Remembering Beyond Vietnam on MLK Day
A good friend introduced me to Martin Luther King Jr's Beyond Vietnam speech some time ago. It was not well-received by the mainstream press at the time (more about that in a moment) but I think it's prescient and, unfortunately, timely.
At the Riverside Church in New York City, he delivered a blistering response to America's war in Vietnam that went beyond the war itself to discuss the values of the nation and its impact at home and abroad:
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, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
[...] 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 South 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.
It is a brilliant speech.
And at the time, it was condemned. As The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University notes:
To King, the Vietnam War was only the most pressing symptom of American colonialism worldwide. King claimed that America made “peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments”. King urged instead “a radical revolution of values” emphasizing love and justice rather than economic nationalism.
The immediate response to King’s speech was largely negative. Both the Washington Post and New York Times published editorials criticizing the speech, with the Post noting that King’s speech had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people” through a simplistic and flawed view of the situation (“A Tragedy,” 6 April 1967). Similarly, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Ralph Bunche accused King of linking two disparate issues, Vietnam and civil rights. Despite public criticism, King continued to attack the Vietnam War on both moral and economic grounds.
Today, we tend to remember MLK in a sanitized, vague way. That's because what he was really calling for was parity in a way that is still unfortunately controversial, even today. At the time, 75% of Americans disapproved of him. But these ideas are even more obviously relevant today than they were at the time. He was prescient, and we need more leaders like him.
And, of course, he was assassinated for it – something that we still have to truly reckon with. As his daughter, Dr Bernice A King, said:
“The reality is that it is not who killed Martin Luther King, Jr…but what killed Martin Luther King, Jr. Because whenever we get to what killed Martin Luther King, Jr., then we will deal with the various injustices that we face as a nation and ultimately as a nation that leads this world.”
Yesterday, Dr Stacey Patton wrote:
Tomorrow, they will invoke Martin Luther King Jr. while doing the very things he warned against. Because America has a necrophilic relationship with Dr. King. It loves the King that forgives its sins and washes its feet.
[...] It loves him dead because dead men don’t organize. Dead men don’t shut down streets. Dead men don’t boycott, don’t strike, don’t disrupt, and don’t demand redistribution of wealth. Dead men don’t call out Empire and don’t name white supremacy. Dead men don’t link racism to capitalism and militarism in the same damn breath.
[...] Naw, they don’t love our Dr. King. They love the silence that comes after the bullet.
