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On Tuesday April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a powerful attack on America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. Speaking from New York City’s historic Riverside Church, the nation’s most prominent civil rights leader condemned the Vietnam War for undermining the war on poverty and for disproportionately taking African Americans to die in Vietnam for freedoms that they did not yet enjoy at home. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) president lambasted the American government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and called upon the Johnson administration to take the initiative in ending the war by halting the bombing and negotiating with the NLF. King argued that the Vietnam War was, in essence, a civil war and that America was betraying her own revolutionary heritage by pursuing a reactionary foreign policy. Asserting that the war was “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” King stated 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. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘personoriented ’ society.”1 Although King had spoken out against the war as early as March 1965, he had tempered his criticisms and been unwilling to break completely with the Johnson Administration.2 But by the spring of 1967, with the war abroad escalating while the domestic war on poverty was being cut back, King felt that he could no longer remain silent. Although King was pleased with his speech, the response to it was far from favorable. Unsurprisingly, the federal government reacted badly. Presidential aide John Roche told Lyndon Johnson that King had “thrown in with the commies.”3 Opinion polls indicated that around 50 percent of African Americans disagreed with King’s antiwar stance, and the SCLC leader was attacked in the pages of many of the nation’s newspapers.4 Chapter 3 Black Moderates Johnson needs a consensus . . . if we are not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on civil rights. —Whitney M. Young, Jr., 1966 The New York Times censured King for trying to combine the peace and civil rights movements, while Life magazine called his speech “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi” and accused him of betraying the civil rights cause.5 Criticism also came from the “moderate” wing of the civil rights movement . Although consisting of numerous groups and leaders, at its center stood the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). America’s largest and oldest civil rights organization had grown increasingly conservative in the years following the Second World War. During the 1940s and 1950s the Association had attempted to dissociate itself from more radical civil rights groups such as CORE, and it had accepted the domestic and foreign tenets of anticommunism. Although the NAACP supported many of the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, frequently supplying bail money and legal help, it remained lukewarm to the tactics of protest. Robert Cook, for example, has argued that the Association “failed to embrace wholeheartedly the concept of nonviolent direct action.”6 The organization preferred to concentrate its efforts in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to win support for progressive legislation by lobbying congressmen, and by using litigation to strike down segregation laws.7 The NAACP’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, was a prominent civil rights moderate. After an early career in journalism, Wilkins had been appointed assistant secretary of the NAACP in 1931. Three years later he replaced W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of the Crisis, the Association’s magazine , before succeeding Walter White as head of the organization in 1955. According to Robert Cook, Wilkins was “temperamentally unprepared ” to commit the Association to a strategy of civil disobedience and protest. He was also equivocal about the efforts of groups like SNCC to build a civil rights movement from the bottom up by fostering indigenous black leadership and empowering local African Americans.8 The moderate wing also included the National Urban League (NUL) and its leader, Whitney M. Young, Jr. Young, a native of Kentucky and former dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University, was appointed executive director of the Urban League in 1960. Six feet two inches tall and weighing around two hundred pounds, he cut an imposing Wgure. Young’s biographer, Nancy J. Weiss, has written...

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