When Silence Is Betrayal

For the past few weeks, tributes to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights legacy have been airing on commercial and public radio and television stations. You might have noticed that the later years of Dr. King's life and work are virtually ignored by those memorials. When you realize that Dr. King had changed his focus to fighting poverty and calling attention to the moral outrage of the Vietnam War, you can easily see why his activist history seems to end in 1965, and then jumps to his murder in 1968. Politicians and pundits who annually embrace Dr. King's inspiring message of racial harmony and equal opportunity for all, seem to be willfully ignorant of his "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" speech delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4th, 1967. After King delivered that speech, he was criticized by the NAACP, the New York Times and the Washington Post editorial pages. The Post wrote that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." Despite the attacks, King continued to condemn the moral and economic debacle of the Vietnam War. The country caught up to him soon enough, and the anti-war movement grew in the proceeding years. Perhaps the reason why so many in the media ignore Dr. King's final few years today is that his message is still very relevant to our current situation:

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset 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 experiments, 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 rehabilitation 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 the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became 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 proportions 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. And 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. And 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.