Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”

Impact

The speech provoked a torrent of criticism. Many editorial writers and political commentators chided King for connecting two issues—civil rights and Vietnam—that they thought should be separate and distinct. The New York Times, for example, rebuked King for damaging both the civil rights and the peace movement. Other observers denounced King for adopting the views of America’s enemies in Vietnam. Life magazine dismissed the speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Even some African American publications, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, criticized King for “tragically misleading” blacks.

The most extreme reaction occurred at the White House. “What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?” Johnson asked angrily. “We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?” The federal intelligence director J. Edgar Hoover informed Johnson that King was cooperating with “subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.” Johnson’s greatest fear, however, was that King’s radical rhetoric was playing into the hands of opponents of civil rights and the War on Poverty. These critics of the Great Society could use King’s supposedly dangerous and even disloyal dissent to block additional funding for antipoverty programs or prevent new civil rights reforms.

King made no concessions to his critics. On April 15, 1967, he led a march in New York City of one hundred twenty-five thousand antiwar protesters and then made a speech in which he repeated many of the criticisms of the war he had made at Riverside Church eleven days earlier. He called for more demonstrations against the war, and he formed a group called Negotiations Now to get one million Americans to sign a petition calling for peace talks. He told staff members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that he would continue his antiwar activities because it was the right thing to do. “I will not be intimidated,” he insisted. “I will not be harassed. I will not be silent. And I will be heard.”