Why Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam War

Scan page 6

6 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1988 On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. The great civil-rights leader was in Memphis to build support for a sanitation workers strike.

Many people believe-and rightfully so that Dr. King became "expendable" for America's rulers when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War and began to lead struggles for economic justice.

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, we are reprinting an abridged version of a speech he made exactly one year to the day before he was killed. This speech was Dr. King's first public condemnation of the U.S. war in Vietnam and was presented at Manhattan's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. It was titled: "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam."

Over the past two years, as I 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. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live...

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. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken...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 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 die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.

We were taking the young Black men who had been crippled by our society and MALCOLM X Fian for Iberation Dr. Martin LUCINI January 1s.

sending them 8000 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. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live together on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason 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. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked 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 having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government... And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three decades...

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from The Legacy of Malcolm X Is the 'Rainbow' a Real Alternative?: A Response South Africa: The Black Unions Go Forward by Michael Schreiber ($1.25)

Dynamics of the Nicaraguan Revolution by Alan Benjamin and Jeff Mackler ($1.50)

How Can Labor Fight Back? A Strategy for Today by Nat Weinstein and Carl Finamore ($1.25)

To order and for list of other Socialist Action pamphlet titl write to 3435 Army St., Rm. 308, SF, CA 94110 Note: Please send 56 cents postage per pamphlet.

Im Remembrance of American firepower for each Viet Conginflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them—mostly children.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe... !! At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, 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 Jackson (continued from page 16) block the united struggle of the exploited and oppressed against their class enemy.

Jackson's real message

It's true enough that when Jesse Jackson speaks before audiences which are largely Black, worker, or farmer, he plays up to their instinctive anti-capitalism. But on national television, Jackson strains to communicate an opposite messagehis real one.

He strains to convince the viewer of the impossible: that he is a "statesman" who will defend the interests of all Americans— rich and poor, mortgagee and mortgagor, landlord and tenant, employer and employee.

Further, Jackson presents himself and his fellow Democratic Party presidential candidates as part of a team working together to defeat Reaganism and advance the common interests of "all the people." And finally, Jackson's message serves to bolster the illusion that electoral action alone can advance the interests of working people.

This goes against all experience. It was the independent labor offensive at the factory gates and in the streets in the 1930s and 1940s that led to the greatest advances for working people in history. It was the independent mass civil-rights movement in the streets of America that defeated Jim Crow in the 1960s.

And it was independent action in the streets by millions of anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s and 1970s that helped force American imperialism to withdraw from Vietnam. death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the most sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor. Somehow this madness must cease...

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. During the past 10 years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green-beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru...

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken-by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am 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. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than just flinging a coin to a beggar... It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring...

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs 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...

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter-but beautiful-struggle for a new world... The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

A genuine political representative of workers, Blacks and other victims of capitalism would follow a political policy the exact opposite of Jesse Jackson's. Genuine working-class political leaders would utilize the electoral process to educate and mobilize workers and their allies for united mass action in their common class interests against their class enemy.

Independent political action and the unions Despite Jackson's pro-capitalist orientation, his background as a prominent Black participant in the civil-rights struggle has guaranteed him a favorable hearing from Blacks. He has built on this base with a deceptive line of "anti-establishment" demagogy designed to appeal to the most oppressed and exploited victims of capitalism-including workers facing plant shutdowns and farmers facing foreclosure.

But the favorable response to the Jackson campaign-although badly misplaced— proves once again what a genuinely independent working-class political movement would accomplish.

A labor party based on the unions, and in alliance with truly independent Black leaders, has unlimited potential for fundamental change. Moreover, there is an existing infrastructure for a mass workers' political movement in the form of local and regional labor organizations in virtually every town and city in the nation.

Such a union-based, independent political organization, with a clear class-struggle message, would swiftly and far more effectively inspire a potentially irresistible movement against capitalist exploitation and social injustice.

----- pull-quotes -----

Pamphlets for struggle!