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| Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on the parable of the Good Samaritan numerous
times in his career (the most famous being “I See the Promised Land,” which
King preached on April 3, 1968, the last night of his life). The parable plays
a major role in one of King’s most significant sermons, “A Time to Break
Silence,” an address at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967,
exactly one year to the day King would be assassinated.
In this sermon, King very publicly opposes the Vietnam War
and links his opposition directly to the Civil Rights movement. He had stated
his opposition to the war on several previous occasions, but this sermon was a
keynote address for the national conference of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned
about Vietnam. Opposing the war meant opposing President Johnson (who was
escalating the war), with whom King had worked to pass the civil rights and
voting rights bills, and who had announced the War on Poverty. King thought,
however, that the War on Poverty had shown great promise for helping reduce
poverty but then the profligate spending on the Vietnam War eviscerated those
poverty programs. The war against the people of Vietnam had thus also become a
war against the poor in the United States. In addition, the Vietnam War was
being fought by an extraordinarily disproportional number of black young men
“to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest
Georgia and East Harlem” (King 2015: 203-204).
King could not keep silent in the face of “such cruel
manipulation of the poor,” but there was one other concern that led him to
speak out passionately against the war. For years he had preached that social
change should be achieved through nonviolent social action, but now the United
States government was using massive violence to bring about change in Vietnam.
King realizes:
. . . I knew that I could never
again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today—my own government (204).
That line—that the United States was “the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today”—was a shocking pronouncement for the majority
of Americans who saw themselves as the pre-eminent force for good in the
world.
Instead, King laments, the United States commits numerous
atrocities against the Vietnamese people: supporting the vicious dictator,
Premier Diem; helping to crush the unified Buddhist church; moving people into
concentration camps; bombing them; poisoning their water; destroying a million
acres of their crops; and possibly killing a million people—primarily children
(207-208).
King speaks as a civil rights leader “to save the soul of
America.” He calls for an end to the war and also for reparations for the
damage the United States had done in Vietnam. Yet he also calls for a much
deeper change of heart: a radical revolution of values where the United States
shifts from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society, one
which conquers the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism
(214). Here King cites the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate true
compassion upon one’s “enemies”:
A true revolution
of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of
our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good
Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we
must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men
and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey
on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It
comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily 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 South 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 hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of
settling differences 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 battlefields 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 death (214-215).
King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam not only provoked
the wrath of President Johnson, it also brought vehement denunciations in the
media, including The New York Times
and The Washington Post, and, in 1967, King’s anti-war position was
extremely unpopular among U.S. citizens overall (Dyson 2000: 61).
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