
Image by Joshua J. Cotten.
In his condemnation of the U.S. war on the people of Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance was not a pacifist one. King was not necessarily anti-war so much as he was against the U.S. empire and its machinations against the Vietnamese and their generational struggle for self-determination. In fact, King would discuss openly how land redistribution was necessary after years of brutal French colonization and how the U.S. actively prevented this as a political strategy. At one point, King stated, “What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?”[1]
Despite the tradition of twisting King’s words and analysis to fit a liberal and conservative paeon to American exceptionalism (i.e. the civil rights movement was simply a “correction” to form that more “perfect union”), King was a stalwart radical and a fervent anti-imperialist.[2] Indeed, in King’s speech decrying the U.S. bloodshed in Vietnam, he didn’t mince words. “After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem,” King had stated at the time, generating swift anger from the White House and even among allies within the civil rights movement itself, those who were more willing to make that bargain with the powerful of ending formal Jim Crow in exchange for their support for America’s wars abroad.[3]
Although King is oftentimes presented as a “peaceful” man who loved everyone, both by liberals and conservatives alike, he was an astute political strategist. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King was explicit about how politics and change was a battle over power, and the exposure of “law and order” as a facade. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored,” had been King’s response when him and other civil rights activists had been called out by white clergymen for sowing “division” in society rather than patiently wait for incremental change under a totalitarian system that disappeared and killed so many, most of them black.[4] Rather than concede to this non-analysis, King embraced disruption as the singular tool that would force the hand of the dominating white population to at least come to the negotiating table.
At the core of the civil rights movement was direct confrontation with those elements that ran Jim and Jane Crow, from private business to more explicit “political” forces. African Americans won their freedom through economic boycotts and political agitation, not by begging for their inalienable rights under a white supremacist and pro-capitalist constitution.[5] King himself stated in what would be his final published work, “The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation.”[6]
Limitations to King’s politics do exist when compared to other notable radicals of that era, like George Jackson, an avowed Marxist-Leninist.[7] One of the major differences that one could point to between King and Malcolm X, earlier on in their careers, was Malcolm X’s insistence from the beginning of his time as a preacher for African Americans to tie themselves to the broader anti-colonial struggle that was sweeping through the globe.[8] King, of course, would hold that similar view but was far more outspoken on it much later in his political career, unlike Malcolm X who spoke on such issues often and openly.
There was also some level of vagueness when it came to King’s association with economic policies that veered away from capitalist thinking and dogma. Anti-capitalism was at the heart of King’s politics and he wasn’t someone who feared being associated with communism or even Marx. In fact, King had attended the funeral of the great W.E.B Du Bois, citing Du Bois’ Marxist analysis and worldview.[9] Still, there were claims made by King that kept the door open in terms of what he exactly believed in terms of what form of socialism was required, if any. One could easily argue that King was a social democratic and not a revolutionary socialist.[10] This is where the insights of a younger group of radicals, like a Jackson or an Assata Shakur, and the analysis of someone who preceded all of them, that of Claudia Jones, prove substantial.[11] For them, as should be accepted by most on the left by now, the “free market” and its concentration of basic resources by the privately owned business elite had to be completely overturned, and replaced by some form of functional form of government that provided what the masses of working people needed to not just survive, but to thrive and dream. There is no middle ground, when it comes to the benefit of the masses across the globe, between capitalists and the exploited.
Still, near the end of his life, King was far more vocal on matters of poverty and class, wanting to help organize a poor people’s march on the nation’s capital.[12] One of the final political acts he’d taken part in was the Memphis sanitation worker strike among black workers who felt marginalized and woefully mistreated by white employers and their white peers. “Whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth,” King had said directly to the sanitation workers there.[13]
The next day King was murdered by a white gunman firing a bullet at him from a rooftop. At the time, most white Americans had turned against King as he strived for a far more just and equitable society than just one that sought the ending of explicitly racist laws.[14]
In the end, King had played his role in a movement and political culture that was successful on many fronts. The U.S. invasion of Vietnam would end. The fall of one of the world’s most brutal system of domination and control, Jim and Jane Crow, was due to the efforts of people like King and the army of volunteers and people committed to not just justice in terms of “inclusion” but had been dedicated to creating a society whereby people could register to vote, could choose to own a home, could access jobs, without the threat of death looming over them daily. Such a defeat of a rabidly oppressive system could never be overlooked or seen as inevitable. There was a time and place when many African Americans probably believed that apartheid would last forever, and that the best hope they had in terms of building some normal life was to flee the land they and their ancestors had toiled and made prosper. It took the efforts of groups like SNCC, the SCLC, the armed deacons for defense who protected King, and King himself for such a system to find its end, to crumble and be replaced.[15] They defeated this monstrosity and stopped a war from plunging even more Vietnamese into a swamp of death and destruction through their radical ends, and their willingness to pursue a different type of world through direct challenges to power, with King oftentimes being the one leading such efforts.
In the contemporary political environment, one could imagine King standing up against the U.S. empire, an empire that has only grown stronger since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an empire of death dealing and sleights of hand (it’s not an invasion for oil, it’s called “spreading democracy”) that spans the globe with over 800 military bases scattered on nearly every inch of planet earth.[16] Palestine would probably be at the forefront of his actions. Not to mention tapping into the growing anger and frustration domestically against two political parties so wedded to war and irrational economic policies.
In an era of extreme disinformation and cooptation, while the younger generations drift further and further away from the actual events and ramifications of the late 1960s, it is incredibly important to elevate King, not merely as a thoughtful and intriguing figure, but very much so as a radical thinker, and as someone who would still face pushback and retaliation from those in power today, whether it be Trump and his sycophants or Biden, whose own legacy is one of bloodshed and blatant hypocrisy.
The triple evils of militarism, racism, and poverty still plague us, the same evils that King bravely condemned in his speech against the war over Vietnam. Would King be given the space to write for the Atlantic or to even speak on MSNBC? Would he have endorsed someone as brutal as Biden, or as vacuous as Harris? No. But he’d also demand we did more than be frustrated at the state we are in.
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now,” he once wrote, warning, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”[17]
1. Martin Luther, King. Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” American Rhetoric, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm. ↑
2. Hajar Yazdiha, “How the distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words enables more, not less, racial division within American society,” The Conversation, Jan. 12, 2023, https://theconversation.com/how-the-distortion-of-martin-luther-king-jr-s-words-enables-more-not-less-racial-division-within-american-society-195177. ↑
3. David Garrow, “When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam,” New York Times, April 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/when-martin-luther-king-came-out-against-vietnam.html. ↑
4. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/552461/. ↑
5. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The Free Press, 1984). ↑
6. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 96. ↑
7. George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1972). ↑
8. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964). ↑
9. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Honoring Du Bois,” Jacobin, Jan 21, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/01/web-du-bois-martin-luther-king-speech. ↑
10. King, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? ↑
11. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); Claudia Jones, A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones (New York: 1804 Books, 2024). ↑
12. “Poor People’s Campaign,” Stanford, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/poor-peoples-campaign. ↑
13. Colette Coleman, “The 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike That Drew MLK to Memphis,” History, Jan. 23, 2024, https://www.history.com/news/sanitation-workers-strike-memphis. ↑
14. “King’s Assassination: A Timeline,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/memphis-hunt/. ↑
15. Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). ↑
16. David Vine, “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?,” Politico, July/August 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321/. ↑
17. King, Where Do We Go From Here, 202. ↑