Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam War

“King’s speech linked the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam in a way that made many black leaders uncomfortable. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, Jr. both criticized his speech. The board of the NAACP passed a resolution to keep the two movements separate. King’s speech recognized that the connections were not something one chose, but rather intrinsic to what both movements were about: In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” . . . Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” . . . So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be saved are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.”

“He called for a “radical revolution of values.” Revolutions were taking place all over the globe, he told his audience. “It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.” King offered a five-step program “to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam.” He called for an end to all bombing; a unilateral cease fire with the goal of beginning negotiations; the curtailment of all military build-up elsewhere in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Laos; acceptance of the NLF as a player in any future Vietnamese government; and the establishment of a date for all foreign troops to leave Vietnam. He urged the church to seek out “every creative means of protest possible.” To all ministers who held ministerial exemptions, he recommended giving them up in order to seek conscientious objector status, a status that most likely would be denied. The injustice of the war needed to be exposed in whatever ways were possible. The next week, King’s name was listed as a national co-chair of CALCAV. On April 15, the Spring Mobilization gathered between 150,000 and 400,000 protesters (estimates vary) in New York City and another 50,000 in San Francisco. The antiwar movement had gained considerable strength. Meanwhile, some 438,000 troops were now in Vietnam”