Martin Luther's Message

Martin Luther King Jr. is a man much admired, revered, and hated in this country. His name has the legendary force as a voice for positive social change...and now as an easy insult. Many comedians use lines that, and I paraphrase, "When I arrive in a new town if I want to find crack or the ganja I just look for MLK Boulevard". The name of the man who spoke against the problems of poverty now has his name indeliably associated with it.

It is good every now and then to look at the words of those we speak of. Here is a sermon he gave, and thank you to Jr. Woodchuckette for sending it to me:I encourage you to read it in its entirety, to pick up on the many excellent points he makes about a nation losing it's moral foundations as it leaves the beliefs in Godly principles, as it forgets the rights in the Bill of Rights are given by God, not by government, that you reap what you so and sowing violence will reap the same.





*Martin Luther King, "It's A Dark Day In Our Nation" *
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"
Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967
The sermon which I am preaching this morning in a sense is not the usual
kind of sermon, but it is a sermon and an important subject,
nevertheless, because the issue that I will be discussing today is one
of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I'm using as a
subject from which to preach, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam."
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an
unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in
Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time
has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In
international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most
nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the
incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that
blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism.
He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still
the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth,"
says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to
preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the
hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral
crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence
becomes betrayal.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of
inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their
government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human
spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of
conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do
in the case of this dreadful conflict, we're always on the verge of
being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who
have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the
calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We
must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited
vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our
history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by
the American people.
Polls reveal that almost fifteen million Americans explicitly oppose the
war in Vietnam. Additional millions cannot bring themselves around to
support it. And even those millions who do support the war [are]
half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden. This reveals that millions
have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism, to the
high grounds of firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and
the reading of history. Now, of course, one of the difficulties in
speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking
to equate dissent with disloyalty. It's a dark day in our nation when
high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent.
But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The
truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it
appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor
or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against
the best in our tradition.
Yes, we must stand, and we must speak. [tape skip]...have moved to break
the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own
heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of
Vietnam. Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At
the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud:
"Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the
voices of dissent?" Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. And so
this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to
take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make
a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt
to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a
collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to
make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue,
nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of
the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and
the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who
bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has
exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Now, since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising
that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of
my moral vision. There is...a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been
waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that
struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor,
both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were
experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in
Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle
political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that
America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued
to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction
tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we
spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only
fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that
fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I
was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and
attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and
their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportion
relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young
men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand
miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not
found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly
faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens
as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat
them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal
solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they
would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could
not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three
years--especially the last three summers. 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 non-violent action; for
they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our 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 first having spoken clearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake
of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.
Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our
total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers
applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes
getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can't do it
this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we non-violently
decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom
Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in
Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in
its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be
non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward
[Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There's something
strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you
when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn
you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese
children. There's something wrong with that press!
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in
1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just
something taking place, but it was a commission--a commission to work
harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is
a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were
not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment
to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this
ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at
those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that
they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for
communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and
white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my
ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that
he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro,
or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them
with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be
true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the
son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is
this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the
Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless
and outcast children, I come today to speak for them. And as I ponder
the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand
and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that
peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the
military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been
under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think
of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful
solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their
broken cries.
Now, let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans as
strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed
their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese
occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution
in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact,
and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted
our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet
our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they
were not ready for independence. So we fell victim as a nation at that
time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the international
situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its
former colony. And they fought eight long, hard, brutal years trying to
re-conquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States
of America. It came to the point that we were meeting more than eighty
percent of the war costs. And even when France started despairing of its
reckless action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at
Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been defeated
at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we
did not stop. We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a
real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were
defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come
through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and
started supporting a man named Diem who turned out to be one of the most
ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out to silence
all opposition. People were brutally murdered because they raised their
voices against the brutal policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and
cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants
watched as all this was presided over by United States influence and by
increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the
insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown,
they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships
seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for
land and peace. And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a man
by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought
with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion
that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are
supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally
won't tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning.
The truth must be told.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments
in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and
without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets
and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform.
Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow
Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd
them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where
minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be
destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and
the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million
acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through
their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into
the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless,
without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see
the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the
children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their
mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the
family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We
have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist
revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a
role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful
revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the
pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments.
I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a
person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the giant
triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable
of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness
and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are
called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be
only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho
Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten
and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion
is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values
will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth
with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia,
Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern
for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just."
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and
say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has
everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A
true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of
war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with
orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins
of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot
be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Oh, my friends, if there is any one thing that we must see today is that
these are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the
wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being
born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as
never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.
They are saying, unconsciously, as we say in one of our freedom songs,
"Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around!" It is a sad fact that because
of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to
adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the
revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch
anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has
a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our
failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions
that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture
the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world
declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With
this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo, we
shall boldly challenge unjust mores, and thereby speed up the day when
"every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low, and the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked
places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all
flesh shall see it together."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation
must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a
worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe,
race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing,
unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and
misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the
world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity
for the survival of mankind. And when I speak of love I'm not speaking
of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which
all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle
of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to
ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief
about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of
John: "Let us love one another, for God is love. And every one that
loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not
God, for God is love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his
love is perfected in us."
Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love
America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety
and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see
our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out
against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can
be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am
disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with
the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We
are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national
disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and
militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly
structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the
insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image
of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an
heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are
neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given.
Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy
place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural
excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left
hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.
It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come
back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on
every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the
young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on
this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let
anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic
force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of
standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear
God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change
your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll
place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be
still and know that I'm God."
Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it
means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand,
sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart.
Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may
mean having a seven, eight year old child asking a daddy, "Why do you
have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a
follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible
tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear,
there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth,
bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning
with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair,
because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith,
because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right:
"No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen
Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall
overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the
scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the
future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap
what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the
mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to
transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony
of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when
justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty
stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the
lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under
his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of
the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the
day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in
the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank
God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as
we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into
plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not
rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I
don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more.