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"Declaration of Independence from the
War in Vietnam"
(April 1967)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

*From Ramparts (May 1967), pp. 33-37. This is the authorized form of the
original address, slightly condensed for publication by Dr. King.

OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I 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. Aren't you hurting the cause of
your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am
nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my
commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they
live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church_the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I
began my pastorage_ leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech 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. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front
paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While
they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and
history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take
on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who,
with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both
continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing
Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile
connection between the war in Vietnam and the st ruggle 1, 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. Then came the build- up in Viet
nam, 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 Vietnam con tinued 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. It was sending their sons and their
brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in ext raordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the
population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them
8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest G eorgia
and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the 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 schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize
that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel
manipulation of the poor.

My third reason 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 woul d 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. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own
nation wasn't us ing 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 having first spoken clearl y to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today_my own government.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from
the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were
convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the
conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendant s of its slaves
were loosed from the shackles they still wear.

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of
America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the
autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be s aved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the
world over.

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 Prize for Peace was also
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 o f 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 or all
men_for commu nist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and
conservative? Have they forgotten that my minstry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so
fully that He died for hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful
minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I
speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ~nta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have
been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is
clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and
their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in
1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China.
Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Inde pendence in their own document of freedom,
we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former
colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again
fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a
government i: that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but
by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, thi s new government
meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years
we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We
encouraged them with our huge financial and military s upplies to continue the war even after they had
lost the will to do so.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through
the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify
the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watc hed again as we supported one of the most vicious
modern dictators_our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly
routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunificatio n
with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by
increasing numbers of U.S. 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.

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. All the while, the people read our
leaflets and received regular promises of peace and demo cracy_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 ra rely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.


They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the
bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from
American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of
them_mostly children.


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 medic ine and new tortures in the concentration camps of
Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?


Now there is little left to build on_save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will
be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets."
The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we
blame them for such thoughts'? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These
too are our brothers.


Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as
our enemies. What of the NLF_that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must
they think of us in America when they realize th at we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem
which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our
integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more ess ential to
the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of
Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist
and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in
which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of
free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the m ilitary junta. And they are surely
right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them_the only party in real
touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement
from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence_when it helps us to see the enemy's
point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may
indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and
profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the
waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation
to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French
commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It
was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, a nd then were
persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and
17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have
surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power ov er a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed
again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear
that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to
have been the initial military breach of the Genev a Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they
remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces
had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese
overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho
Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and bu ilt up its forces, and now he has surely
heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his
sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of
aggre ssion as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.

At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam
and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our
own troops there as anything else. For it occu rs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is
not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to
destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period
there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know
that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely
realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of
Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death
and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world , for the world as it stands aghast at the path
we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is
ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those
of humanitarian instinct. The Americans a re forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is
curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize
that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will
never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and
militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable
intentions in Vietnam. It' will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American
colony, and men will not refrain from thinkin g that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that
we may bomb her nuclear installations.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we
admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been
detrimental to the life of her people.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a
halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the
long and difficult process of extricatin g ourselves from this nightmare:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military
build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam
and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954
Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese
who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations
we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this
country if necessary.

Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to
disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by
seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in
Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this
is the path now being chosen by more than 70 studen ts at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and
I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover,
I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as
conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his
convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some
circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I
wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far
deeper malady within th e American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves
organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and
attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound c hange in American life and policy.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the
wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of
suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. mi litary "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to
maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American
forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colomb ia and
why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such
activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those
who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice
or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken_ by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures
that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am 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. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered
more important than people, the giant triple ts of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and
present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and
superficial. It comes to see that an edifice wh ich produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true
revolution of values will soon look easily 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 difference s 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 battlef ields
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 deat h.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of
values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that
the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from
molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer.
Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those
who shout war and through their misguided passio ns urge the United States to relinquish its participation
in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We
must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the Uni
ted Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these
turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for
democracy, realizing that our greatest defense aga inst communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of
justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice
which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and
oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the lan d are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of
comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just 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 the 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 hos tility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and
justice throughout the developing world_a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall
surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corrido rs of time reserved for those who possess
power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter_but beautiful_struggle for a new
world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell th em the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of
American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of co mmitment to their cause,
whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this
crucial moment of human history.

Source: American Civil Rights Review's Document Archive