Public Employee Press

Iraq: What would King say?

We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world.
— MLK, Jr.

By JANE LaTOUR

In the summer of 1965, the United States escalated the war in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and sent in masses of ground troops for “search and destroy” missions that wiped out farming villages and killed thousands of civilians.

Back in the States, the national spotlight focused on racial tensions in the North. That summer saw fierce battles fought in the streets of Newark, Watts, Cleveland, and hundreds of other cities.

One figure of national prominence — a lone but eloquent voice — was connecting the dots between the carnage abroad and the war at home. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his first anti-war speech March 1, 1965, at Howard University.

Using the strongest language, he warned about the damage America was doing to itself by dropping bombs on another nation while neglecting the crisis of its own cities.

Moral obligation to dissent
We remember Dr. King as a civil rights leader. But we forget his opposition to the Vietnam War. King’s public remarks in 1965 led to a tremendous campaign of vilification against him. “The press is being stacked against me,” he said. For a while, he retreated. “Sometimes we have to face the fact that the public is not ready to digest the truth,” he said.

But he agonized about the war and worried about shirking his moral obligation to speak out. In 1966, he told his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church, “It’s just as evil to kill Vietnamese as it is to kill Americans.” In December of that year, he identified the war as a major obstacle to adequate funding for the social welfare programs that Americans so desperately needed.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City. He titled his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it, he said: “A time comes when silence is betrayal. We are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. 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.”

Dr. King was viciously maligned after the speech. Some civil rights leaders distanced themselves from him. Life Magazine called the speech “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Dr. King, who always warned about confusing dissent with disloyalty, answered his critics: “I really feel that someone of influence has to say that the United States is wrong, and everybody is afraid to say it.”

Exactly one year later — on April 4, 1968 — Dr. King was killed.

David Garrow, author of the King biography “Bearing the Cross,” told PEP: “There’s no doubt whatsoever that Dr. King would have intensely and vociferously opposed the war in Iraq.”

He said, “One of the most disappointing aspects of King’s historical legacy, given that his criticisms are quite widely accepted as correct, is that most people are unable to extrapolate from the Vietnam era to the present day.”

On a deadly course
As someone who has spent years writing about Dr. King, Professor Garrow said that, “Given Dr. King’s world view, were he alive in 2005, he would be intensely distressed that American behavior in the world has not gotten any better, but arguably has gotten worse.”

David Levering Lewis, another eminent King biographer, offered his own assessment of the question. “Dr. King would no doubt deplore what has after all become a clash of civilizations largely engineered by the leaders” of the United States. That is how one of his biographers believes King would have seen “the deadly course upon which we’ve set the history of our planet,” Lewis said.

What would Dr. King say about Iraq? DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts answered: “As a nation, we are discussing ending Social Security, the safety net for older Americans; cutting Medicaid for the poor; and ending the Section 8 housing subsidy that prevents homelessness — all to wage a costly war in Iraq.

“Dr. King would say we have our priorities confused — that we should be helping people, not harming them. I am certain he would agree with me that the cost of this war is too high and that although we recognize the contributions of our brave American soldiers, we must support their return to their families and civilian life.”