King’s revolution of values was not just idealism, for in that same speech King linked the spiritual revolution he called for to an analysis of the three evils afflicting American society: “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” By this time in 1967, after the legislative victories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King saw that the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. could not be confined to political struggle and divorced from other structural oppressions. Racism and white supremacy were indelibly tied to “materialism,” and “militarism,” the forces of inequality and violence that lay at the root of American society.
Indeed, against inequality King was about to launch the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a national organizing effort to address the poverty and inequality that still kept African Americans as second class citizens, even with new political rights. In the wake of legislative victories, King argued that “now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” There was still an economic revolution to be won, without which the struggle for black freedom would be forever incomplete.
