We will forever connect the name Martin Luther King, Jr. with the civil rights movement in the United States. Because he was the movement’s most well-known and charismatic leader, this is appropriate. Our nation continues to honor King’s legacy every January with a holiday in his remembrance. However, the Martin Luther King we think we are honoring today is not the same King as the man who lived through the 1950s and 1960s. What the nation has forgotten is that Martin Luther King stood for more than just nonviolent protest, voting rights, and ending racial discrimination in our country. Much more.
In addition to his speeches on racial injustice and his status as the iconic figure of the civil rights movement, by the end of his life, King became much more outspoken on several other important issues in 1960s America: the Vietnam War, militarism, poverty, and the inequalities produced by capitalism. The actions of those working against him show just how radical and threatening his vision was to those in power. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with the blessing of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, wiretapped his phones. His opponents repeatedly accused him of being a communist, going so far as to produce a photograph supposedly showing King attending a “communist training school.” For a time, he ranked as the FBI’s most dangerous man in America.
Why the Backlash to Martin Luther King, Jr.?
What prompted this vitriolic backlash to a man so dedicated to racial and social justice? By 1967, the United States was entering its fourth year of official military involvement in South Vietnam, although, unofficially, it had already been militarily active there for over a decade. King was among the critics who began speaking against the war publicly at this time. He linked the resources spent killing Vietnamese overseas to the lack of will and money to fight poverty at home.
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In a speech given at New York’s Riverside Church in April of 1967, King said, “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 demoniacal destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” Furthermore, he added that his convictions about the war came
out of my experiences in the ghettos of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers. 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.
More on Why Martin Luther King Opposed the Vietnam War
Elaborating on the reasons for his moral dissonance regarding Vietnam, King described the results for the Vietnamese people who the United States claimed it was saving from communism. In a nation in which the landlord class had long relegated the general population to a state of feudalism,
the only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. . . . They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. . . . 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?
King also made clear that American soldiers, most of whom were themselves from lower-class or working-class backgrounds, suffered from the war:
I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. 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 the secure while we create a hell for the poor.
The Connection of War and Poverty
Clearly, the issues of war abroad and poverty at home intertwined in King’s thinking, even if America has forgotten the fact. He realized that this hurt all Americans. This attitude stemmed not just from current events, but also from King’s understanding of the biblical conception of justice. In biblical times, the concept of justice did not refer to the equal application of the law, as we understand the word justice to mean today. Instead, justice meant meeting the needs of everyone in the community. King’s writings and speeches clearly indicate his desire to seek justice in both its ancient and modern forms.
This is one aspect of Dr. King’s legacy that America no longer acknowledges. His work on voting rights and human equality seem mainstream and lack controversy today. However, to understand the man’s true legacy, this is part of King’s story that we must understand and come to terms with. In my next post I’ll continue this theme by discussing Dr. King’s work against poverty in the United States.
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