On the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 Southern Illinoisan, April 4, 2013

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech criticizing American policy in Vietnam, saying he was compelled by his role as a pastor. “To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.”

King’s decision to link his name with the burgeoning anti-war movement came at a point in his career when he was undergoing a profound reassessment of the fundamental problems facing the country and the movement he led.

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 thrust King into a position of leadership of the African-American struggle for civil rights, where he had articulated a strategy of directly challenging segregation laws through nonviolent mass resistance. Over the next decade the movement succeeded in forcing reluctant politicians to confront the issues of Jim Crow and black disfranchisement and won major victories, most notably the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But King’s position as leader always was problematic. The struggle for civil rights was less a unified national movement than a collection of hundreds of local movements with their own respective goals and leadership. Disputes over priorities, tactics and philosophy arose frequently.

The divisions within the movement became apparent after 1965 as inner cities across the country exploded in the fury of racial riots and many younger black activists increasingly rejected the philosophy of nonviolence. These developments troubled King deeply and forced him to reflect on the nature of the movement he tenuously led and the problems it faced.

King began to understand that racism was not solely a Southern phenomenon and that it was fundamentally connected to the issue of poverty. In this context, then, the Vietnam War became symptomatic of the country’s misplaced priorities.

In his address on Vietnam, King placed the issue of violence raised by urban riots in a broader context, saying “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.”

The war victimized the poor in multiple ways, King felt. It diverted attention away from the federal government’s anti-poverty programs. Poor young men, therefore, had few options other than enlisting in the military. And thus the nation, King said, was “taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia or East Harlem.”

King also saw this victimization of the poor affecting the Vietnamese. In a short history of the war, he commented they “must see Americans as strange liberators” given the long-term U.S. policy of standing against Vietnamese independence and on the side of the nation’s wealthy. “What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?”

This policy necessarily created cynicism among our own troops, King added. “Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and secure while we create a hell for the poor.”

As King reassessed his philosophy, he came to believe that voting rights and integration were inadequate solutions as long as deep-seated poverty remained a fact of life in America. This realization led him to start forming alliances among the dispossessed of all races. In late 1967, he began organizing a Poor People’s March that would bring black, white, Hispanic and Native American groups to Washington in 1968 to demand effective anti-poverty programs.

As part of his increasing emphasis on class issues, King traveled to Memphis to help garbage collectors in their struggle to form a public employees’ union. And it was there, exactly a year after his speech on Vietnam, that King was shot.

Forty-five years after his death, the issues King confronted in his last year remain as timely as ever. As he stated in his speech on the war, “When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”