Civil Rights Events

Robert F. Kennedy Visits Mississippi's Delta

Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination … still reverberates in American life. One reason his standing as a political leader endures is the genuineness of his concern for the most disadvantaged Americans. A child of privilege, Bobby Kennedy was a perhaps unexpected champion of the poor and the marginalized. But living out his strong Catholic faith, he was determined to go to the margins of society—and was always empathetic with the people he met there.

Through 1967 and 1968, in the runup and course of his campaign for president, Robert Kennedy traveled to some of the places in the United States hardest hit by poverty and racism. In the midst of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, the U.S. senator from New York wanted to see how change was playing out and what still remained to be done.

Over the course of what became known as his “poverty tour,” Kennedy visited the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley and the Mississippi Delta. Among whites, blacks and Latinos alike, Kennedy found a nation within our nation in need of aid and wrongs that needed righting (De Loera-Brust 1).

Robert Kennedy consistently related to the underdog. He made a point of witnessing first-hand the hunger of children in the Mississippi Delta as well as the hardship of those living in urban ghettos and on Native American reservations. He was relentless in his efforts to provide for improved circumstances for those who were hungry and poor.

…

After a visit [in 1996] to Harlem in New York City, RFK described the experience: “I have been in tenements in Harlem (New York) in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks…”

Robert Kennedy believed that the best way to help the poor was not have them rely on government bureaucracy, rather to give them the means by which they could work their own way out of poverty. After touring a highly run-down area of New York City known as Bedford-Stuyvesant – riddled with crime, unemployment and deteriorated housing – Kennedy was challenged to find a way to help the community to rebuild itself. He met with community activists, who were cynical of his interest. They claimed that he was just another ‘white politician who was out visiting for the day and would never be heard from again’. But Kennedy was a man of action. His response was to launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a joint venture between residents and businesses. The project was designed to revitalize and rebuild businesses within the community and, in doing so, restore hope for its residents (Baldes, Gould, and Marien (1-3).

Robert F. Kennedy was two years into his first term as a U.S. senator from New York when [in 1967] he visited the Mississippi Delta. At the time, many were already eying him as a presidential candidate, someone who could carry on his brother’s political legacy. But at that moment, Kennedy was trying to carve out his own political identity. Still grieving over his brother’s assassination, he threw himself into trying to make a change in issues that he cared about.

Although many accounts hold that Kennedy’s interest in poverty arose after his brother’s death, former aides link it to work he did as attorney general on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s. Kennedy believed delinquency was a product of economic inequality, linked in part to the racial tension that was beginning to erupt all over the nation.

…

Though the local officials he traveled with had planned where to take him, Kennedy often ordered the entourage to pull over for unscheduled stops so that he could talk to families at random. He didn’t simply want to rely on what his tour guides wanted to show him. “It was more like a fact-finding mission,” [Ellen] Meacham [a University of Mississippi journalism professor accompanying the tour] said. “He was much more interested in finding the truth of the matter and connecting with people than creating a photo op.”

For hours, Kennedy and his entourage traveled by car from one dusty town to another, visiting families who lived in terrible conditions. The senator peeked in refrigerators and cupboards, often finding them empty. He quizzed adults on whether they had heard of any of the government assistance programs created as part of the War on Poverty — and many had not. But it was the children he was most moved by.

In Cleveland, he asked the television people to wait outside while he, [NAACP activist Marian] Wright and [longtime aid Peter] Edelman went into a darkened home. Inside, they found a small baby on the dirty floor, listlessly picking at scattered pieces of rice and cornbread — the day’s meal. As Meacham recounts in her book [Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi], Kennedy became fixated on the child, who wasn’t much younger than his son Max, who had just turned 2. Kennedy ignored the stench of the open toilet in one corner of the room and despite the sores on the baby’s arms and legs crouched on the dusty floor, trying to coax a response from the dazed child, whose belly was swollen from malnourishment. Kennedy touched the boy’s face and cheeks again and again, softly saying, “Baby … hi, baby.”

According to Edelman, Kennedy tried for at least five minutes to get some reaction from the child, but the baby never acknowledged him or made a sound. “It was an incredibly awful but powerful moment,” he said (Bailey 1-4).

A reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs, witnessed part of the first morning of Kennedy’s tour. His observations were printed in 2002 in American Heritage.

Kennedy decided he wanted to see how bad things really were in the Delta, and he asked [Marian] Wright to find a pocket of poverty that the entire subcommittee could visit the next day.

He may not have realized that finding pockets of poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the late spring of 1967 was as easy as finding pockets in a pool hall.

…

At about 10:00 A.M. we reached a black community lost in a sea of cotton fields. The few average-income whites and better-off blacks had separated their houses from the much poorer blacks we were visiting with a cyclone fence. The poorer people had outhouses and used big tanks for water storage. There were some indoor bathrooms but very few phones or television sets.

The houses were probably 40 years old, unpainted and sparsely furnished but in good repair. They were bunched together higgledy-piggledy in what anyone raised in Mississippi would have recognized as “quarters,” around a central tamped-earth court where women washed their clothes in huge pots of boiling water, stirring the laundry with short paddles just as they had in the 1850s.

