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<h3><b>Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in
Vietnam"</b></h3><font size=3>Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church
on April 30, 1967: <br><br>
<a href="http://www.africanbynature.com/Resources_2/mlk_vietnam-1967-speech.ram">
A Real Audio file hosted here</a>. <br><br>
</font>
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<dd>The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the
usual kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject,
nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one of
the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I'm using as a
subject from which to preach, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in
Vietnam." <br><br>
<dd>Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an
unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam
because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come
for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international
conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived
about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for
scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But
the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth
lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for
knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus,
"and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach
about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest
places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis
maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes
betrayal. <br><br>
<dd><a name="a000071more"></a>The truth of these words is beyond doubt,
but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when
pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task
of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor
does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the
apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the
surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing,
as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we're always on
the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some
of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found
that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must
speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in
all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a
war, by the American people.<br><br>
<dd>Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose
the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to
support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are]
half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions have
chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the high
grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the
reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking
out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate
dissent with disloyalty. It's a dark day in our nation when high-level
authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But
something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The
truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it
appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor
or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against
the best in our tradition.<br><br>
<dd>Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]...have moved to
break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of
my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the
destruction of Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom
of my path. At the heart of their concerns, 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 so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because
I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to
my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.<br><br>
<dd>This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to
overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a
collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to
make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue,
nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the
problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the
National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear
the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a
heavy price on both continents.<br><br>
<dd>Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising
that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my
moral vision. 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 fifty-three dollars for each person classified as
poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars 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.<br><br>
<dd>Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it
became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the
hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers,
and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion
relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young
men who had been crippled by 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 a 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 school room. 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 or Atlanta. Now, I could
not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the
poor.<br><br>
<dd>My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it
grows out of my experience 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; for
they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our
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 first having 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. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded
our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its
newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of
Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can't
do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we
non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on
the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They
praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was
so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying,
Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent
toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There's
something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will
praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse
and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown
Vietnamese children. There's something wrong with that press!<br><br>
<dd>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 not just
something taking place, but it was 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 communists and
capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and 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 to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or
must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my
conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the
Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this
vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the
Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and
outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder the
madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and
respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that
peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the
military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been
under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think
of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful
solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their
broken cries.<br><br>
<dd>Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as
strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed
their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese
occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in
China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and
these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our
Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our
government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not
ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the
same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for
all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony.
And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer
Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America.
It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the
war costs. And even when France started despairing of its reckless
action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and
an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien
Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop.
We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to
sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it
looked as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva
agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting a
man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in
the history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People
were brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the
brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem
ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this
was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers of
United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's
methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy,
but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real
change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are
we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of general Ky [Air
Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own
people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life
is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our
government and the press generally won't tell us these things, but God
told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.<br><br>
<dd>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 and all the while the people read our
leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land
reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their
fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as
we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps,
where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be
destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and 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 towns and
see thousands of 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. We
have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the
village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated
in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political
force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken,
the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing
to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense
profits of overseas investments. I'm 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, militarism and
economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.<br><br>
<dd>A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we
are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will
be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole
Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly
beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True
compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. 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." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin
America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of
feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from
them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world
order and say of war, "This way of settling differences 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.<br><br>
<dd>Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is
that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds
of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. They are saying,
unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs, "Ain't gonna
let nobody turn me around!" It is a sad fact that because of
comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust
to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the
revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch
anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has
a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our
failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that
we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the
revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring
eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we shall boldly
challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when "every
valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places
straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh
shall see it together."<br><br>
<dd>A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a
worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe,
race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing,
unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted
concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak
and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival
of mankind. And when I speak of love I'm not speaking of some sentimental
and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great
religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is
somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality
is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of John: "Let us love
one another, for God is love. And every one that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. If
we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in
us."<br><br>
<dd>Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love
America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and
sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our
beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out
against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be
no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed
with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple
evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently
moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America
has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that
all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its
pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian
heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All
men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and
worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived
from the State--they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to
dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any
home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed
away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and
bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted
with irrationality.<br><br>
<dd>It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come
back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving
finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington
today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today.
I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a
stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And
don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine,
messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a
way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can
hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't
change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power,
and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my
name. Be still and know that I'm God." <br><br>
<dd>Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it
means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand,
sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart.
Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may
mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do
you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to
be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible
tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear,
there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth,
bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning
with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair,
because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because
the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can
still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right:
"No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William
Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise
again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right:
"Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."
Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible
is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we
will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With
this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will
be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to
speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and
every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be
afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we
will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able
to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at
last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as we're getting ready to sing
it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither
shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you, I ain't gonna
study war no more. <br><br>
</dl>Text from
<a href="http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet/riversidetranscript.html">
Pacifica Radio/KPFA/UC Berkeley Library's Media Resource Center's
site</a>. The sermon was at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, not the
<a href="http://www.publicchristian.com/wp-print.php?p=176">Riverside
Church -- that speech is here</a>. <br><br>
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