The Significance of Martin Luther King's Speech at Riverside Church

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967 Dr. King gave a major speech at the Riverside Church in New York. One year later to the day the Baptist minister and civil rights leader was assassinated.

At what point did Martin Luther King know that he was a marked man? He saw what happened to JFK, to Bobby, to Medgar Evers, to Malcolm X. It must have weighed on him heavily that one day he would leave his wife and family for the cause that burdened his heart.

As with all his major speeches, it is delivered with power and authority. The new feature here is that he is critical of our government's involvement in Viet Nam, accusing our leaders--and with good cause--of being a great purveyor of violence.

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I come to this great magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization that brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

Why was Dr. King now addressing the war? People were telling him that civil rights issues were different from the anti-war movement. He disagreed, and he spells out his reasons. First, it became apparent to him that the war was an enemy to the poor.

Riverside 1967. (Photo: Public domain)

Perhaps a 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. 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. 

Another reason he had come to make this speech was because he saw how blacks were arming themselves, many believing that violence was the only way to set things right. When he said it was not, they would point to Viet Nam and say how our government believed violence was the way to resolve issues.

This latter led Dr. King to become more vocal about the wrongness of the war.

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”

His career as a minister required him to preach peace to the nation and take up the cause of the needy.

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 next section of his speech details the history of Viet Nam after the end of World War II, and our part in the then-present devastation.

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 unified Buddhist Church.

He follows this section now with concern for our own troops and what we are doing to them.

I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.

How do you un-see once you've seen it so plainly?

He goes on to make a statement that is expounded upon more fully in more recent book The Cold War's Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, that the U.S. misinterpreted all national ambitions for self-rule through a Cold War lens. He stated, "In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution," and then elaborated on this.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and 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 antirevolutionaries.

Sadly, this next paragraph could have been written yesterday:

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

And finally:

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

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Why I Am Writing About This

Nearly every point in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech is something many of us had thought about at one time or another growing up in the Sixties, or so I thought. We hadn't articulated it so clearly, but were uncomfortable with what we were hearing, seeing in the news, reading in the papers. 

Simultaneously, Dr. King was being slammed as becoming a Communist now, taking the side of our enemies. As you can plainly see, this speech is in harmony with the Gospel, for we are all brothers and sisters in the human family, and have responsibilities to one another. It has been cited as the moment he was perceived as a real threat to out nation's Machiavellian war efforts, a voice that had to be silenced. 

Related Links
Background on the speech Beyond Vietnam 
The full speech, Beyond Vietnam
Coretta Scott King's Statement at the Conclusion of the Conspiracy Trial  regarding the assassination of her husband on e year later.