I introduced myself to Kennedy, who was shorter than I had imagined and seemed frail. His nose was more hooked than it appeared in photographs, he was deeply tanned, and he kept trying to brush his thick, longish hair out of his face when the wind kicked up. His blue suit didn’t look much better than mine. He spoke in a low, breathy voice, and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves upon had to strain to hear him. Most of all, he just looked terribly, terribly tired. I knew that he had played football for Harvard and still played touch football with his family. I knew he didn’t smoke or drink. But he seemed worn out, chastened, by something that had to be more than fatigue.

Then we began moving through the houses. The people in the small crowd we had attracted ranged in age from 3 to 63, yet none appeared to be between 15 and about 50. When you saw Third World population distribution like that, you knew that those in the middle, the employables, had gone off to the cities—the ones that had burned that year and the year before. No one here had a job, and very few had decent clothes.

The first house we walked into had a refrigerator in a big room. Kennedy opened it. The only item inside was a jar of peanut butter. There was no bread. We walked outside, and he held out his hand to a bunch of young, filthy, ragged but thrilled kids. In a minute or two he was stopped by a short, aging, very heavy black woman in old, baggy clothes. I regret to say that I’d become inured to poverty by a childhood and young adulthood in the Delta, but this poor woman was in awful shape even for Mississippi.

She thanked Senator Kennedy for coming to see them and said that she was too old to be helped by any new program but she hoped the children might be. Kennedy, moved, softly asked her how old she was. “I’m 33,” she said. Both he and I recoiled.

We moved into the central courtyard, where the local weekly editor interrogated Kennedy almost belly to belly, lighting into liberals of every stripe. Kennedy would patiently reply and then touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.

I had my deadline to meet, so after a while I thanked Kennedy and drove to a pay phone to call in my story. I never saw him again… (RFK 2-5).

It’s been a long time since Charlie Dillard went to bed hungry, but he still chokes up thinking about it. Growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, there were days when he and his eight brothers and sisters had only a slice of cornbread or a spoonful of syrup apiece, and that was it.

Sometimes there was no food at all, and he would go to bed face down on the dusty floor of his grandparents’ old shotgun house pressing his hollow belly into the wood hoping it would somehow ease the sharp pains of hunger that pulsed through his skinny body and kept him up at night.

...

Dillard’s mother was a farm worker. She picked cotton, soybeans and vegetables, depending on the season. And like many black children in the Delta at the time, Dillard was often with her, working 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for five dollars a day. He only sporadically attended school. When he wasn’t in the fields, he and his siblings were doing odd jobs — mowing lawns or raking leaves for white families on the other side of town — anything to help make ends meet. His father was out of the picture, so it was up to the whole family to work to survive.

But in 1967, jobs were hard to find in the Delta, especially for blacks. Farmers were increasingly turning to machines to harvest and process their crops, eliminating the need for manual labor. Dillard’s mother had gone to Florida in search of work, leaving her children behind in circumstances that seemed to grow more desperate by the day. His grandparents didn’t have enough money or food to take care of all the kids, a group that had grown to include some of his cousins. On any given night, there were 15 people or more, mostly children, crammed into a tiny three-room shack where there was no heat or air conditioning.

One Tuesday afternoon in April 1967, when Dillard was just 9, he was playing outside with his siblings when he saw a crowd of people walking up the street. He stopped and stared. He had never seen anything like it. There were men with giant television cameras on their shoulders, and while there were a couple of blacks, most in the group were white, which was unusual because white people rarely came to their blighted part of town with its unpaved streets and decrepit homes.

Suddenly, a white man in a dark suit emerged from the crowd and made a beeline for Dillard and his siblings. To the boy’s surprise, the man walked up and offered his hand — an unusual gesture at the time in racially charged Mississippi. The man introduced himself as Robert Kennedy — a name that didn’t mean much to Dillard, who didn’t have a television. Only later did he learn that the man was the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York.

“He was the first white person I ever shook hands with,” Dillard recalled.

Glancing over the kids, who were filthy and dressed in tattered, ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Kennedy had a somber air about him. He spoke quietly, asking Dillard why he wasn’t in school. The child explained that he wasn’t enrolled. Looking distressed, Kennedy asked the boy what he had eaten that day. “Molasses,” Dillard replied.

As Dillard walked up the wooden steps of the house to go inside and tell his grandmother about their visitors, Kennedy and his entourage followed. Inside the house, the senator questioned the woman about what she had fed the kids that day. Just bread and syrup, she replied. And they wouldn’t eat again until the evening because there just wasn’t enough food. The cupboards were empty. “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day,” the woman told Kennedy, who could not conceal his shock.

As he turned to go, Kennedy, a father of 10 at the time, including a boy just three weeks old, smiled sadly at Dillard and his siblings. He touched their heads and gently caressed their cheeks. They looked up at him with sad, worried eyes. “It wasn’t like a politician kissing babies,” said Ellen Meacham … He touched those children as if they were his own.”

Traveling abroad, the senator had seen poverty and hunger first hand in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But as his… aide Peter Edelman recalled, Kennedy seemed more shaken by what he had seen in Mississippi. He was disturbed to see so many children suffering in a way they weren’t in other places stricken by poverty.

