The autobiography of martin luther

Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that violent

rebellion is doomed from the start. Anyone leading a violent rebel-

lion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the

possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-

armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would de-

light in exterminating thousands of black men, women, and chil-

dren.

Occasionally Negroes contended that the 1965 Watts riot and

But those who expressed this view always ended up with stumbling

words when asked what concrete gains were won as a result. At best

the riots produced a little additional anti-poverty money, allotted by

frightened government officials, and a few water sprinklers to cool

the children of the ghettos. Nowhere did the riots win any concrete

improvement such as did the organized protest demonstrations.

When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what

acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes

they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments. They

fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in over-

throwing a government by violence unless the government had al-

ready lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces.

Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the

United States.

Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power.

Constructively it can save the white man as well as the Negro. Racial

segregation is buttressed by such irrational fears as loss of preferred

economic privilege, altered social status, intermarriage, and adjust-

ment to new situations. Through sleepless nights and haggard days,

numerous white people struggled pitifully to combat these fears. By

following the path of escape, some seek to ignore questions of race

relations, and to close their minds to the issues involved. Others,

placing their faith in legal maneuvers, counsel massive resistance.

Still others hope to drown their fears by engaging in acts of mean-

ness and violence toward their Negro brethren. But, how futile are

all these remedies! Instead of eliminating fear, they instill deeper and

more pathological fears. The white man, through his own efforts,

through education and goodwill, through searching his conscience

and through confronting the fact of integration, must do a great deal

to free himself of these paralyzing fears. But to master fear he must

also depend on the spirit the Negro generates toward him. Only

through our adherence to nonviolence—which also means love in

its strong and commanding sense—will the fear in the white com-

munity be mitigated.

"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus"

People have said to me, "Since violence is the new cry, isn't there a

danger that you will lose touch with the people in the ghetto and

be out of step with the times if you don't change your views on

nonviolence?"

My answer is always the same. While I am convinced that the

vast majority of Negroes reject violence, even if they did not I would

not be interested in being a consensus leader. I refuse to determine

what is right by taking a Gallup poll of the trends of the time. I

imagine that there were leaders in Germany who sincerely opposed

what Hitler was doing to the Jews. But they took their poll and dis-

covered that anti-Semitism was the prevaihng trend. In order to "be

in step with the times," in order to "keep in touch," they yielded to

one of the most ignominious evils that history has ever known.

Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but

a molder of consensus. If every Negro in the United States turns to

violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this

is the wrong way. Maybe this sounds like arrogance. But it is not

intended that way. It is simply my way of saying that I would rather

be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in

life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he

will stand on it till the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence.

I cannot make myself believe that God wanted me to hate. I'm tired

of violence, I've seen too much of it. I've seen such hate on the faces of

too many sheriffs in the South. And I'm not going to let my oppressor

dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used vio-

lence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles

and guns. I'm not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a

higher level. We have a power that can't be found in Molotov cocktails.

One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement was

that it talked unceasingly about not imitating the values of white

society, but in advocating violence it was imitating the worst, the

most brutal, and the most unciviHzed value of American life. Ameri-

can Negroes had not been mass murderers. They had not murdered

children in Sunday school, nor had they hung white men on trees

bearing strange fruit. They had not been hooded perpetrators of vio-

lence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim.

I am concerned that Negroes achieve full status as citizens and

as human beings here in the United States. But I am also concerned

about our moral uprightness and the health of our souls. Therefore

I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of

malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors.

Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an

unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personahty and eats away its

vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is

why the psychiatrists say, "Love or perish." Hate is too great a bur-

den to bear.

Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of

the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to

turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin

to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence.

May it not be that the new man the world needs is the nonviolent

man? Longfellow said, "In this world a man must either be an anvil

or a hammer." We must be hammers shaping a new society rather

than anvils molded by the old. This not only will make us new men,

but will give us a new kind of power. It will not be Lord Acton's

image of power that tends to corrupt or absolute power that cor-

rupts absolutely. It will be power infused with love and justice, that

will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, and lift us from

the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. A dark, desperate,

confused, and sin-sick world waits for this new kind of man and this

new kind of power.
30

BEYOND VIETNAM

Today, young men of America are fighting, dying, and killing in

Asian jungles in a war whose purposes are so ambiguous the whole

nation seethes with dissent. They are told they are sacrificing for

democracy, but the Saigon regime, their ally, is a mockery of democ-

racy and the black American soldier has himself never experienced

democracy.

