King's Legacy: Americans Must Choose Between War and Social Progress

Thirty-five years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

Exactly one year before, on April 4, 1967, he had made one of the most fateful speeches of his life, denouncing the Vietnam War and calling on young men to resist the draft.

". . . I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitating its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," he said.

"So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

These words proved to be prophetic. But as true as they were then, they are many times truer today. While George W. Bush was requesting $75 billion from Congress as a first installment for the war in Iraq, state governments were slashing billions from education and health care spending for the poor.
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