“I remember he came out of one of the houses, and he was just … he couldn’t believe it. He told me this was the worst poverty he had ever seen, worse than anything he’d ever seen in a Third World country,” Edelman recalled. “That might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but it was shocking to see that in the United States. He couldn’t stop thinking of those hungry kids, those children in rags and [with] swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that wouldn’t heal. It was horrific.”

…

Hours later, Kennedy arrived back at Hickory Hill, his family’s stately brick home in the rolling countryside of McLean, Va. It was his wife Ethel’s birthday, and she and the kids had stayed up late to welcome the senator back from Mississippi.

But as Kennedy crossed the threshold to the dining room, where his family awaited, his kids later recalled how their father had suddenly halted, looking anguished as he surveyed his opulent home and his happy, healthy children. It was a stark contrast to what he’d seen in Mississippi earlier in the day. “He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his oldest daughter, who would later serve as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, wrote in the New York Times. “‘I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he told me. ‘The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.’ He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.”

The senator slammed his fist on the table and looked around at his children, who sat stunned at their father’s outburst. “Do you know how lucky you are?” Kennedy asked them. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a great responsibility. Do something for these children. Do something for our country.”

In Clarksdale, Kennedy had stood atop a car, vowing he would not forget the people of the Mississippi Delta. And he did not. He moved quickly to make differences where he could, including getting meals to the struggling families. He called wealthy friends and charity organizations, soliciting help. Within hours of Kennedy’s visit, food showed up at his grandparents’ house, Dillard recalled. Not much later, after images of Kennedy’s visit had aired on national television, the city of Cleveland suddenly decided to pave the roads in his neighborhood and throughout the poor black section of town. “I think they were probably shamed or something,” Dillard said.

The morning after he arrived back in Washington, Kennedy and [Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S.] Clark began lobbying the Agriculture Department to get additional food aid into the Delta — a push that federal officials initially resisted. Among other things, he successfully argued for changes in the food stamp program, which was then operating as a pilot program. Under the old policy, individuals had been required to buy food stamps, but Kennedy successfully lobbied to expand the program to allow families with no income to qualify for assistance.

The senator petitioned private groups for help. The Field Foundation sent doctors to investigate medical conditions in the Delta and confirmed reports of malnourishment. Meanwhile, the Senate held fiery hearings on the plight of the Delta. Embarrassed by the revelations about the struggles of poor blacks in his state, Sen. John Stennis, who had initially suggested that Kennedy had exaggerated his interactions in the Delta, set up a $10 million emergency fund for food and medical help for impoverished residents in his state.

Eventually, the federal government would dramatically expand its aid programs into the region, including offering school lunches. But Kennedy saw the need for more transformative change. He didn’t believe the solution to the Delta’s problems could be solved by government alone. As he had in Brooklyn, he pressed for community partnerships and incentives that would help attract skilled jobs to the region, offering residents hope and opportunity. But those efforts ended with his death a little over a year later (Bailey 5-8).

Works Cited:

Baldes, Tricia, Gould, Katie, and Marien, Dr. Joanne. “Poverty.” RFK Legacy Education Project. Web. https://rfklegacycurriculum.wordpress.com/poverty/

Bailey, Holly. “Hunger 'Hurt So Bad': How Robert Kennedy Learned about Poverty from a Boy in the Delta.” Yahoo! May 30, 2018. Web. https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunger-hurt-bad-robert-kennedy-learned-poverty-boy-delta-090025735.html

De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/infographic-revisiting-rfks-poverty-tour

“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-delta

Civil Rights Events

Dr. King and the Vietnam War

Aftermath

The Riverside audience responds to Dr. King's address with tremendous enthusiasm. John Bennet states, "There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King" (Aftermath 1).

“I felt lifted up,” John Lewis said. “I thought he would become much more aggressive in trying to get our country and people in high places in our government to put the issue of poverty and hunger back on the American agenda” (Hedin 7). I came away from that evening inspired. I still believed, in the face of so much that seemed to be falling apart, that slowly, inexorably, in ways I might not be able to recognize or figure out, we were continuing to move in the direction we should, toward something better. I wasn't in the midst of the movement anymore, not at the moment, but I knew I would get back to it.

President Johnson, leaders of both parties, and most of the political establishment react with predictable fury and condemnation, not just at Dr. King's opposition to the war but even more so to his placing the war in a broader context of colonialism that directly challenges the anti-Communist premise of Cold War foreign policy (Aftermath 1).

… Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House and authorized the FBI to increase its surveillance campaign to discredit and destroy him. Other civil rights leaders spurned him. Even the NAACP issued a statement disavowing King’s sentiments (Burrell 4).

One White House advisor tells the president that King, "who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid," has "thrown in with the commies," because he's "in desperate search of a constituency." FBI Director Hoover tells the president that "Based on King's recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation." Carl Rowan, head of the U.S. Information Agency and one of the highest-ranking Afro-Americans in the Executive branch, publishes a red-baiting article in Reader's Digest — the most widely-read magazine in the nation — calling King an egomaniac under the sway of Communist agents (Aftermath 1).

Ralph Bunche, who was the first African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, said King “ought not be both a civil rights leader and an anti-war spokesman” and should give up one role or the other (Suggs 1).

