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… Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House and authorized the FBI to increase its surveillance campaign to discredit and destroy him.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/