
On April 4, 1967, civil rights leader and Nobel laureate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a gathering of more than three thousand people at New York’s Riverside Church. His talk that day, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, was his most public, most controversial and, some historians have argued¹, his most prophetic critique of American foreign and domestic policy.
At the time of King's speech, the Vietnam War was in its twelfth year. President Lyndon Johnson was committed to winning it through a series of escalations of the United States' ground war and bombing missions. But rather than bringing the conflict to an end, Johnson's combat surges between 1963 and 1967 sunk the United States deeper into the quagmire of the war. Civilian and military casualty rates rose exponentially, and news outlets around the world broadcast horrific images of the chaos and tragedy of the war.
King, who had until 1967 been restrained in his public criticism of the war, now called openly from the sanctuary of Riverside Church for an immediate end to the conflict. He asserted that the “madness” of America’s role in Vietnam was morally indefensible and unambiguously linked to what he called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” The time had arrived, he told his audience, for him and his fellow clergy to break their silence and to “move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”
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.
He went on to say:
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
King’s speech was denounced quickly, and not only by his usual critics. Many prominent voices in the civil rights movement and in the liberal political establishment criticized and distanced themselves from King and his assessment of the war. The New York Times ran a castigating editorial entitled, Dr. King’s Error, calling the ideas presented in his Riverside Church lecture “both wasteful and self-defeating.”² Dr. Ralph Bunche, the United Nations Under Secretary for Political Affairs and a Director of the NAACP, said of Dr. King and the speech, “Like us all, of course, he makes mistakes. Right now, I am convinced, he is making a very serious tactical error.”³
A few weeks after his speech at Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a guest on the Casper Citron Show, a nationally syndicated radio program which aired in New York on WQXR, WOR and WRFM. The exact date of Dr. King's appearance on the program is not clear, though it likely took place during the week of June 19th, 1967. Mr. Citron began the interview by asking King to respond to the criticisms being leveled at him in the wake of his Riverside Church speech, and specifically to the charge that King should focus on civil rights and not involve himself in matters of war and foreign affairs. Dr. King remained steadfast in his convictions, telling Citron:
Before I became a civil rights leader I was a clergyman, and I still am. And it’s always the responsibility of a clergyman to bring to bear the great insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage on the social evils of our day, and I happen to think war is a great social evil.
The other thing is that I cannot, for the world of me, segregate my moral concern. These issues, in the final analysis, are tied together. There can be no peace ultimately without justice, and there can be no justice without peace. Therefore I must carry my moral concern to the problem of war in general and the war in Vietnam in particular.
And the other thing is that in 1964 I received the Nobel Peace Prize. And this was a commission, so to speak, for me to do more than I had ever done to try to bring the issue of peace before the conscience and before mankind in general.
So for all of these reasons I don’t feel that I’m moving out of my area but that I’m in the very area where I must be because of a deep moral concern and a deep feeling that racism and militarism and economic exploitation are all tied together.
Audio of this excerpt of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking with Casper Citron in 1967 is available in the media player at the top of this page; the complete interview is available here. Note: The audio quality of the original recording is often distorted.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee by a white supremacist on April 4, 1968, one year to the day from his speech at Riverside Church in New York. America’s war in Vietnam continued to escalate and expand through the administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. On April 29th of 1975, President Gerald Ford withdrew the last American forces from Vietnam in a dramatic two-day evacuation called Operation Frequent Wind. On April 30th, 1975, North Vietnamese troops captured the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, ending the twenty year conflict with the United States. In 2008, an article in The British Medical Journal estimated that there were 3,091,000 combat and civilian casualties in Vietnam between President Harry Truman's deployment of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group in 1955 and the fall of Saigon in 1975.
¹Peniel, Joseph, “This speech made Martin Luther King Jr. revolutionary”, CNN, 3 April 2017
²Editorial Board, “Dr. King’s Error”, New York Times, 7 April 1967
³Sibley, John, “Bunche Disputes Dr. King on Peace”, New York Times, 13 April 1967
This recording of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Casper Citron Show is a recent acquisition of the New York Public Radio Archive. It was made possible through the generosity of Christiane Citron, the host's daughter.