By Dr Anthony Siracusa, PhD, The University Of Colorado Boulder — The Conversation, 12 January 2022
On 2 July 1964, Martin Luther King Jr stood behind President Lyndon Baines Johnson as the Texan signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A year later, as Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, King again joined the president for the occasion. But by the start of 1967, the two most famous men in America were no longer on speaking terms. They would not meet again before King fell to an assassin’s bullet on 4 April 1968.
King was foremost a minister who became concerned that his political ally Johnson was making a grave moral mistake in Vietnam. Johnson escalated American troop presence in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 in 1965, and by 1968 more than a half a million troops were stationed there. As I write in my 2021 book “Nonviolence Before King,” the Baptist preacher had been on a “pilgrimage to nonviolence” for years, and by 1967 he was a radical apostle of Christian nonviolence.
King publicly rebuked Johnson’s war policy in Vietnam on 4 April 1967 in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam.” He spoke of seeing the war as an enemy of the poor: “I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. If our nation can spend 35 billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”
By 1967 King’s vision of justice was one of flourishing for all people, not only civil rights for African Americans. He called “for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation — an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.” The cost for King’s speaking out was high: by the time of his assassination, his national approval rating was at an all-time low. For those seeking to honor King’s legacy today, his religious nonviolence asks that people go beyond acts of service and charity to both speak and act against violence and racism, and to organize to end those pernicious forces. This article has been republished under Creative Commons licence.