King ’s opposition to Vietnam is now prophetic
On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. stood behind President Lyndon Johnson as the Texan signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although not the first civil rights bill passed by Congress, it was the most comprehensive.
King called the law’s passage “a great moment … something like the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.” Johnson recognized King’s contributions to the law by gifting him a pen used to sign the historic legislation.
A year later, as Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, King again joined him.
But by 1967, the two most famous men in America were no longer speaking. They would not meet again before King fell to an assassin’s bullet April 4, 1968.
King was foremost a minister who pastored to a local church throughout his career, even while he was doing national civil rights work.
He became concerned that his political ally Johnson was making a grave moral mistake in Vietnam. Johnson quickly escalated American troop presence in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 in 1965. And by 1968, more than a half a million troops were stationed in the Southeast Asian nation.
King called on the United States to “be born again” and undergo a “radical revolution of values.”
King preached nonviolent direct action for years, and his team organized massive protest movements in the cities of Albany, Ga., and Selma and Birmingham in Alabama.
But by 1967, King’s religious vision for nonviolence went beyond nonviolent street protest to include abolishing what he called the “triple evils” crippling America society: racism, poverty and militarism. He believed these forces were contrary to God’s will.
He came to believe, as he said in 1967, that racism, economic exploitation and war were crippling America’s ability to create a community defined by love and nonviolence.
And on April 4, 1967, he publicly rebuked the president’s war policy in Vietnam at Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York City in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam.”
“I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam,” he told those gathered in the majestic cathedral. “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”
King was initially optimistic about Johnson’s Great Society programs for job growth, job training and economic development. But by 1967 the Great Society appeared to be a casualty of the mounting costs of the war in Vietnam.
“I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such,” King said in his speech.
King saw the grinding poverty facing Black people at home as inseparable from the war overseas.
“If our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”
As urban revolts in the late 1960s rocked the nation, King pleaded with people to remain nonviolent.
“But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam?” King said in that 1967 speech. “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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.”
By 1967, King’s vision of justice was one of flourishing for all people, not only civil rights for African-americans.
King was criticized for expanding his vision beyond Black Americans. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a statement that opposed merging the civil rights and peace movements.
But in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King called “for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.” Such love is “the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”
He noted this unifying principle in Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.
King never sought elected office, because he wanted to maintain a moral voice and be
free to challenge policies he believed to be unjust.
But the cost for King’s speaking out was high: By the time of his assassination, King’s national approval rating was at an alltime low.
Nonviolence is a radical concept of love that demands we embrace those we know and those we don’t, to acknowledge, as King said, “that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny.”