It is a Sunday and the 2024 presidential process is about to begin and what better time to learn a bit of forgotten history?

Drop the history lesson.

1968 our election was down to Nixon, Humphrey and Wallace (now there is a choice to die for)….but did you know that there were some on the antiwar side that wanted MLK to run for the presidency?

I had just turned 21 when the election was taking place but unfortunately I could not participate since I was a bit preoccupied in Vietnam trying stay alive.

All that said…..back to 1967….

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. never sought public office or held an allegiance to any of the major political parties. “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic Party,” he said in a 1958 interview. “They both have their weaknesses. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.”

Yet in 1967 with both the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in full swing, King briefly considered launching a presidential campaign on a third-party ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock, the noted pediatrician and the author of the bestseller Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare. Spock had risen to fame in the 1940s with his guidance on raising children, but by the 1960s, he was one of the leading antiwar demonstrators in the country.

After seeing Ramparts magazine photos of Vietnam children sprayed with napalm by U.S. military forces, King came to a reckoning about the war. “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands of little children in Vietnam,” he said. This new awareness brought King closer to Spock and the antiwar movement and on the precipice of electoral politics.

On April 4, 1967 before 3,000 people at New York’s Riverside Church, King gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, where he called for the U.S. government to take immediate steps to end the Vietnam War. “If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam,” he said.

The speech received a swift rebuke from leaders across the political spectrum. The Pittsburgh Courier, the leading Black weekly newspaper, said that King “does not speak for all Negro America and besides he is tragically misleading them.” President Lyndon B. Johnson felt betrayed by King’s antiwar statements after finding common cause with him over civil rights issues. 

https://www.history.com/news/martin-luther-king-jr-dr-spock-presidential-campaign

If I had been one of those that stayed behind I would have worked for King if he had run.  But instead we got 3 candidates that I would not hit a pig in the butt with at anytime.

Sadly he was killed thus ending any chance of a real antiwar person ever holding office.

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“lego ergo scribo”