Martin Luther King at Riverside Church

Martin Luther King wasn’t a president or a veteran, but he was a warrior who fought with the tools of peace. His struggle goes on, but his memorialization has become a serious obstacle to it. Building a gigantic statue of him hasn’t lifted up black America, and ritually replaying the “I Have a Dream” speech hasn’t brought about a post-racial society. Neither has electing an African-American president, who keeps a very low profile on race — especially on Martin Luther King Day.

The irony in all this is that King himself had moved beyond a focus on race by the end of his life. He understood that racism was entwined with war and poverty and that the three of them had to be fought together. His coming-out moment was the speech he delivered at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination. This speech and the circumstances surrounding it were the subject of a two-part program by Tavis Smiley, which was one of the more striking pieces of television journalism that I have seen in recent years, and one of the few observances of King to have seriously addressed his unfinished legacy.

By 1967, opposition to the Vietnam War was widespread, although few public figures had yet embraced it. King had found a critical ally in Lyndon Johnson, who singlehandedly forced through Congress the most significant civil rights legislation since Reconstruction while undertaking a War on Poverty that would, within a decade, cut the national poverty rate in half. King understood that his wagon was hitched to Johnson’s star, and Johnson needed King to help offset the desertion of Southern white voters and the deep national frustration with the war. King himself had grown increasingly marginalized in the black community, as more strident voices clamored for black self-empowerment and even a separate republic. Both men were politically weakened, and each needed the other more than ever.

When push comes to shove

For King to break publicly with Johnson over Vietnam was therefore an extraordinarily difficult decision. His closest advisers were against it. He himself knew that it would be, at least in the short run, a serious blow to his cause and perhaps a fatal one to his leadership. Nor, he decided, could he frame opposition to the war in racial terms, even though he was well aware that black soldiers made up a significant part of the forces fighting it. The war had clear class and race implications, but was itself only symptomatic of America’s habitual resort to violence as a means of imposing its will on the world. This cut to the core of King’s personal commitment to nonviolence. It was not a political choice he had to make, but a moral one. He could no longer march in step with the man who had unleashed the war, nor could he maintain a prudent silence. History would no doubt have forgiven him had he done so. But he would not have forgiven himself.

Unlike many of King’s public addresses, the Riverside speech was largely unfilmed, although we have the recording of it. As Smiley played it back for us, along with commentary from Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Taylor Branch, and others, it showed a King uncharacteristically somber. The deep voice and the rolling cadence are there, but it never changes pitch or seeks to evoke an emotional response. It is not a preacher’s voice or tone. Nor is it a lecturer’s. It is the voice of a man searching his conscience and compelled to deliver it.

King wrote all his major speeches except this one, which was drafted and vetted by staff members under his supervision. However, it clearly reflects his style as well as his views. And it pulled no punches. That King had been deeply troubled by the war was no secret by this time. But the Riverside speech was an open break with Johnson. It did King no good in the African-American community either. For conservative civil rights leaders, it repudiated years of cultivating white establishment liberals that left the movement not only without a strategy for moving forward but also without the means of dealing with black-power militants. For those militants themselves, it was an irrelevant distraction from the liberation struggle at home. For King personally, it was deeply isolating. If the speech seemed to divide African-Americans, it was not particularly welcomed among antiwar activists, who were almost exclusively white. Less than four years after the Washington Mall speech, Martin Luther King seemed to be yesterday’s man.

But King of course was prophetic, and what he said at the Riverside Church — that America was losing its soul — is timelier today than ever. One line in it strikes home particularly: “We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for [our soldiers] must know. . .that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved [in Vietnam].” With Al-Qaeda’s flag flying above the city of Fallujah, the site of our bloodiest battle in Iraq, marine veterans are now asking the same question their predecessors of nearly half a century ago did: What did we fight and die for? Then as now, there is no one to answer them.