A black minister sat and worked on a sermon that he was to deliver the following Sunday. The title: “Why America may go to Hell.”

In the months leading up to that day, he spent time delivering fiery speeches condemning the United States as the “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and said it was “on the wrong side of a world revolution” in movements across the globe.

He railed against the imperialistic policies of the United States and spoke out vehemently against the war.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” he said.

He condemned social and class inequalities in the United States and argued for a mandatory wage for all.

No, the minister in question wasn’t Jeremiah Wright. It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and like Mark Twain and other great dissidents before him, his public legacy has been largely whitewashed to fit acceptable political debate.

“If America does not use her vast wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life,” King said, “she too is going to hell.”

Wright speaks forcefully, and some of his views are discomforting — just as King’s were in the days leading to his death. And a media that has largely served elite interests acted similarly back then.

Columnists Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon point out that back then, Time magazine

labeled King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech "demagogic slander that sounded like

a script for Radio Hanoi," while The Washington Post said that King has "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Wright and King weren’t the first Americans to lament the transgressions of their country either.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever,” wrote Thomas Jefferson on the United States’ continued use of slaves, John Nichols observed in The Nation.

Our current political environment is one where superficial and trivial issues are discussed as if they were important, leaving underlying doctrinal and institutional factors outside of acceptable political debate.

We should remember that conformity carries with it little cost; it is expected by all governments of their citizens. The price of dissent, on the other hand, can be high, even in a country with as much freedom of speech as ours.

As Princeton professor Cornel West said of King, “He’s a patriot because he loves America, but he doesn’t confuse dissent with disloyalty.”

We shouldn’t confuse it either.