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As Americans gather next Monday to celebrate the legacy of the great martyred civil rights and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a time of fascist rule in the United States, it is important to remember seven interrelated parts of King’s thought and activism that have been largely forgotten and deleted:

1. The Dr. King who in 1963 (“Letter From a Birmingham Jail”) wrote that the primary obstacle to overcoming American racial oppression wasn’t the open racism of segregation’s brutal enforcers but the tepid incrementalism of white moderates who counseled excessive patience and discouraged the mass direct action required to overthrow the Jim Crow regime.

2. The King who spoke out against American imperialism, most particularly against the US War on Vietnam, and who said (on April 4, 1967, in New York City’s Riverside Church) that a society that spent more money on military empire than on programs of social uplift was “approaching spiritual death.”

3. The King who said that the defeat of de jure segregation and racist voter disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South needed to be understood as an elementary prelude to the overcoming of deeply entrenched racism, de facto segregation, and economic inequality across the entire nation.

4. The King who placed the primary blame for the US race riots of 1965-67 on a “white power structure…seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” and a “white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” that told Black people “they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

5. The King who denounced what he called “the........

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