AUGUST 12. 1965

King calls for halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam to encourage

negotiated settlement of conflict

JANUARY 10, 1966

Backs Georgia State Senator-elect Julian Bond's right to oppose

war

Urges halt to bombing on Face the Nation televised interview

APRIL 4. 1967

Delivers his first public antiwar speech at New York's Riverside

Church

All my adult life 1 have deplored violence and war as instruments

committed to the creative power of nonviolence as the force which

is capable of winning lasting and meaningful brotherhood and

peace. As a minister, a Nobel Prize holder, a civil rights leader, a

Negro, a father, and above all as an American, 1 have wrestled with

my conscience.

Despite this—whether right or wrong—in the summer and fall

of 1965, after President Johnson declared himself willing to negoti-

ate, I believed that it was essential for all Americans to publicly avoid

the debate on why we were waging war in the far-off lands of Viet-

nam. I believed that the crucial problem which faced Americans was

how to move with great speed and without more bloodshed from

the battlefield to the peace table. The issues of culpability and moral-

ity, while important, had to be subordinated lest they divert or di-

vide. The President's strong declaration to negotiate, to talk peace,

and thus end the death and destruction, had to be accepted, hon-

ored, and implemented.

Accepting this premise, my public statements, while condemning

all militarism, were directed mainly to the mechanics for achieving

an immediate cessation of hostilities. I did not march, I did not

demonstrate, 1 did not rally. I petitioned in direct meetings with

the President, and at his invitation with U.N. Ambassador Arthur

Goldberg. In my meeting with Ambassador Goldberg, in September

1965,1 urged that our efforts to seek peace by negotiations could be

speeded by agreeing to negotiate directly with the National Libera-

tion Front, by admitting Red China to the U.N., and by halting the

bombing of North Vietnam.

For a while, knowing that my wife shares my passion for peace,

I decided that I would leave it to her to take the stands and make

the meetings on the peace issue and leave me to concentrate on civil

rights. But as the hopeful days became disappointing months, I

began the agonizing measurement of government promising words

of peace against the baneful, escalating deeds of war. Doubts gnawed

at my conscience. Uncertain, but still trusting, we watched setbacks

in the search for peace and advances in the search for military ad-

vantage.

sider themselves my friends expressed disapproval because I had

been voicing concern over the war in Vietnam. In newspaper col-

umns and editorials, both in the Negro and general press, it was

indicated that Martin King, Jr., is "getting out of his depth." I was

chided, even by fellow civil rights leaders, members of Congress, and

brothers of the cloth for "not sticking to the business of civil rights."

I agonized a great deal over this whole problem. I went away for

two months to do a lot of thinking, but basically to write a book. I

had a chance to reflect, to meditate, and to think. I thought about

civil rights and I thought about the world situation and 1 thought

about America.

Something said to me, "Martin, you have got to stand up on

this. No matter what it means." 1 didn't rush into it. I didn't just

decide to do it on a moment's notice. I had my own vacillations and

I asked questions of whether on the one hand I should do it or

whether I shouldn't.

As I went through this period one night I picked up an article

entitled "The Children of Vietnam," and I read it. And after reading

that article, 1 said to myself, "Never again will I be silent on an issue

that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands

and thousands of little children in Vietnam." I came to the conclu-

sion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must

decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

"I was a loud speaker but a quiet actor"

In February 1967, the slender cord which held me threatened to

break as our government spurned the simple peace offer—conveyed

by one no less than the authorized head of the Soviet Union—to

halt our bombing of North Vietnam, not the bombing of all of Viet-

nam, in return for fully occupied seats at a peace table. We rejected

it by demanding a military quid pro quo.

