In this lesson, we’ll learn of King’s militant pacifism in the midst of the Vietnam War.
In His Own Words
“I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight . . . A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war . . . So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
“Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending [them] eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem . . . I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I can’t be silent.
“I wish I was of draft age. I wish I did not have my ministerial exemption. I tell you this morning, I would not fight the war in Vietnam. I’d go to jail before I’d do it. And I say to the federal government or anybody else: They can do to me what they did to Dr. Spock [and to] William Sloan Coffin, my good friend, the chaplain of Yale. They can just as well get ready to convict me, because I’m going to continue to say to young men, that if you feel in your heart that this war is wrong, unjust, and objectionable, don’t go and fight in it. Follow the path of Jesus Christ.”
– from “Beyond Vietnam,” address at Riverside Baptist Church, New York City April, 1967
“Each of us is two selves.”
As King identified economic injustice, racism, and militarism as “triplets of social misery” and pressed LBJ to end the Vietnam War, J. Edgar Hoover increased his surveillance of King. Using unauthorized wiretaps to gather information about King’s activities, Hoover threatened to expose King’s frequent marital infidelities and (Hoover’s) imagined Communist activities. Hoover himself is now known to have been a cross-dressing, closeted gay, which must have contributed to his hatred for all he considered “un-American.”
” — don’t go fight in it.”
Talk about catching hell. When Martin Luther King, Jr., began speaking out against the Vietnam War, he caught it coming and going, from black folks and white, from liberals and conservatives, from the preachers and from the people.
The main argument used to persuade him to shut up about the war was that the civil rights and peace movements were two different agendas and if he spent time speaking out on peace, civil rights would suffer. But King saw these issues as two sides of the same coin. You can’t have peace without justice and there could be no justice without peace. Besides, it was very clear that as the war in Vietnam escalated, funds for fighting the War on Poverty in the United States were being diverted. And hadn’t he just won the Nobel Peace Prize? He felt that the award obligated him to speak on global issues of brotherhood.
King was also disenchanted with government duplicity surrounding the war. President Kennedy had actually devised a disengagement plan before he was assassinated, but President Johnson never implemented it. In fact, during the time that Johnson and other government officials were telling the country that the United States was prepared to engage in “unconditional discussions” toward a negotiated peace, the U.S. was actually escalating war efforts in the area. Johnson said privately that he opposed the war, but that he couldn’t allow anyone to call him “a coward,” an “unmanly man,” a “weakling!”
King was in agony about speaking out against the war. His most ardent supporters warned him that sponsors would stop sending money to the SCLC (they did) and that Johnson’s renowned temper might be unleashed against him (it was). He struggled to find a moderate ground from which to oppose the war. When he finally did speak out, he was tormented by the fact that, of the 185,000 men sent to Vietnam, a disproportionate number of them were black. And the Johnson administration was talking about escalating forces to about 450,000.
Despite UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg’s reassurances, peace was not close at hand. A Vietnamese monk wrote to King that: “. . . hundreds and perhaps thousands of Vietnamese peasants and children lose their lives every day, and our land is unmercifully and tragically torn by a war which is already twenty years old. I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists cannot remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent . . . Recently a young Buddhist monk named Thich Giac Thanh burned himself to call the attention of the world to the suffering endured by the Vietnamese, the suffering caused by this unnecessary war — and you know that war is never necessary . . . Nobody here wants the war. What is the war for, then? And whose is the war?”
For more information about the Vietnam War, visit http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/vietnam.htm.
A Closer Look
King was not an absolute pacifist — at one time he believed that only armed conflict could bring about racial justice in the United States. He evolved into what he termed a “realistic pacifism” that he considered the lesser of two evils. After all, he said, “The choice today is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is either non-violence or nonexistence.”
It took King nearly two years to speak out fully and consistently against the war. He was by no means the only black to do so, only the most prominent. For his stance, he was attacked by the formerly supportive white and black news media, which claimed that he was not equipped, as a preacher, to know or say anything about the war. Although he was not alone in his antiwar stance, King began speaking out against Vietnam before it became popular to do so.
His own civil rights colleagues denounced him because they were extremely loyal to Johnson, who had committed himself to extend the civil rights agenda and who had done more for Negroes than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Johnson himself was enraged with King, whom he called “that goddamned nigger preacher.”
According to Michael Eric Dyson in his book, I May Not Get There With You, Johnson admitted to King during one of their last conversations that King’s criticism of the war “had the same effect on Johnson as if he had discovered that King had raped his daughter. In that anguished statement, Johnson tapped the tortured white male Southern soul: its jealousy and fear of black men, its selective rebuff to interracial sex (after all, thousands of white men aggressively pursued it), and its unquestioning use of white women to show how forbidden sexual desire is tied to political betrayal.”
It is a clear measure of King’s greatness — perhaps even more so than facing Bull Connor’s dogs — that he stood, alone, by his conviction to oppose the war.
Assignment: A Threat to Justice Anywhere: War
In his “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” King said, “Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
Visit http://www.mlkday.com/theman_index.html and read the entire text of King’s speech on Vietnam. What are your thoughts on the Vietnam War? If such a war were being conducted today, would you go? Why or why not? Write down your thoughts in your journal. Seek out someone who was in Vietnam and who is willing to talk about it. What are their thoughts about the war and King’s stance?
