Was Martin Luther King Jr Justified In The Vietnam War

Section One: Identification and Evaluation of Sources

The topic of this investigation is: To what extent was Martin Luther King Junior justified in his disapproval of the Vietnam War?

The first source that was critical to this investigation was “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr,” It contained All of the speeches and some other writing that were written by Martin Luther King Jr. who was arguably one of the most famous Civil Rights Leaders in the 60’s. His peaceful work against racial prejudice in the United States earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1964. He worked as Civil Rights Leader and humanitarian until he was assassinated on April 4th 1968. James Melvin Washington was the editor

Lucks. Lucks earned his PhD in history from The University of California, Berkley. This book was extremely useful in the beginning of this investigation to finding out the causes of tension between Civil Rights leaders and the War movement. It’s valuable because it was written specifically about the relationship between the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement and how one effected the other. It provides detail on how the Vietnam War over shadowed the Civil Rights movement in the second half of the 60’s until its conclusion in 1975 which created a great jumping off point for further research into specific details and the reaction of Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights community. A limitation of this book though was that it provided very little information on Martin Luther King’s reactions to events in the War and reasons as to why he may have had certain opinions which was the focus of this

Martin Luther King Junior in his speech at Riverside Baptist Church said “There is at the outset 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 as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were 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. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to 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 hopes of the poor at home."(King and Washington 21) Concerns about the cost of war taking away money for the cause were true. In the beginning the War on poverty seemed to be making an effort at making