What did MLK say about the Vietnam War?

My opposition to the war in Vietnam was not a sudden political calculation — it arose from the deepest convictions of my conscience and my calling. Let me share what I actually said, in my own words. At the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, in the speech I titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, I explained why I could no longer remain silent. As I said there, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.’’ That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam” I knew many would ask why a civil rights leader was speaking about war. But the connection was plain to me. In Conscience and the Vietnam War, delivered as part of the Massey Lectures, I described watching the promising poverty programs of the mid-1960s destroyed by the war's appetite: “the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war” There was also the cruel irony I could not ignore — that young Black men, denied their rights at home, were being sent to fight for freedoms abroad they had never enjoyed themselves. I also recognized that I could not preach nonviolence in the streets of America while my government practiced massive violence overseas. In Conscience and the Vietnam War, I put it plainly: “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” This was not anti-Americanism. It was a call for America to live up to its own highest ideals.