Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later

This article made me weep, as does Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam speech each time I listen to it. And weeping is what is so needed to cleanse us all of the toxins that infect us and our nation and the world. We need to soften and strengthen our hearts for what is asked of us as peacemakers today and for the journey ahead. Tears... I am overcome with gratitude for Dr. King and grief at his loss and yet more gratitude that his strong spirit and deep wisdom and amazing courage continues to inform and inspire so many. May our numbers grow and grow. — Molly

At the time of his speech at Riverside Church, King had come to see war, poverty, and racism as interrelated; taking on one necessarily meant confronting the others.

By Benjamin Hedin

Fifty years ago, John Lewis, the civil-rights activist and current congressman from Georgia, was living in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, in a studio on Twenty-first Street. On April 4, 1967, he rode uptown to Riverside Church, on the Upper West Side, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver a speech about Vietnam. Lewis knew that King would declare his opposition to the war, but the intensity and eloquence of King’s speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” stunned him. What King offered was a wholesale denunciation of American foreign and domestic policy. He had never spoken with such fathoms of unrestraint. For Lewis, the force of the speech eclipsed that of all the others that King gave, including his most famous.

“The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said to me recently, over the phone. Lewis was present for that one, too: he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial minutes before King did. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He added, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”

Half a century later, the Riverside speech also seems to carry the greater weight of prophecy. King portrayed the war in Vietnam as an imperial one, prosecuted at the expense of the poor. Vietnam, he said, was “the symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” and, if left untreated, if the malady continued to fester, “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.”

“It was far beyond anything I thought he would say,” Clarence Jones, King’s attorney and speechwriter on many occasions, told me. Initially, Jones and other members of King’s inner circle advised him not to give the speech. Any public utterance against Vietnam would threaten his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, who had helped to advance the cause of civil rights. And King was in a beleaguered spot in 1967. His organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was broke. Their Chicago campaign of the previous year—an attempt to make inroads in what King called “the teeming ghettos of the North”—had been a failure. More than ever, perhaps, he needed Johnson. So why step into Riverside? Jones and the others wondered. Politically, there was nothing to gain.

But King was not thinking politically, not in that sense. Jones recalled preparing some remarks, only to have King dismiss them on account of their hedging and diplomacy. King called him on the phone, Jones remembered, “and he says, ‘What’s all this on the one hand and on the other hand?’ ” King saw no reason to be circumspect or honor multiple sides. “The Vietnam War is either morally right or morally wrong,” he told Jones. “It’s not on the one hand or on the other hand.”

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