In a January 2022 interview on Fox News, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, discussing what students should be taught in schools, wrongly claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. “did not talk about the oppressed, the oppressors, the victims, all that.” In fact, King’s most famous writings and speeches explicitly use those very terms.

In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail , he wrote, “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” And in his I Have a Dream address that same year, he said Black Americans were “the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”

King frequently framed racism and inequality as systems of oppression. Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he warned, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty

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