By one count, some 168 major newspapers condemned the speech. …

"He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people," The Washington Post declared (Krieg 5). “King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies…and… an even graver injury to himself” (Suggs 2). The Post called King’s recommendations “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and opined that, “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence” (Burrell 1).

The New York Times, too, published a damning assessment, titled "Dr. King's Error," arguing that it was "both wasteful and self-defeating" to link Vietnam with domestic inequity and unrest.

"Dr. King," the piece resolved, "makes too facile a connection between the speeding up of the war in Vietnam and the slowing down of the war against poverty" (Krieg 5).

“There are no simple or easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country… Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion” (Hedin 6).

The San Antonio Express ruled that King, "gripped" by some "strange logic," was "tragically wrong in his viewpoint."

"If King and his group really want to help themselves," it continued, "they can show a spirit of support now lacking that will make the impression in Hanoi that America is not greatly divided in its determination to honor the commitment in Vietnam."

Others were less measured in their language. Life magazine described the speech as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," while James Marlow, in his analysis for The Associated Press, suggested King's drawing together Vietnam and civil rights was a cynical attempt to reclaim the "limelight."

"Some Negro leaders publicly disagreed with these latest tactics of King," he wrote. "Since he needs all the white and Negro support he can get to start the civil rights movement rolling again, it's hard to see how he did it anything but injury."

"Martin Luther King Crosses the Line," The Cincinnati Enquirer blared, calling his words "arrant nonsense."

The "unctuous" King "has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize," they wrote. "Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement" (Krieg 6-7).

Fearing to appear unpatriotic in a time of war, much of the Black press echoes the criticisms of white media. The Pittsburgh Courier says King is "tragically misleading American Negroes," on issues that are, "too complex for simple debate." The New York Amsterdam News urges Afro-Americans to "rally around the country" and support President Johnson (Aftermath 2).

Articulating the opinion of conservative Republicans, LIFE magazine describes the speech as:

"A demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi. ... [King] goes beyond his personal right to dissent, ... when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam ... King comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long."

…

Committed to the Democratic Party and its Cold War liberalism, NAACP and Urban League leaders rush to reaffirm — once again — that they do not stand with Dr. King. The NAACP Board of Directors adopts a resolution labeling any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements, "A serious tactical mistake." Former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall who is now LBJ's Solicitor General and soon to be Supreme Court appointee, acknowledges King's right to dissent on foreign policy, but "not as a civil rights leader." During a personal encounter, Whitney Young of the Urban League accuses King of abandoning the poor for the antiwar movement. King retorts, "Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the Kingdom of Truth" (Aftermath 2)

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin refused to talk about it [the speech] in the press. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young distanced themselves from him. Black media that had chronicled his every step since the Montgomery Bus Boycott a decade earlier railed against him … (Suggs 2).

All of these denunciations show that the liberal civil rights establishment, which included the Democratic Party, many media outlets, and civil rights organizations, were only comfortable with the King that spoke of dreams and racial progress, and allowed liberals to remain secure in their condescension toward the South, without having to examine their own assumptions or the policies they had crafted. The liberal establishment did not want to hear a black public intellectual who was not talking about the foibles of black people or how much progress black people had made. And civil rights organizations did not want to endanger relationships with the federal government or white philanthropic organizations that provided much of their operating funds (Burrell 4).

For Dr. King, the most surprising — and disheartening — rebuke comes from his long-time friend, ally, and co-worker Bayard Rustin who defends King's "right to debate" the war but tells Blacks not to join the anti-war movement because the problems they face are "so vast and crushing that they have little time or energy to focus upon international crises." Though himself a pacifist and Conscientious Objector, Rustin later tells Afro-Americans to join the military "to learn a trade, earn a salary, and be in a position to enter the job market on their return." And he opposes immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops because doing so would result in a totalitarian regime ruling Vietnam.

Some Black leaders do support King. CORE leader Floyd McKissick who has been fearlessly condemning the war says, "I'm glad to have [King] with us, no question about that." Dr. Benjamin Mays, King's teacher from Morehouse College in Atlanta calls King, "One of the most courageous men alive today." He defends the speech in terms of Gandhian nonviolence. Others also defend King, and his stand intensifies the Vietnam debates already roiling Afro-American communities across the nation. Sam Washington of the Chicago Defender describes how many Blacks in that city see in King, "a good example to follow," and he observes that while opposition to the war is not yet widespread, Blacks are beginning to move "over to King's side" rather than that of the NAACP and the Urban League.

While King expected attacks from the administration and political conservatives, those from liberals whom he had hoped would be allies trouble him. SCLC leader Dorothy Cotton later commented, "My sense is that Martin was very much pained by the criticism. He really took notice of what people were saying. My very clear impression is that the criticism made him delve even deeper into the way of nonviolence." Rev. Andrew Young later recalled, "Martin was almost reduced to tears by the stridency of the criticism directed against him. [The Post and Times editorials] hurt him the most because they challenged his very right to take a position."

For Vincent Harding, who drafted major portions of Beyond Vietnam, the attacks were a form of racial paternalism, because in essence they were saying:

Martin Luther King, you have forgotten who you are, and who we are. You should be very, very happy that we have allowed you to talk critically about race relations in this country. You should be very happy that we've allowed you to talk about Negro things. But MLK, when it comes to the foreign policy of this country, you are not qualified to speak to these issues. These are our issues. Our white establishment [is] in charge of such things, and you are absolutely out of your place to enter into this kind of arena.

