Today
as we remember Martin Luther King, let’s move beyond his “I have a dream”
speech and consider his stance on the other divisive issue of the day, the War
in Vietnam. Dr. King made two speeches in April, 1967 about the war in Vietnam.
For some context, we had 485,000 military in Vietnam in 1967, and 11,153 would
die in action in that year. Lester Maddox became Governor of Georgia, and the 1st
Super Bowl took place.
Here
are a few quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the subject of the Vietnam War:
From Dr. King’s speech at Riverside
Church in New York City, April 4, 1967: (text and audio here).
(Emphasis by the Wrongologist)
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right
side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values. We must
rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a
“person-oriented” society. When
machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
“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… 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.”
From
his April 30th speech
in Atlanta: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
“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. A few years ago there
was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise
of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There
were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam.
And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of
a society gone mad on war. 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. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is
estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend
only $53 for each person classified as poor, and much of that $53 goes for
salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see
the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.”
“There
is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would
praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark, [sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama
who was one of the officials responsible for the violent arrests of civil
rights protestors during the Selma to Montgomery marches] but will curse and damn you
when you say: ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There is
something wrong with that press.”
“A true revolution of values will
soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous
indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the
West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to
take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries, and say, ‘This is not just’…This business of burning human beings
with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of
injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of
sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Once again, our country needs another person with social
conscience to lead us away from what Dr. King suggests in our approaching spiritual
death.
So today, remember Dr. King not simply for his eloquence
on civil rights, but also for his social conscience.
excellent post.