major political parties. While President Biden recognized King's commitment to workers' rights, in an April 2024 statement on the 56th anniversary of his assassination, he omitted King’s conviction that the economic system of capitalism was the primary cause of the injustices endured by workers. Biden, as we should all recall, was responsible for signing a bill to defeat the planned December 2022 railway workers strike as they sought reasonable wages and sick days. Suffice to say, the anti-capitalist King is not the one commemorated during quotidian MLK day celebrations.
Militarism
Mainstream celebrations and remembrances of Rev. King are equally silent about his vehement opposition to U.S. military violence and foreign policy. Despite describing King as one of his heroes, President Biden, an early advocate of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, had nothing to say about King's condemnation of U.S. militarism in his January 16, 2023 remarks on MLK Day. Biden’s comments exclusively focused on King’s civil rights advocacy and commitment to “service.”
The U.S. Department of Defense Educational Activity also failed to highlight King’s opposition to U.S. militarism in its materials celebrating King. The organization is responsible for managing K through 12 schools on behalf of the Department of Defense. Their observance calendar features a page honoring King as an advocate “for nonviolent resistance to overcome injustices as a means of lifting racial oppression.” The organization’s other literature including a poster commemorating the 2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and an educational document, “Excellence In Action: Martin Luther King, Jr., Day” makes no mention of King’s opposition to economic injustice or military violence.
Similarly, a 2018 Martin Luther King Day presentation by the Department of Defense’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ignored King’s bold criticisms of the U.S. military as an institution and the prioritization of military spending over social spending on the poor. The document exclusively emphasized King’s commitment to service and “racial equality.”
The U.S. Department of Defense Educational Activity’s page on Martin Luther King Day concludes by calling on the public to honor King’s memory “by organizing, volunteering, and spreading the word.” Of course, this “call to action” fails to address the essential question of what cause or values to devote our efforts to. Those who would embrace King’s vision of justice would apply their efforts of organizing, volunteering, and educating to oppose and undermine the institutionalization of military force and much of what passes for normal U.S. military policy. Thus it’s little wonder that the Department of Defense is disinclined to highlight this dimension of Rev. King’s service.
Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. King delivered a morally courageous national address: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” He called for an end to the Vietnam War, criticized the U.S. for betraying its role as a force for revolutionary freedom, and described the U.S. as the “ greatest purveyor of violence in the world today….” King called for a withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam, and the start of a “radical revolution of values” by redirecting the millions spent on warfare to the needs and well-being of the poor in America. For King, the money spent on warfare wasn’t just mismanagement of resources, it signaled spiritual decay:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech offered a master class in critical thinking centered on the ethic of love. In the nearly one-hour-long address, King reproached those members of the civil rights community who complained that King’s embrace of the anti-war cause was an undesired distraction from addressing racism. He reminded his critics and the wider public that his ultimate commitment was not to a particular political project but rather to the exemplification of the love ethic his Christian faith inspired, namely a love of all humanity.
“To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?”
King’s rebuke of such critics makes clear the shallowness of those who would have us understand King as only a champion of civil rights. They also reveal his commitment to ethical consistency and the primacy of love as the orienting principle for his efforts.
For King, sharing his life with those American society deemed “enemies” began with rejecting the stereotype that they were subhuman or alien beings radically separated from Westerners. King sought to exemplify Jesus’ insistence that we love precisely those we see as our enemies, beckoning his audience to consider the perspective and feelings of not only the Vietnamese people but also the National Liberation Front—the “Vietcong” and “communists”—against whom the U.S. was waging war.
“How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.”
These comments point us to the too-often overlooked commitments at the heart of King’s social justice activism: the prioritization of values and the ethic of love.
The Priority of Values
Rev. Dr. King wished to do more than “reform” the existing social order in the United States. America was on a course of implosion and needed nothing short of a radical moral awakening and rebirth to survive. “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” he said, in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” Basic moral decency called for the nation to “rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,” and to recognize the error of prioritizing profits and property rights over human beings.
