MLK's Three Evils

In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a searing diagnosis of the national health. "I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism." In the half-century since, this structural critique of American society has been largely supplanted by a sanitized version of King's message. But recently, a number of writers have been exploring the more radical aspects of King's philosophy. This collection sorts their work roughly along the lines of the three evils he identified in 1967: the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war.