January 15th, 2026

Dr. Vincent Intondi spoke Thursday at Linn-Benton Community College. “King once said, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice,'" Intondi noted. "Today, I ask you to reach up, grab hold of it, and let’s bend it together.”

Speaker focuses on overlooked
legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

​  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often remembered for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963.
  In a program Thursday at Linn-Benton Community College honoring the legacy of the slain civil rights leader, Dr. Vincent Intondi talked about something often ignored about King’s work.
  “He always saw the intersection of peace and civil rights as part of the links to the same chain,” Intondi said. “Many people think that his jump into foreign policy was really with the Vietnam war, but actually he was speaking out against nuclear weapons as early as 1957. He always saw this as something near and dear to his heart and that we must fight for nuclear disarmament. He’d always say, ‘What does it matter if we integrate lunch counters, if we don’t care about the world we’re trying to integrate.’”
  Intondi is Executive Director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and a research scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He had a transformational experience in 2005 when he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and met with survivors of the atomic bombings of August 1945. He is now a nationally recognized expert on nuclear disarmament and environmental justice and the author of “African Americans Against the Bomb” and “Saving the World from Nuclear War.”
  Intondi, who holds a Ph.D in history, said many kids are growing up learning only what’s “safe” about history.\

Video: Dr. Vincent Intondi

  “We take King and put him in a nice categorical box in our textbooks with ‘I Have a Dream.’ We don’t want to look at that last year of his life when he was too radical. We don’t want to look at what he said about economics, or environmental justice or nuclear weapons."
​  The New START Treaty will expire Feb. 5,” Intondi noted. “Trump said yesterday, ‘If it expires, it expires.’ It’s the last nuclear treaty that we have. He’s gotten rid of every other one. It says that the U.S. and Russian will not deploy more than 1,500 nuclear weapons. If that (treaty) ceases to exist, there will be an all-out nuclear arms race with the United States, China, Russia and more.”
  The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the U.S. will spend nearly $1 trillion  on nuclear weapons and delivery systems over the next decade.
​   Meanwhile, in Baltimore, they’re asking for parents to bring space heaters because they don’t have heat in the schools, Intondi said. And in Oregon, there’s a push for data centers for AI, which proponents want to power with small nuclear reactors. “You want to live next to one with the cancer rate?”
  Intondi said there was successful pushback back on 13 nuclear power bills during the last legislative session in Salem, but he expects more bills to come. “They are hellbent on getting nuclear power in the state,” he said.
  Circling back to Martin Luther King Jr., Intondi said, “If we truly want to live up to Dr. King’s legacy, then now is when you need to commit to live in a world in which human rights are protected, nuclear weapons are abolished, wars are ended, autocracies are defeated, and equality and justice are not just words.
  “King once said, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ Today, I ask you to reach up, grab hold of it, and let’s bend it together.”
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  Thursday’s program was presented by the LBCC Office of Institutional Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the Linn-Benton Branch NAACP. Jason Dorsette, Executive Director of the LBCC Office of IEDI and past president of the NAACP branch, emceed the program, and LBCC President Lisa Avery gave the welcoming remarks. Among those in the audience was John Phillips IV, new president of the Linn-Benton NAACP Branch.