Martin Luther 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”

“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 nonviolent 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. 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. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [...] I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy" [...] Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”