As for Dr. King himself, though discouraged by the fierce condemnation hurled at him from former friends and allies, he is buoyant at having finally declared his full opposition to both the Vietnam War and the destructive values inherent in U.S. foreign policy. Eleven days later, on April 15th, he participates in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, a mass march from Central Park to the United Nations where he delivers an address to the marchers with the call and refrain of Stop the Bombing! The police claim there are 125,000 marchers; protest organizers place the total at 400,000. By either estimate it is the largest anti-war protest in American history up to that point. In later months and years, even larger ones take place.

Dr. King's Beyond Vietnam speech marks a significant advance in the growing anti-war movement. His eloquent statement and his prestige as a moral leader and Nobel Prize winner bring his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy to people and communities who have not been reached by student protesters. Afro- Americans, even those who reject nonviolence and integration, honor him as a courageous leader who puts himself on the line for freedom and justice, and his principled stand against the Vietnam War resonates in a community that has already begun to question the war.

Public opinion, however, shifts slowly — but shift it does. One year later, in the last poll taken before Dr. King is assassinated, public support for the war has dropped to 40%. Three years earlier, in the Spring of 1965, it had been over 60%. And over the same period, opposition to the war has grown from a little over 20% in 1965 to almost 50% in 1968. Yet almost 75% of all Americans, and 55% of Black Americans, still feel that as a civil rights leader Dr. King should not be involving himself or using his prestige in opposing the war (Aftermath 3-6).

During a recent speech at the National Press Club, King’s youngest daughter, Bernice, noted that once her father started speaking out against the war in Vietnam he became a threat.

“The reason why my father was assassinated was because he had such a love for humanity,” [Bernice] King told the crowd. “It was not because he was talking about black and white together. He was assassinated because once he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he started talking about how we were distributing our wealth to fight what he felt was an unjust war” (Joiner 1).

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. … (Nguyen 5).

It is a truism of nonviolent resistance that the people most profoundly affected by any act of political defiance are the protesters themselves. Whatever its effect on the civil rights and anti-war movements, A Time to Break Silence liberates Dr. King spiritually and politically. Ten days after Riverside, he begins a series of speeches on the theme of The Other America, speeches about race, poverty, economic injustice, and political inequality that directly challenge establishment economic policy and American "business as usual." He continues to speak out against the Vietnam War, and he begins planning and building an inter-racial movement of the poor to demand a fundamental reordering of American economic policies and practices (Aftermath 7).

King began plotting what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative to unite all of America’s dispossessed, regardless of their race or nationality. The Riverside speech seemed to unlock something in him, and he would no longer concern himself with political allegiance or popular opinion.

“The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he said at a conference the following month. Even so, he added, “take up your cross and just bear it. And that’s the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now” (Hedin 7).

Yet the moral imperatives and political issues Dr. King raises in “Beyond Vietnam” still resonate today in the 21st Century:

When you read the speech, if you replace the word "Vietnam," every time it pops up, with the words "Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan," you will be — it will blow your mind at how King, were he alive today at 81, could really stand up and give that same speech and just replace, again, "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and "Afghanistan". — Tavis Smiley, NPR (Aftermath 7).

… liberal policies only proved, rather than dispelled, King’s arguments. Liberals who had previously supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s became the same people supporting laws, such as the Safe Streets Act in 1968, that began the militarization of municipal police forces and put more money into building up the law enforcement and criminal justice apparatuses than had ever been allocated toward Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs.

In the fifty years since, the U. S. has entered into new war fronts across the world. And the Democrats have often stood in lockstep with the Republicans in supporting increasing funding for the military industrial complex, even as the wars extended to the home front in the forms of “wars” on drugs, crime, and the poor. Increasing funding for military intervention overseas has occurred almost without fail, while attacks on the social safety nets of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs have only ramped up over the last fifty years — mostly from Republicans — and are only getting stronger every year.

Decreasing or eliminating funding to anti-poverty programs, while simultaneously increasing defense spending and allowing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top one percent of wealth holders is antithetical to the kind of society Martin Luther King, Jr. was working to create. It smacks of the same double-burden he described poor Americans facing back in 1967. And in light of President Donald Trump’s comments regarding immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in which he disparaged in racist terms those seeking to escape violence and persecution by coming to the United States, King would say we still have more maturing to do (Burrell 5-6).

Works cited:

“Aftermath.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.htm#1967vietking

Burrell, Kristopher. “To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech.” The Gotham Center for New York History. November 15, 2018. Web. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/to-build-a-mature-society-the-lasting-legacy-of-martin-luther-king-jrs-beyond-vietnam-speech

Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/martin-luther-king-jr-s-searing-antiwar-speech-fifty-years-later

Joiner, Lottie. “King’s Vietnam Speech Still Holds True 50 Years Later.” The Undefeated. April 4, 2017. Web. https://theundefeated.com/features/martin-luther-king-jr-vietnam-speech-still-holds-true-50-years-later/

Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politics/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam-speech-backlash/index.html

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/

Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events

Dr. King and the Vietnam War

Riverside Church "Beyond Vietnam" Speech

Fifty years ago, John Lewis, the civil-rights activist and current congressman from Georgia, was living in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, in a studio on Twenty-first Street. On April 4, 1967, he rode uptown to Riverside Church, on the Upper West Side, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver a speech about Vietnam. Lewis knew that King would declare his opposition to the war, but the intensity and eloquence of King’s speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” stunned him. What King offered was a wholesale denunciation of American foreign and domestic policy. He had never spoken with such fathoms of unrestraint. For Lewis, the force of the speech eclipsed that of all the others that King gave, including his most famous.

