It is heartening to see the Martin Luther King celebrations that occurred last week across the country to honor one of the nation's true heroes and a fierce advocate for peace and justice, but it's easy to forget the generations of resistance and rebellion that came before, starting with the earliest years of the republic.

Except for the racist core that remains at the heart of the structures of U.S. society, the turnout for MLK Day could make those who struggle for justice feel very good...at least, for one day. However, the celebration brings to just about all Americans the story of the civil rights movement that King was a part of. Usually though, the day concentrates on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and skims over all that came before, that resulted in some of the changes that were needed.

Vincent Gordon Harding is one of those forebearers who might be overlooked when it comes time for celebration of victories in civil rights and the struggle for peace. He wrote the speech that King delivered against the Vietnam War and war, in general, in Riverside Church in New York City, just a year before he was assassinated. In the speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam,” King condemned not only the war, but addressed the general racism rampant in the country, and denounced militarism and the materialism that pervaded the U.S. and still does, all to the detriment to huge percentages of the population that have been marginalized, historically and currently.

Harding, a historian and a lay minister of his church, grew up in Harlem and the Bronx, and made his way through academia to his doctorate. He died in 2014 at the age of 82 in a Philadelphia hospital. In discussing the Riverside speech in later years, Harding's view was described in his Los Angeles Times obituary, quoting Soujourners magazine in this excerpt:

“All the keepers of the conventional wisdom, especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post, simply vilified and condemned Martin,” he said in a 2007 interview with Sojourners magazine. “They spoke about the fact that he had done ill service, not only to his country, but to ‘his people.’”

The Riverside speech — known as “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” — was pilloried by 168 newspapers, said commentator Tavis Smiley, who produced an hour long PBS special on it in 2010.

It “led to the demonization of King,” Smiley told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that year. “The speech caused black leaders to turn against him. It got him disinvited by LBJ to the White House. He couldn’t get a book deal. It’s fascinating, given the adulation and adoration we have for MLK today.”

That adulation was on display this week and much of the celebration was in reference to King's “beloved community,” with interfaith services, with cleanups of neighborhoods in various cities, with songs and films, and many other ways in which people from all walks of life and beliefs are willing to show their desire for the “beloved community.”

As was noted above, the struggle for freedom and justice for black Americans started early in the life of the nation, when the human impulse for freedom was displayed by slaves that were sold into an alien country, about which they knew nothing and didn't even have a common language with which they could organize to gain their freedom. They knew simply that they wanted to be free and they refused to accept the atrocious concept that humans could be bought and sold like an axe, a wagon, or a horse.

According to the University of Houston Digital History: “During the early 18th century there were slave uprisings in Long Island in 1708 and in New York City in 1712. Slaves in South Carolina staged several insurrections, culminating in the Stono Rebellion in 1739, when they seized arms, killed whites, and burned houses. In 1740 and 1741, conspiracies were uncovered in Charleston and New York. During the late 18th century, slave revolts erupted in Guadeloupe, Grenada, Jamaica, Surinam, San Domingue (Haiti), Venezuela, and the Windward Island and many fugitive slaves, known as maroons, fled to remote regions and carried on guerrilla warfare (during the 1820s, a fugitive slave named Bob Ferebee led a band in fugitive slaves in guerrilla warfare in Virginia).”

And so it went, throughout the 19th Century, but as the UH Digital History states: “The main result of slave insurrections was the mass executions of blacks. After a slave conspiracy was uncovered in New York City in 1740, 18 slaves were hanged and 13 were burned alive. After Denmark Vesey's conspiracy was uncovered, the authorities in Charleston hanged 37 blacks. Following Nat Turner's insurrection, the local militia killed about 100 blacks and 20 more slaves, including Turner, were later executed. In the South, the preconditions for successful rebellion did not exist, and tended to bring increased suffering and repression to the slave community.”

All the celebrations in the world will not change the racist nature of U.S. politics, education, finance, home ownership, healthcare, and all other areas in which blacks and whites are marginalized, but black Americans suffer from those policies more than most. Yes, progress has been made on all of these fronts, but racism still rides roughshod over so many Americans and, except for the bright spots on the annual calendar, like MLK Day, much of the racism is covered over, as if it didn't exist.

We'll know that progress has been made toward that beloved community, when what is taught in schools as “history” includes black history, Native American history, the history of immigrants of every description in this great country, and the treatment of vulnerable peoples around the world by the most powerful nation on earth. It's time for real history, not the mythological history of great and powerful leaders and the conquerors and the rich. What is important is for all Americans to know what the people have paid to make this country what it is. It's time for them to share in its largess.

We're seeing it happen across the nation and the globe, with young people picking up the burden of the struggle for freedom and justice. As Harding once said: “We can't sit back and celebrate Martin King and ask when there will be another like him. No, my dear young friends. We must join our voices with that blessed poet June Jordan and demonstrate that 'We are the ones we've been waiting for.'”