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