“The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said to me recently, over the phone. Lewis was present for that one, too: he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial minutes before King did. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He added, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”

Half a century later, the Riverside speech also seems to carry the greater weight of prophecy. King portrayed the war in Vietnam as an imperial one, prosecuted at the expense of the poor. Vietnam, he said, was “the symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” and, if left untreated, if the malady continued to fester, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight” (Hedin 1).

Dr. King began his speech with these words. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. …The world now demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. In order to atone for our sins, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.”

For the 3,000 anti-war faithful who jammed into New York’s majestic Riverside Church to hear King speak, his decision to break his long public silence on Vietnam was cause for celebration. For King, the decision was fraught with political danger (Wernick 1).

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam” (Nguyen 2).

Stanley Levison and others had arranged for a respectable antiwar group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, to schedule an appearance at Riverside Church, a bastion of establishment liberalism. For Dr. King, the speech couldn’t have come soon enough. Three days prior he told a reporter, “We are merely marking time in the civil rights movement if we do not take a stand against the war.”

At Riverside, Dr. King told the 3,000-person overflow crowd that “my conscience leaves me no other choice” than to “break the betrayal of my own silences” over the past two years. Following the widespread urban riots that had marked the summer of 1966, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government” (Garrow 3).

How, King asked, could he tell young men in rioting cities "that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems" when Americans in Vietnam were "using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted" (Krieg 3).

Dr. King acknowledged how his sense of prophetic obligation had been strengthened by his receipt of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, which represented “a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man’” — a calling “that takes me beyond national allegiances.” Dr. King emphasized that he counted himself among those who are “bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism.”

Dr. King then turned his full wrath against the war. He insisted that “we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam” and that “we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam.” He alleged that the United States tested its latest weapons on Vietnamese peasants “just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe,” and he decried “the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets” in South Vietnam (Garrow 4-5).

"Now [the Vietnamese] languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.

“They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Viet Cong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. ... We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the unified Buddhist church.”

Of American GIs he says:

"I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor." (Time 2-3).

He recommended that all young men confronting the military draft declare themselves conscientious objectors… (Garrow 5)

"Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors," he said. "These are the times for real choices and not false ones."

King …offered a plan, in five steps, "to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict." It began with a call to immediately end the bombing in both North and South Vietnam and ended with the US setting a date for the withdrawal of "all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement" (Krieg 4).

The United States should prepare to “make what reparations we can for the damage we have done.”

But the war wasn’t just a mistake; it was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Civil rights, inequality and American policy in Southeast Asia were all of a larger piece. When “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered” (Garrow 6).

… he had his sights beyond the current war. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he said. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King warned of a time of endless war, when the U.S. would be trapped in one overseas entanglement after another while the gap at home between the rich and poor grew ever larger.

King had come to see war, poverty, and racism as interrelated; taking on one necessarily meant confronting the others. He told his audience at Riverside that the United States was “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.” He was talking about Vietnam, but the sickness that he named, that “far deeper malady,” could be detected in everything America did, he suggested (Hedin 5).

He concludes his speech with a stirring call to action:

"We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world — a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight" (Beyond 2).

Works cited:

“Beyond Vietnam.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.htm#1967vietking

Garrow, David J. “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam.” The New York Times. April 4, 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/when-martin-luther-king-came-out-against-vietnam.html

Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/martin-luther-king-jr-s-searing-antiwar-speech-fifty-years-later

Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politics/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam-speech-backlash/index.html

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. ““The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/

“A Time to Break Silence.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.htm#1967vietking

Wernick, Adam. “Martin Luther King's 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam War Ended a Historic Partnership with Lyndon Johnson.” PRI. October 6, 2017. Web. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-06/martin-luther-kings-1967-speech-opposing-vietnam-war-ended-historic-partnership

Civil Rights Events

Dr. King and the Vietnam War

The Time Has Come

By the end of 1966, large numbers of American soldiers have been fighting in Vietnam for almost two years and close to 400,000 of them are "in country" with more serving aboard Navy ships in the South China Sea and at air bases in Thailand, Guam, and elsewhere.

The Viet Cong rebels the U.S. military has been fighting for almost two years have been a melange of Communists, Buddhists, nationalists, religious sects, students, and peasant associations in a coalition called the National Liberation Front (NLF). To the surprise of the Cold-War liberals running the White House, they not only refuse to surrender in the face of overwhelming American might but their resistance has intensified — resistance that is now bolstered by units of the North Vietnamese Army.

