Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Where do we go from here? We must continue nonviolent demonstrations in the North, organize units of power that bring the haves and have-nots together in solidarity, boycott banks and all other businesses that discriminate against us, and continue to demand special treatment from Washington, on the grounds that “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” Finally, King wrote, we must broaden our movement and form allies with Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and Appalachian whites—the poor and forgotten of all races and ethnic groups—and enlist them in our war on poverty. “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.” If we do, perhaps we can yet inject “new meaning into the veins of American life.”

  IN LATE FEBRUARY, KING SENT his final revisions off to New York, where freelance editor Hermine Popper and Stanley Levison helped prepare the manuscript for publication. King’s editors at Harper &Row were ecstatic. “I have seldom been as moved, inspired and enlightened all at once,” said one. “It is a distinguished work in every sense—in its breadth of vision, compassion, freshness and felicity of style.” Cass Canfield also thought it “superb” and a privilege to publish, which Harper planned to do in the summer with the first run of 25,000 copies. Serial rights went to the New York Times Magazine and the Progressive, and foreign rights to publishers in England and five other European countries.

  But King was already preoccupied with something else. While he was in Jamaica, James Bevel left his post as SCLC project director and became Executive Director of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which intended to organize a national antiwar crusade. A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, and other Committee leaders secured Bevel in hopes of getting King, and Bevel was pressuring King to join forces with them, arguing that the war was so heinous that it took precedence over everything, even civil rights.

  In Jamaica, King brooded over the war during breaks in his writing. Bevel was a passionate and brilliant lieutenant, and it troubled King that he would leave SCLC for the Spring Mobilization Committee. It was symptomatic of what the war was doing to America—draining off manpower and money that were urgently needed in the domestic war against poverty. King noted that by 1967 relatively twice as many black soldiers as white were fighting and dying in Vietnam, and that the American government was spending approximately $332,000 for every enemy killed there, as compared to $53 per person in its antipoverty programs. It challenged his imagination to think “what lives we could transform if we were to cease the killing,” as he wrote in Where Do We Go from Here?

  One day King was sitting on the porch of his Jamaican villa reading Ramparts magazine. He froze when he came to a section on Vietnam, with color photographs of a mother and her baby killed by American firepower. How could he keep quiet about such things? Stokely Carmichael wasn’t doing so. He was still getting into the papers with his denunciations of the war (“Hell, no, we won’t go!” “Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger.” “If I’m going to do any fighting it’s gonna be right here at home.”), which made King’s current silence sharply noticeable. Back in the United States, he sat before his television set, watching news clips from Vietnam. He saw rice fields and entire villages in flames. He saw mothers run from blazing huts with children clutched to their chests. He saw American and Vietnamese soldiers with their limbs and faces blasted away. He saw the burned and disfigured bodies of Vietnamese children. A war that incinerated children was a war that mutilated his conscience.

  He remembered Dante’s warning: the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a moment of moral crisis seek to maintain their neutrality. “I can’t be silent,” King told his aides and friends. “Never again will I be silent.” He had to make the war one of his major concerns, before it destroyed his movement and his country. No more guarded criticisms in speeches on civil rights. He was going to devote entire addresses to Vietnam, and he was going to make America listen. In February, he conferred with his Research Committee and sent Rustin in search of facts to document his points. He even phoned the President—never mind his hostility—and made it clear that he would be taking a more forthright stand against the war. But “I am not centering this on President Johnson,” he said. There was “collective guilt” in this misadventure, stemming from America’s arrogant belief that she had some divine mission to police the world, without letting young nations like Vietnam go through the same growing pains, turbulence, and revolution that had characterized American history. It was a painful irony that a country that had initiated much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world should behave like an arch anti-revolutionary. Ultimately “a great nation is a compassionate nation,” and he meant to make his country set its house in order.

  PART NINE

  THE HOUR OF RECKONING

  ON FEBRUARY 25, 1967, AT THE Nation INSTITUTE in Los Angeles’ Beverly-Hilton Hotel, King gave his first speech devoted entirely to Vietnam, “one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars.” Throughout his address, he referred to “our” tragedy and “our” guilt in Vietnam, “our paranoid anti-Communism, our failure to feel the ache and anguish of the have nots.” Unlike Carmichael, who had given up on America, King was still a patriot—America was still his country—and he could not abide the destruction she was wreaking in Vietnam and here at home, where the promises of the Great Society were being shot down, too, and “an ugly repressive sentiment to silence peace-seekers” was loose in the land, vilifying them as “quasi-traitors, fools, and venal enemies of our soldiers and our institutions.” Yes, “the bombs in Viet Nam explode at home: they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.” And so “I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world…. We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement. We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken.”

  Thus King entered the small but growing ranks of war protesters—the most prominent American at this point to do so. He was now marching in step with Coretta (who had continued her peace activities while he was involved in Chicago) and a farrago of antiwar groups, most of them centered at Berkeley and on other college and university campuses. In Congress, a handful of doves—Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas chief among them—made objections to Johnson’s Vietnam policy as they voted him appropriations to continue it. And on March 2, Robert Kennedy—now a U.S. Senator—joined the doves in a speech that Johnson had tried to stop “in the interest of national security.” Standing in the Senate, Kennedy decried “the ever-widening war,” spoke of its atrocities, and called as King did for a halt to the bombing and a negotiated settlement. King had had little contact with Kennedy since he had resigned as Attorney General in 1964 and become U.S. Senator from New York. Even now he avoided any direct association with Kennedy, both men content with a “distant” comradeship as they traveled parallel paths of opposition to the war, poverty, and racism.

