Martin Luther King, "It's A Dark
Day In Our Nation"
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in
Vietnam"
Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967
"I call on the young men of America who must make a
choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be
too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you
think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force
to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way
of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems
that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant!
And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break
the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands
of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and
know that I'm God." "
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FULL TEXT
The sermon
which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual kind
of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject,
nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is
one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I'm
using as a subject from which to preach, "Why I Am Opposed to the
War in Vietnam."
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as
an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in
Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The
time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.
In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because
most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the
incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that
blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial
patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.
Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye
shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you
free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I
agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for
those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which
they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the
demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of
opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor
does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the
apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the
surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as
perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,
we're always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we
must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence
of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a
vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the
humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must
speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has
never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American
people.
Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose
the war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves
around to support it. And even those millions who do support the war
[are] half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that
millions have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth
patriotism, to the high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the
mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Now, of course,
one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that
there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty.
It's a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek
to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening,
and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and
I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who
opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our
soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our
tradition.
Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]...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. And so this morning, I speak to
you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel
seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate
plea to my beloved nation.
This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an
attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the
need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it
an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front
paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a
successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish
not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but
rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility,
and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both
continents.
Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not
surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into
the field of my moral vision. There is...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 that there was a real
promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the
Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings.
Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken
as if it was 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
demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my
friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each
enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each
person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes
for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and 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 hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their
brothers, and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily
high proportion relative to the rest of the population. We were
taking the black young men who had been crippled by 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 a 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 school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning
the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly
live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be
silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it
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; for they ask and write me, "So what about
Vietnam?" They ask 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 first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of
those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be
silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They
applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most
of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before
thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed
and said, we can't do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in
movement--we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The
applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without
retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma,
Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in
its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when
I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist
sheriff] Jim Clark. There's something strangely inconsistent about a
nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent
toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be
non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There's
something wrong with that press!
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of
America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed
upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was
not just something taking place, but it was a commission--a
commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the
brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national
allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to
live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus
Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of
peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why
I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know
that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and
capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for
revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry
is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he
died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro,
or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten
them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I
must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling
to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or
nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And
because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially
for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come today to
speak for them. 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 not
now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of
Saigon, but simply of the people who have been 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
until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their
broken cries.
Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as
strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French
and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the
Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And
this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves
independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in
their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to
recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for
independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that time of the same
deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for
all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former
colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to
re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United
States of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more
than eighty percent of the war costs. And even when France started
despairing of its reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a
conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached,
because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after
that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the
sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage
the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked
as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva
agreement. But instead the United States came and started supporting
a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless
dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence all
opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their
voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched
and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The
peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States
influence and by increasing numbers of United States troops who came
to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When
Diem was overthrown, they may have been happy, but the long line of
military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in
terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting in
Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice
Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own
people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his
life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh,
our government and the press generally won't tell us these things,
but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop
commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt,
inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read
our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy
and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us,
not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and
apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into
concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They
know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go,
primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison
their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy
the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of
thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in
packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by
our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling
their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. 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 United Buddhist Church. This is a
role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful
revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and
the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas
investments. I'm 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. 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, militarism
and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one
hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside,
but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see
that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women
will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey
on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar. 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 Latin 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. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order
and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." 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.
Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is
that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are
revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and
out of the wounds 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. The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light. They are saying, unconsciously, as we say
in one of our freedom songs, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me
around!" It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a
morbid fear of communism, 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 anti-revolutionaries.
This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary
spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to
make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we
initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the
revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world
declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With
this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo,
we shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day
when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill
shall be made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the
crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be
revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation
must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in
order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call
for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. This oft
misunderstood and misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by
the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now
become an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind. And when I
speak of love I'm not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great
religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love
is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate
reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about
ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of
John: "Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that
loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth
not God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us
and his love is perfected in us."
Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love
America. I speak out against this war, 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. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with
America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not
great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively
and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic
exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a
dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has
strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that
all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically;
its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our
Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All
men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to
a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither
conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given. Out of
one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and
healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this
unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It
has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with
irrationality.
It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come
back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving
finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington
today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America
today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice
today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The
book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose
America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of
the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with
judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America,
"You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise
up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the
hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know
that I'm God."
Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes
it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand,
sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened
heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and
scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a
daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since
learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up
the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before
Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must
bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and
bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that
determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair,
because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith,
because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was
right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William
Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again."
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth
forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that
scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is
right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be
able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With
this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we
will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like
waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we
will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie
down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig
tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have
spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when
all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the
words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank
God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as
we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into
plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not
rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I
don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more.
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