…

As American casualties mount higher and higher, more troops have to be sent than Pentagon planners had originally estimated. To meet the insatiable demand, the number of young men conscripted into the military is increased. By the end of 1966 over half of the American military personnel serving in the war zone have been directly — or indirectly — coerced into uniform by the draft. Known as "Selective Service," the draft is a biased system. Blacks, Latinos and poor whites are more likely to be "selected" for conscription (or pressured into volunteering) than middle and upper-class whites. In the words of a popular anti-war slogan, it's a, "Rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Conscription becomes even more skewed towards the poor and uneducated in August of 1966 when "Project 100,000" significantly lowers the minimum qualification-test scores required for induction into the Army. In the 1960s, Blacks comprise 11% of the population yet more than 40% of those entering the service as part of Project 100,000 are Afro-American — and their casualty rates are double those of men who enter the service through other routes.

Despite these race and class disparities, overall public opinion still supports Johnson and his war. In March of 1965 when LBJ first sends combat units to Vietnam more than 60% of Americans approve of his action and barely 20% oppose it. Two years later in April of 1967, support for the war has dropped to 50% and opposition has risen to 32%. Though in two years his majority has shrunk its still a majority nonetheless.

The Johnson administration promotes the war as a struggle to "defend democracy," a democracy that by 1967 seems increasingly remote for nonwhites in America. Yet while support for the war among Afro-Americans and Latinos lags behind that of whites a majority also continue to back LBJ's policies — in part out of respect for Johnson's commitment to civil rights. And "mainstream Negro leaders," Afro-American politicians, NAACP and Urban League officers, and a significant portion of the Black press, help sustain Black support for the Vietnam War by publicly condemning those who question it. They warn that civil rights activists who speak out on foreign affairs endanger the freedom cause. (Many of them are the same "leaders" who also condemn sit-ins, civil disobedience, mass protest marches, and armed self-defense as "harmful" to Black social progress in America.)

For a large portion of the American population, dissent against Cold War ideology is "un-American." For conservatives and right-wingers, anyone who opposes military action against the "Red Menace" is a traitor. For the liberal establishment, including many labor leaders and influential clergymen, criticizing Johnson's anti-Communist foreign policy is tantamount to heresy. Outside of college campuses and away from university towns, anti-war protesters are often met with widespread hostility — and occasionally violence.

Anti-war activists are harshly condemned by the political establishment. To law enforcement officers and many campus authorities, anti-war students are subversive enemies of all that is right and holy in America. And in homes across the nation, families are split into warring generations when young opponents of the war and the draft come into bitter conflict with parents proud of their patriotic service during the Second World War (War 1-4).

Most Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

… By 1967, the war was near its peak, with about 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (Nguyen 1).

As a man of God, Dr. King rejects Communism for it's antagonism to religion and as a humanist he opposes its anti-democratic totalitarianism. As a pacifist, he opposes all wars, and as an opponent of colonialism he sees the Vietnamese struggle as a nationalist revolt against an oppressive and corrupt government imposed by foreign powers. As a minister committed to the social gospel, he's dismayed by the damage the war is doing to both American and Vietnamese societies and he's distraught by the negative effects of spending national treasure on bullets and bombs rather than alleviating poverty and human suffering. And as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he sees it as his duty to speak out on issues of war and peace.

But ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King and SCLC have used nonviolent protests to pressure the federal government to enforce existing laws and enact new civil rights legislation. This strategy, however, relies on political support from the liberal wing of the northern Democratic Party establishment. Now, as SCLC begins to shift its focus from southern segregation and denial of voting rights to national issues of economic justice that challenge business practices in the North, some of that support is drying up. Confronting LBJ over Vietnam will cause more establishment liberals to turn away on all issues — not just the war — so much so that it may become impossible to win passage of important new civil rights laws, or convince Johnson to take executive action against housing and employment discrimination.

King is also the head of a major social-justice organization, and with that role comes responsibilities. Public figures who challenge the Johnson administration face condemnation, ostracism, and retribution against not only themselves but also the organizations they are associated with. Which is why most of SCLC's key activists and supporters caution Dr. King against speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Some of SCLC's board members are vulnerable to political and economic retaliation from the Democratic Party and liberal establishment. So too are pastors of SCLC-affiliated churches, as are prominent supporters. And the bulk of the organization's funding now comes from northern liberals, many of whom are loyal Democrats who support the war and the administration's Cold War policies.

Within the broadly defined Freedom Movement, Dr. King occupies the vital center between militant, youth-led groups like CORE and SNCC and more conservative organizations like the NAACP, National Council of Negro Women, and Urban League. King is determined to hold the Movement together as a united force for equality and social justice. He knows that if opponents manage to divide the major Afro-American organizations against each other they can stymie all future progress. As SNCC and CORE begin to take increasingly strong stands against the Vietnam War, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League remain committed to maintaining good relations with LBJ and the liberal establishment. They adamantly support Johnson' Vietnam policy and they relentlessly pressure King to mute his anti-war statements.

For whites in general, Dr. King speaks for Afro-Americans on political and social issues. For many whites, he is the only Black notable they can name outside of athletes and entertainers. Therefore, at least to some extent King's actions and politics affect how Blacks in general are treated by whites. Within the Black community, most Afro-Americans are patriotic and as 1966 comes to an end the majority support President Johnson and his Vietnam War (though not by as large a percentage as among whites). And while King is still widely admired for his past achievements, his influence and leadership are under constant challenge. The majority of his fellow Black Baptist ministers, for example, reject his social activism and their churches do not support SCLC or engage in political efforts (Road 1-3).

