By BOB HERBERT
On the evening of the fourth of April, 1967, one year to the day (almost to the hour) before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked into Riverside Church in Manhattan and delivered a speech that was among his least well known, yet most controversial.
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” he said, “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”
The speech was an eloquent, full-throated denunciation of the war in Vietnam, one of the earliest public critiques by such a high-profile American. Silence in the face of the horrors of that war, said Dr. King, amounted to a “betrayal.”
The speech unleashed a hurricane of criticism. Even the N.A.A.C.P. complained about Dr. King stepping out of his perceived area of expertise, civil rights, to raise his voice against the evil of the war. The Times headlined an editorial, “Dr. King’s Error.” The war would go on for another eight years, ultimately taking the lives of 58,000 Americans and a million to two million Vietnamese. Dr. King himself would be silenced, at the age of 39, by a bullet in Memphis.
The widespread celebration of Dr. King’s birthday on Monday brought that Vietnam speech to mind. It’s both gratifying and important that we honor this great man with a national holiday. But it’s disturbing that we pay so much more attention to the celebrations than we do to the absolutely crucial lessons that he spent much of his life trying to teach us.
Whether it’s the war in Iraq, or the plight of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the violence and self-destructive behavior that plagues so many black Americans, our attitude toward the wisdom of Dr. King has been that of the drug addict or alcoholic to the notion that there might be a better way. We give lip service to it, and then we ignore it.
In the Vietnam speech, Dr. King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
. . . We miss his leadership, all of us, whether we’re wise enough to realize it or not.
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