Martin Luther King, Jr. is most known for his "I Have A Dream" speech, but his speech on Vietnam delivered in New York City's Riverside Baptist Church is far superior in moral force and force of argument. An audio and text of the speech can be found here.
For me, the 1967 speech represents Dr. King's complete break with the politics of "lesser evilism." From 1961 to 1965 he had worked closely with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, working within the system to help achieve the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
From 1964 until King's untimely death in 1968, Democrats controlled both house of the United States Congress and a Democrat sat in the White House. The federal government in those years was arguably the most liberal in history. Some of King's closest friends urged him to stay silent on Vietnam so as to stay in favor with the Democrats and help a liberal majority stay in power. But by 1967 he had reached a dramatically different conclusion:
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 nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own 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 having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.
The April 1967 speech put King permanently on the bad side of President Lyndon Johnson and many congressional Democrats. Such is the price of rejecting the politics of lesser evilism, a price too many are not willing to pay.
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