As early as the first months of 1965, even before Johnson had begun his troop buildup in Vietnam, Dr. King was calling for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, telling journalists, “I’m much more than a civil-rights leader.” But his criticism of the government’s refusal to halt widespread aerial bombing and pursue peace talks attracted little public comment until that fall, when Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, a close ally of Johnson, attacked Dr. King and cited an obscure 1799 criminal statute, the Logan Act, that prohibited private citizens from interacting with foreign governments.

Dr. King was privately distraught over the war and Dodd’s response. The F.B.I.’s wiretapping of his closest advisers overheard him telling them “how immoral this is. I think someone should outline how wrong we are.” But he reluctantly agreed that he should “withdraw temporarily” from denouncing the war. “Sometimes the public is not ready to digest the truth,” he said.

Dr. King remained relatively mute about the war through most of 1966, but by year’s end he was expressing private disgust at how increased military spending had torn a gaping budget hole in Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs. “Everything we’re talking about really boils down to the fact that we have this war on our hands,” Dr. King said in yet another wiretapped phone call.

Finally, in early 1967, he had had enough. One day Dr. King pushed aside a plate of food while paging through a magazine whose photographs depicted the burn wounds suffered by Vietnamese children who had been struck by napalm. The images were unforgettable, he said. “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation” (Garrow 1-2).

In late January Dr. King temporarily relocates to Jamaica for the seclusion he needs to write Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Vietnam weighs heavy on his conscience. Though he has publicly questioned the war, urged negotiations, and bemoaned its effect on poverty and public morality, he knows that out of pragmatic caution he has held back from speaking forthrightly about Vietnam from his heart and his head. He determines that the time has now come for him to break his public silence, to take his stand and speak truth to power regardless of consequences. No longer will he curtail his public statements because of how Johnson, liberal Democrats, and conservative Black leaders might react.

On February 25, 1967, Dr. King joins Senators Gruening (D-AK), Hatfield (D-OR), McCarthy (D-MN) and McGovern (D-SD) — all of whom have come out against the war — at an anti-war conference organized by Nation magazine in [Beverly Hills] Southern California. In a speech titled, "The Casualties of the War in Vietnam," King tells 1,500 people that "The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam," and he speaks of a million Vietnamese children burned by napalm in a war that violates the United Nations Charter and the principle of self-determination, cripples the antipoverty program, and undermines the constitutional right of dissent.

At the same time, he distances himself from those in SNCC, CORE, and SDS whose politics are increasingly being rooted in disillusioned hatred of America by positioning himself as a patriot with a vision of a better nation:

"Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no disappointment when there is not great love" (Road 4).

King's fiery aide James Bevel has been given leave from SCLC to organize the first major mass-mobilization protest against the war — a march from New York's Central Park to the United Nations on April 15, 1967. King decides that … he will march … and share a speaker's platform with war opponents from a wide range of political viewpoints including radicals urging men to resist the draft, socialists condemning capitalism, and revolutionary communists calling for a Viet Cong victory over American GIs.

With the exception of Bevel, almost all of Dr. King's closest advisors argue against his decision. Strenuously. He understands their political concerns but remains adamant. "I'm going to march," he tells them.

An opportunity for King to march against the war comes sooner than expected. On March 25th, 1967, he joins Dr. Benjamin Spock in leading 5,000 people through the Loop in the Chicago Area Peace Parade (Road 3-4)

King’s presentation in Beverly Hills and appearance in Chicago received modest press coverage, and in their wake Dr. King told Stanley Levison, long his closest adviser: “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country and the time has come for a real prophecy and I’m willing to go that road” (Garrow 3).

King's advisors fear media coverage of the April 15th mass protest will (as usual) focus on the most radical and sensational rather than the most thoughtful and profound. Andrew Young arranges for CALCAV, which now has 68 chapters nationwide, to invite King to give a major anti-war address on April 4th in the historic Riverside Church. Vincent Harding and others begin helping King with the text of his speech.

The SCLC board meets in Louisville KY where SCLC is supporting mass protests against residential segregation and Hosea Williams is threatening that "streakers" will disrupt the famed Kentucky Derby horse race. Dr. King meets with boxing champion Muhammad Ali who has announced he will defy his draft notice and refuse induction into the armed forces. King supports Ali. "My position on the draft is very clear, I'm against it," he tells reporters.

But many of SCLC's 57 board members still oppose King's stand against the war — some out of anti-Communist fervor, others because SCLC donations have dropped by 40% and they fear the consequences of going too far down the anti-Vietnam War road. Though it's now less than a week before King is to speak at Riverside, they vote down a resolution calling for SCLC to oppose the war. Eventually, they agree to a watered-down version so as not to "embarrass" King, their president (Road 4-5).

Works cited:

Garrow, David J. “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam.” The New York Times. April 4, 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/when-martin-luther-king-came-out-against-vietnam.html

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/

“The Road to Riverside.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.htm#1967vietking

“The War.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.htm#1967vietking