*Photo: Martin Luther King Jr.*
Monday, 20 January, 2025 was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. The day was declared a public holiday in honour of the African-American civil rights campaigner, Reverend (Dr.) Martin Luther King Jr (MLK). He was a Baptist Minister whose advocacy for equity for blacks in America was unwavering and whose eloquence was legendary. This year, rather ironically, the celebration of MLK Day coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States.
On 4 April, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, in a speech entitled, “Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence,” and delivered to a congregation of Ministers, MLK said: “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I’m in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”
MLK believed that America’s war on Vietnam was a glaring immorality, and he noted, in the speech, regarding Vietnamese women, children and the aged: “They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”
He also asserted: “If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people.”
In a 25 February, 1967 speech titled “Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam war,” delivered in the company of four anti-war U.S. senators in Beverly Hills, California, MLK also pointed out the oddity of the war: “Poverty, urban problems and social progress generally are ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession. When it is not our security that is at stake, but questionable and vague commitments to reactionary regimes, values disintegrate into foolish and adolescent slogans. It is estimated that we spend $322,000 for each enemy we kill, while we spend in the so-called war on poverty in America only about $53.00 for each person classified as ‘poor.’ And much of that 53 dollars goes for salaries of people who are not poor. We have escalated the war in Vietnam and de-escalated the skirmish against poverty [in America].”
MLK continued: “Through rugged determination, scientific and technological progress and dazzling achievements, America has become the richest and most powerful nation in the world. We have built machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable range of interstellar space. We have built gargantuan bridges to span the seas and gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Through our airplanes and spaceships we have dwarfed distance and placed time in chains, and through our submarines we have penetrated oceanic depths. This year our national gross product will reach the astounding figure of 780 billion dollars. All of this is a staggering picture of our great power. But honesty impels me to admit that our power has often made us arrogant. We feel that our money can do anything. We arrogantly feel that we have everything to teach other nations and nothing to learn from them.”
Underscoring the point, MLK noted, in a 6 February, 1968 speech in Washington, D.C. titled, “A proper sense of priorities”: “In spite of all of our scientific and technological progress we suffer from a kind of poverty of the spirit that stands in glaring contrast to all of our material abundance. … Henry David Thoreau said once something that still applies. In a very interesting dictum he talked about improved means to an unimproved end. This is a tragedy that somewhere along the way as a nation we have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. And consequently we suffer from a spiritual and moral lag that must be redeemed if we are going to survive and maintain a moral stance.
On 17 May, 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam war and as campus protests raged, just as they had been raging against the war in Gaza until a few days ago, MLK addressed the students of the University of California at Berkeley as follows: “America has brought the nation and the world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future … And yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers and sisters. … You, in a real sense, have been the conscience of the academic community and our nation.”
Moreover, MLK said, in the “Beyond Vietnam” speech: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
On racial injustice, in a speech titled “I’ve been to the mountain top,” on 3 April, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, MLK specified the principal goals of blacks in America: “We … are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. … We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. … And that [if] we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.” Moreover, in an 11 January, 1968 speech at Ohio Northern University, MLK remarked: “Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is no greater power in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and justice.”
Underscoring the imperative of the struggle for freedom and justice in America, MLK noted: “Over the last four years, more than 83 Negroes and white civil rights workers have been killed, brutally murdered, and not a single person has been convicted for these dastardly crimes. Some were convicted for the first time a few days ago in the murder of the three civil rights workers who were killed in Mississippi in ’64. But they were not convicted on the basis of murder. They were convicted on the basis of the federal law which is based on a conspiracy charge and with the maximum of ten years. Nobody in the state of Mississippi has been convicted for all of these murders which have taken place. Over the last three years more than 62 Negro churches have been burned to the ground in the state of Mississippi. Nothing has happened about it. It seems that they have a new motto in Mississippi now – not ‘Attend the church of your choice,’ but ‘Burn the church of your choice.’”
On reparations for the historical injustice of slavery, MLK said, in the same Ohio speech: “The important thing that America must realize is this: That at the same time that she refused to give the black man anything, she was giving away millions of acres of land [to white peasants from Europe] in the West and the Midwest through an act of Congress. Not only did she give the land, she built land grant colleges to teach them to farm. She provided county agents to help them and … to give them expertise in farming. But not only that, the nation provided low interest rates in later years so that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, many of these persons are being paid today not to farm, and these are many of the persons who are telling the Negro that he should lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
MLK continued: “I guess that it is all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. Through centuries of denial, centuries of neglect, and centuries of injustice many, many Negroes have been left bootless. This does not mean that we do nothing for ourselves. It does not mean that we should not amass our economic and political resources to reach our legitimate goals. It simply means recognizing, the nation recognizing, that it owes a great debt on the basis of the injustices of the past.”
On a note of optimism, MLK concluded: “I believe that we can emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. I haven’t lost faith in the future. I still feel that we can develop a kind of coalition of conscience, and with this coalition move on into a brighter tomorrow. … With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Exactly one year after he made his America-damning, conscience-pricking 4 April, 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and around twenty-four hours after his establishment-defying “I’ve been to the mountain top” speech, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April, 1968, at the age of 39.
May King’s dreams endure.