As I look back, I acknowledge that this end of faith was not

sudden; it came like the ebbing of a tide. As I reviewed the events, I

saw an orderly buildup of evil, an accumulation of inhumanities,

each of which alone was sufficient to make men hide in shame. What

was woeful, but true, was that my country was only talking peace

but was bent on military victory. Inside the glove of peace was the

clenched fist of war. I now stood naked with shame and guilt, as

indeed every German should have when his government was using

its military power to overwhelm other nations. Whether right or

wrong, I had for too long allowed myself to be a silent onlooker. At

best, I was a loud speaker but a quiet actor, while a charade was

being performed.

So often I had castigated those who by silence or inaction con-

doned and thereby cooperated with the evils of racial injustice. Had

I not, again and again, said that the silent onlooker must bear the

responsibility for the brutalities committed by the Bull Connors, or

by the murderers of the innocent children in a Birmingham church?

Had I not committed myself to the principle that looking away from

evil is, in effect, a condoning of it? Those who lynch, pull the trigger,

point the cattle prod, or open the fire hoses act in the name of the

silent. I had to therefore speak out if I was to erase my name from

the bombs which fall over North or South Vietnam, firom the canis-

ters of napalm. The time had come—indeed it was past due—when

I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name

of peace burn, maim, and kill.

More than that, I had to go from the pulpits and platforms. I had

to return to the streets to mobilize men to assemble and petition, in

the spirit of our own revolutionary history, for the immediate end

of this bloody, immoral, obscene slaughter—for a cause which cries

out for a solution before mankind itself is doomed. I could do no

less for the salvation of my soul.

I had lived and worked in ghettos throughout the nation, and I

traveled tens of thousands of miles each month into dozens of

Northern and Southern Negro communities. My direct personal ex-

perience with Negroes in all walks of life convinced me that there

was deep and widespread disenchantment with the war in Viet-

nam—first, because they were against war itself, and second, because

they felt it has caused a significant and alarming diminishing of con-

cern and attention to civil rights progress. I had held these views for

a long time, but Negroes in so many circles urged me to articulate

their concern and frustration. They felt civil rights was well on its

way to becoming a neglected and forgotten issue long before it was

even partially solved.

The great tragedy was that our government declared a war

against poverty, and yet it only financed a skirmish against poverty.

And this led to great despair. It led to great cynicism and discontent

throughout the Negro community. I had lived in the ghettos of Chi-

cago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt and the cynicism and the

discontent. And the fact was that every city in our country was sit-

ting on a potential powderkeg.

As I moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak

from the burnings of my own heart—as I called for radical depar-

tures from the destruction of Vietnam—many persons questioned

me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concern, this

query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking

about the war. Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?"

"Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. And when I hear them,

though I often understand the source of their concern, I nevertheless

am greatly saddened that such questions mean that the inquirers

have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. They

seem to forget that before I was a civil rights leader, 1 answered a

call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy. I answered a call

which left the spirit of the Lord upon me and anointed me to preach

the gospel. And during the early days of my ministry, 1 read the

Apostle Paul saying, "Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye

transformed by the renewing of minds." I decided then that 1 was

going to tell the truth as God revealed it to me. No matter how many

people disagreed with me, I decided that I was going to tell the truth.

/ believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the

church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads

clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

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 as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both

black and white—through the poverty program. There were experi-

ments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and

I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were 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 rehabili-

tation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw

men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.

So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor

and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it he-

came clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the

hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers

and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high propor-

tions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black

young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them

eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia

which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So

we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro

and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation

that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we

watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but

we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I

could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the

poor. . . .

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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of

this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling

under our violence, I cannot be silent

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any

concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the pres-

ent war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy

must read "Vietnam." It can never he 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 led down the path of protest

and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of

America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed

upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was

also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever

worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes

me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the

meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ 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. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant

for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours,

for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they

forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his

enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the

Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can

I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads

from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most

valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share

with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling

of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.

Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for His

sujfering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for

them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who

deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader

and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-

defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the

voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for

no document from human hands can make these humans any less our

brothers. . . .

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady

within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we

will find ourselves organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned commit-

tees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala

and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They

will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be

marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies with-