Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (seen here, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964) spoke out more directly and passionately against the
Vietnam War than he ever had before 50 years ago this week, in a controversial address, “Beyond Vietnam,” at New York’s Riverside Church. The Nobel laureate’s break
with Lyndon B. Johnson, who had
helped pass civil-rights legislation King had long advocated but who was now
pursuing a conflict that the minister regarded as “madness,” came amid a year
of personal anguish and reduced effectiveness in leading his movement.
As King looked out on April 4, 1967, at the Morningside Heights
congregation, hosted by the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about
Vietnam, he was aware that opponents had been questioning his direction over
the past year. His 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., followed by
passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later, was his last significant
victory. Since then, he had endured:
*a failed “Chicago Campaign” that failed to alter either
de facto discrimination in the city’s housing or the broader plight of its
African-American population;
*criticism from “Black Power” activists that his continued belief in nonviolent protest was
too accommodating to white power structures; and
*gnawing self-doubt about his purpose as a leader. Once, he burst out at a meeting with associates
that he wished he could simply be the pastor of a small church again. Instead,
he had decided, while on a vacation that winter to finish his latest book, to
embrace a broader role implied by his Nobel Prize: an advocate for wider social
justice.
Above all, he was growing uneasy over American
involvement in the Vietnam War and the collateral damage to African-Americans,
the nation’s poor and world peace. At last, he told the full house at
Riverside, he felt compelled to ‘‘break the betrayal of my own silences and to
speak from the burnings of my own heart.’’
At this point widespread public recognition that the
American involvement in the conflict was a failure had not yet crystallized. (In
fact, it hadn’t even coalesced among African-Americans. Even after King’s
address, only a quarter of blacks backed his stance on the war, according to
one opinion poll.) That meant he was already veering far out on a limb, particularly for a white population (already annoyed, even suspicious, about his protests) who thought he was getting even further from his core role than he should.
King’s constant traveling as president of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference left him little time to write a speech
with such momentous implications for his cause. His associate Andrew Young
helped stitch the address together with significant input from attorney
Clarence Jones and King’s close friend Vincent
Harding. “He knew that I would not be putting words into his mouth. I would
simply be speaking as my friend would want to speak, and that was the way that
I went about the task that he asked me to do,” Harding recalled in a 2008 interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman included on the Website Democracy Now.
In his address, King reviewed the course of the war
and offered reasons why he had come to oppose it--notably, diverted government resources and energy from the Great Society
legislation proposed by LBJ only two years before, and the disproportionate
impact of the conflict on the poor, who were forced to send “their sons and
their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high
proportions relative to the rest of the population.”
With time, King’s general rationale was repeatedly
confirmed (e.g., “we increased our troop commitments in support of governments
which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”) But two
examples of rhetorical overkill undercut the speech’s effectiveness: 1) What
did Vietnamese peasants think of America, he asked, “as we test out our latest
weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures
in the concentration camps of Europe?” 2) In bombing defenseless villages, King
claimed, the U.S. government had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today.”
It was predictable that conservatives would fire back
after the speech, taking their cue from William F. Buckley Jr., who termed it
“one of the greatest acts of intellectual confusion in recent history.” The
godfather of modern conservatism continued: “Dr. King gave a speech which could
have been written in, indeed it was for all intents and purposes written in,
Hanoi.”
More problematic for the future direction of
liberalism in the U.S. was that King’s speech was condemned by such mainstream
progressive media as The New York Times
and The Washington Post, as well as
such prominent African-American leaders as Urban League head Whitney Young and
the player who broke baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson. The board of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People even voted unanimously in
favor of a resolution assailing his speech as a “serious tactical mistake.”
Most ominously for King’s future well-being, President
Johnson was dangerously angered by King’s turn against him. He didn’t stop at
merely referring to King in private as "that godd---ed n---er preacher."
Instead, he stopped ignoring J. Edgar Hoover’s constant drumbeat of criticisms
of the civil-rights leader and even asked his press secretary to distribute the
FBI’s information about King’s ties with alleged Communist Stanley Levison to favorite
reporters.
The animus caused by his Riverside speech may have
helped fulfill King’s sense of his prophetic mission, but it came at the price
of making him feel increasingly like a target, according to Stanford University
historian Clayborne Carson, who in January told USA Today: “There were a lot
people who preferred that (King) be dead. If they wouldn’t bring it about, they
certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have
survived the ‘60s in any case.”
On April 4, 1968, less than a week after Lyndon
Johnson announced he would not be seeking re-election—and exactly one year
since King had denounced the President’s Vietnam policy so dramatically—the
civil-rights leader was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
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