On The 50th 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 38th
anniversary of some unremarkable space flight or the 10th
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.
