Words Worth Remembering: King’s Forgotten Warning
On Tuesday, April 4, 1967, all thoughts and things seemed to be in disarray. American troops had been fighting, suffering, and dying in the dense and distant jungles of Vietnam for two years, fighting a Communist regime in a war that seemed to produce little success, whose objectives were unclear, and which appeared to have no end.
By the end of the month, some 9,300 Americans were listed as military deaths; total estimated war-related deaths — on all sides, including civilians — ranged from 180,000 to 250,000, a grim reminder of the staggering human cost.
A reader of The New York Times could not go a day without seeing reports of the tragic events unfolding in Southeast Asia, while the nation burned with unrest. Student-led protests surged; signs like those reading “get the hell out of Vietnam” appeared at marches across the country. Notably, on Saturday, April 15, hundreds of thousands marched to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, then the largest anti-war protest in American history.
Boxing icon Muhammad Ali joined countless others in refusing induction into the U.S. military. For this, he was stripped of his heavyweight title, banned from the sport, and handed a prison sentence that was not overturned until 1971. Other, less well-known inductees burned their draft cards, fled to Canada, or accepted, willingly or not, imprisonment as a form of civil disobedience. So pervasive was the anti-war movement that the White House acknowledged in mid-April that the FBI was monitoring “anti-war activity.”
Under these turbulent conditions, Martin Luther King, Jr.—already falsely suspected of being a Communist sympathizer and even agent—spoke at The Riverside Church in New York City, where he, for the first time, publicly broke with President Lyndon Johnson and condemned the Vietnam War.
“I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church… leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight,” King began his address. “There is a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America.”
In the fall of 1965, following the tragedies of Selma and the triumph of the Voting Rights Act, King and other leaders like A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin proposed “A ‘Freedom Budget’ for All Americans,” a radical move to expand what was once just a struggle to win equal justice for Black Americans into a truly universal campaign for social justice.
The budget called for, among other things, measures to eliminate poverty within ten years; guaranteed employment and a living wage for all willing and able to work; a higher minimum wage; new investments in education, healthcare, housing, and transportation; more efficient taxation of corporations and the wealthy; a redirection of some military spending to social programs; no new tax increases on the working class; and an overall commitment to racial and economic justice as a means to achieve a better America.
“It is a political necessity,” King wrote in the foreword to the Freedom Budget. “It is a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.”
But Vietnam shattered the lofty idealism of the Freedom Budget. It was nothing short of yet another struggle between better and worse selves. This time, worse selves seemed more potent than ever. “I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad at war,” King said, his voice ringing with disappointment and pastoral rebuke.
“And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”
King condemned “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
No one could afford to ignore what was happening in Vietnam. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam,’” King said. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”
Here, King harkened back to the theme of a little-known sermon he delivered in April 1954 at Dexter in Montgomery, where he preached that “the moral and spiritual ends for which we live stand almost in a state of oblivion.” The problem was that people had, like Mary and Joseph in Jerusalem, left God behind. The solution, he had preached: “We must put God back at the center of our thinking.”
The problem in 1967 remained what it had been in 1954. But the solution was the same: a return to the good. Although more political protest than sermon, King’s address spoke a deeply spiritual message, one that did not need even the mentioning of God to point clearly to what was lost.
Violence, war, and death, especially of a sort that was damaging rather than furthering American interests, was usurping the first duty of government—the people’s well-being.
King, as in 1954, called for a “true revolution of values”—and priorities. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” he warned. “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
Quoting the Book of Isaiah, King envisioned a day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”
“If we do not act,” he warned, “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.”
In conclusion, King said, “Let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”