  Their respective speeches infuriated American hawks, particularly Lyndon Johnson. At a private dinner party he argued that the American people would not tolerate “a dishonorable settlement disguised as a bargain for popularity purposes.” By now, both the White House and the FBI were closely monitoring King’s antiwar course, which the FBI suggested to “friendly” news sources was remarkably similar to Communist efforts.

  Through March, King rode the antiwar trail, denouncing Vietnam in Chicago, Louisville, and Atlanta, with a posse of FBI agents in pursuit. His stand on Vietnam put him on a collision course with pro-administration Negroes like Whitney Young of the Urban League. After a fund-raising affair on Long Island, Young argued that he was fighting the other war in the ghetto and that King’s speeches would
cost the movement dearly when it came to White House support.

  “Whitney,” King flared, “what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of heaven.”

  They stood face to face now, Young accusing King of not caring about the ghettoes, of eating and dressing well despite his high and mighty words, King angrily retorting that he opposed the war because it was hurting the ghettoes. Finally, Wachtel broke up the argument and took King to his home in Great Neck. By then King’s anger had turned to regret and self-recrimination. “I never saw Martin so disgusted at himself,” Wachtel said. He complained about his failure to control his temper and handle his quarrels. It was irrelevant, he moaned, that Young had assailed him first; King had no excuse for being “so cruel” to him. Later he phoned Young and did his best to make amends, but the episode was one more example of how the war was tearing Americans apart.

  The New York Times and other news sources pressed King for interviews and statements about why he was becoming so outspoken on Vietnam. Anxious for a public forum where he could make his position clear, King and his advisers arranged for him to deliver a major address in New York’s Riverside Church, under the auspices of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, on the evening of April 4.

  King warmed up in a news conference at the Overseas Press Club, where he called on Negroes and “all white people of goodwill” to boycott the war by becoming conscientious objectors to military service. That evening, a clear, crisp night in New York City, 3,000 people filed into Riverside Church for a star-studded antiwar program. King was to give the main address, followed by comments from historian Henry Steele Commager of Amherst College, Rabbi Abraham Heschel who had marched with King in Selma, and Dr. John C. Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary. Outside the cathedral, some” thirty-five pickets—a few of them black nationalists—marched and chanted in protest.

  When King rose to speak, the throng in the cavernous sanctuary gave him a standing ovation. He came here tonight, King said, not to address Hanoi or the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, but to make “a passionate plea to my beloved country,” which bore with him the responsibility for ending this tragic war. “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…. 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 sources 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 several 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. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated 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 adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube.”

  But the war was doing 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 black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 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 on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

  He opposed the war for other reasons too. He could not condemn violence in American ghettoes without speaking against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” He opposed the war because his Nobel Peace Prize took him beyond national allegiances. He opposed the war because he was a Christian minister, a reason that was so obvious that he often marveled at those who questioned why he was speaking out. He opposed the war, finally, because he could not tolerate what it was doing to the Vietnamese people. And he felt called this night to speak for them—for the weak, the voiceless, the victims of the United States and those it called its enemies—for they too were his brothers.

  “And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion 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 continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to hear their broken cries.

  “They must see Americans as strange liberators,” King said. After World War II, we rejected Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary government on the grounds that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence. For nine long years we supported the French in their efforts to recolonize Vietnam. And when they moved out, we took their place, refusing to let Ho Chi Minh unify his own country, refusing to let the Vietnamese people hold general elections as prescribed by the 1954 Geneva Agreement. Instead we converted a civil war over national unification into an American war over world Communism. The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicine and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? “Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?” We have destroyed two of their most cherished institutions: the village and the family. We have inflicted twenty times as many casualties on them as have the Vietcong. We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force—the Unified Buddhist Church. “We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!”

  And what of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam? What must they think when we accuse them of aggression and violence, and yet support the cruelty and repression of the Saigon regime and rain thousands of bombs down on “a poor weak nation” more than 8,000 miles away from our shores?

  “Somehow this madness must cease,” King said. “We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initia
tive to stop must be ours.”

  He outlined several concrete steps the United States should take immediately to start extricating itself from “this nightmarish conflict.” It should halt the bombing and declare a unilateral ceasefire in hopes that this would create an atmosphere for negotiation. It should include the National Liberation Front not only in the peace talks but in any future Vietnamese government. And it should set a date for the removal of all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the Geneva Agreement.

  “We must move past indecision to action,” King said. “We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world—a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act 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.

  “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.”

  Commager, Bennett, and Heschel also condemned the war that night, but it was King’s haunting eloquence that dominated the meeting. “There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King,” Bennett said in his own remarks. “I hope that he will make us see the monstrous evil of what we are doing in Vietnam.” King’s speech, in fact, was not only accurate in its historical detail; it was the most unequivocal denunciation of the war to come from so eminent and influential an American. More than any other, it marked his emergence as a global leader who applied his incomparable oratory and philosophy of redemptive love to the international theater. Young Charles Fager had been right in his essay the year before in the Christian Century: King could never again be just a spokesman for American Negroes. As Daddy King said after the Riverside speech, “He did not belong to us, he belonged to the world.” And his vision mesmerized those close to him. “I’m not a mystic,” Wyatt Walker said. “But I am absolutely convinced that God is doing something with Martin Luther King that He is not doing with anyone else in this country.”