Martin Luther King Jr. packed several suitcases and secluded himself on the coast of Jamaica, far from the telephone, far from the crises roiling America. Congress had passed civil-rights protections after his campaigns in the South, but many black Americans remained crushed under poverty. King was not the first black activist to take a bold public stand against the war. “The Vietnam War is either morally right or morally wrong — it’s not ‘on the one hand’ or ‘on the other hand,’” King told Jones. Above all, the war in Vietnam symptomized a larger problem with American society, King said, calling for a rapid shift “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Source: Los Angeles Times January 16, 2017 11:01 UTC