King’s express emphasis on values deserves our attention. King was not only a student of the Christian faith; he was a minister and scholar well-versed in the wider humanities including traditions outside of his own.
King’s work meets a 21st-century world that too often believes it has only to confront and deal with empirical facts to solve its problems. But King was convinced that the kind of transformation our society desperately needed was an ethical transformation—a transformation in what we deem important for its own sake, what we choose to care the most about. The starting point of a genuine ethical transformation would be the “restructuring” of social structures that normalized and tolerated poverty toward a society that placed human dignity and love at its center.
The Love Ethic
Rev. King’s conception of justice and his objection to the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism grew from his embrace of the ethic of love. For King, love—the love of humanity and personhood—was not just a feeling or private emotion. To exemplify love in our lives was to activate and experience the divine potentiality of our humanness.
In “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” delivered Christmas Eve, 1967, King sought to clarify the meaning of love, as he had done in so many of his prior spoken and written works.
“Then the Greek language has another word for love, and that is the word ‘agape.’ Agape is more than romantic love, it is more than friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart…. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men.”
Writing in Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), King explained love as “that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.” For King, love was the highest of human values. To recognize love as a supreme value is to unlock “the door which leads to ultimate reality.”
“This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John: ‘Let us love one another: for love is of God: and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love…. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.’”
King’s vision of and commitment to love may have been partly shaped by Erich Fromm’s groundbreaking book, The Art of Loving (1956). In an interview with Kenneth B. Clark, conducted before the 1963 march on Washington, King described Fromm’s book as clearly explaining “that love is the supreme unifying principle of life.”
In his book, Fromm boldly proclaimed love is the “answer to the problem of existence” in that it is the means by which we are able to overcome the inescapable separateness, aloneness, and helplessness that denotes the human condition:
“He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.”
Later in The Art of Loving, Fromm explained that brotherly love (agape), with its requirements of “care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge” lies at the root of all other forms of love. Acknowledging brotherly love as the kind referred to in the Bible, Fromm explained that brotherly love is the universal love of all human beings for their quintessential humanness.
“In brotherly love there is the experience of union with all men, of human solidarity, of human at-onement. Brotherly love is based on the experience that we all are one. The differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all men.”
For Fromm, such a form of love requires the activation of human reason: the capacity to distinguish between superficial appearance and reality, between prejudice and genuine understanding. He wrote,
“In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from periphery to the core. If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separate us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood…..”
King took Fromm’s contention that love was an existential necessity seriously. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, Dr. King argued that our nation had to undergo a radical or systemic transformation in order to survive the fate of so many of the militaristic empires and expansive nations of the past: self-destruction. Specifically, we needed to move from a “thing” oriented society to a person-oriented society. Such a transformation would require us to begin our social fabric with a renewed awareness and commitment to the “often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept” of “an all-embracing and unconditional love” for all of humanity.
Embracing the love ethic, King believed, required us to put militarism and economic exploitation in the same category as white supremacist racism; to see them as a “triplet” of intersecting and mutually reinforcing evils. Military profiteering and violence, domestic economic injustice, and white supremacist racism befalling people of color in the U.S. were not separate issues. They were interrelated expressions of one common and mutually reinforcing system of oppression. And any system that dehumanized humanity—that turned persons into things—was one that must be opposed and overturned.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Whatever else may be said, let it be known that a genuine commemoration of King’s life and commitment to service must begin with a courageous contemplation of his persistent prioritization of the ethic of love and his bold and perhaps prophetic call for people of conscience to recognize that racism, economic injustice, and militarism were equally condemnable.
Read more about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas at the links below
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The quote from Fromm that love requires “care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge” brings tears to my eyes because it is so hard to perform acts of love consistently in our age of hyper-individualism. For now, day by day, I struggle on.
"Love Me, I'm a Liberal!" was written when Dr. King was alive, and it remains entirely relevant.