On The 50th Anniversary Of Doctor Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967)

On The 50^th Anniversary Of Doctor Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967)

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

I have mentioned a number of times earlier in this space that I have been at times annoyed by the proliferation of celebrations and commemoratives of events that don’t, to my mind at least, rate either celebration or odd-ball year observance. You know like the 38^th anniversary of some unremarkable space flight or the 10^th anniversary of the demise of some event faded from memory except in some fill-in starved newsroom. On the other hand some events in my left-wing calendar are worthy like the anniversaries of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 are worthy of orderly and odd-ball yearly observance. Then there is the subject today (see above) the commemoration of Doctor Martin Luther King’s important speech to the congregation at the Riverside Church in Manhattan in April of 1967 where he decisively broke with the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration’s Vietnam War policy. No question that the speech is in many quarters and maybe objectively worthy of a fiftieth anniversary commemoration but for personal reasons I had been ambiguous about placing it in this space.           

In my high school days I was a lonely ardent defender in my Irish Catholic enclave in North Adamsville of the black civil rights struggle down south in this country. A struggle that was strongly identified with the personage and non-violent strategies of Doctor King. That defense was one that placed me in an extreme minority both in my Northern lily white school and in the community at large. I was called, falsely at the time, seven kinds of commie red and a n----r loving for the simple acts of heading to Boston several times to join picket lines at the downtown Woolworth’s department store in support of the attempts to integrate the lunch counters down South (and maybe up North as well) and heading down to join the freedom riders trying to integrate the buses. Simple democratic and civil demands. Thus I, of necessity, had a great admiration for both the personal courage of Doctor King (and his supporters in the field in the front line battles of the South) and of his philosophy of non-violent direct action.

As is well known those action were directly responsible for various pieces of civil rights legislation and attempts to integrate various social institutions highlighted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That year was kind of watershed on two fronts. It spelled the demise of the intensity of the civil rights struggle and the emergence of the Vietnam War as the decisive social battle of the time. Opposition to the Vietnam War in 1965 was an extremely small and radical position as the start of a seemingly endless war unfolded. Doctor King in many ways was a natural leader for such opposition as more and more people began to protest. Yet for those various reasons just mentioned he held his fire, held it after lesser public figures began to openly oppose the war, until the major Riverside speech. Some of that had to do with pushing the civil rights agenda forward but it also had to do with that latent anti-communism still alive in the land and the politics of the “domino” theory attached to it.

Here is where my personal dilemma comes in dealing with presenting this commemoration. I too was late, very late, in opposition to the Vietnam War for those same domino theory adherence reasons that drove Doctor King. Except mine lasted at least until the Tet offensive of 1968. With that caveat though I present the rightly commemorated speech. Despite the subsequent political gulf that has separated me from Doctor King’s philosophy and strategies the ideas presented still retain their power.