King at Riverside: The Speech That Cost Him the Liberal Establishment

April fourth, nineteen sixty-seven. Exactly one year before he was shot. Martin Luther King Junior stood at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City and delivered a speech that most of his allies had begged him not to give. He gave it anyway.

The speech was called Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In it, King declared the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. He said the Vietnam War was destroying the Great Society from the inside, consuming the money and the political capital that should have gone to the Poor People's Campaign he was building. He said the men in the Johnson administration who were sending young Black men to die in Southeast Asia for rights they were still fighting for at home were conducting a cruel manipulation of the poor. He said the government of the United States, not the Viet Cong, was the primary obstacle to peace.

The response from the institutions that had supported him was swift and nearly unanimous. The New York Times editorial board condemned the speech, saying he had done a disservice to both the civil rights movement and the peace movement by mixing the two. The Washington Post said he was diminishing his leadership by venturing outside his area of competence. Life magazine called the speech a demagogic slander. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution distancing itself from the antiwar position. His approval ratings in public polling dropped sharply.

King had calculated that the liberal coalition could not be sustained by people who wanted civil rights legislation but also wanted the war. He was willing to say it out loud, in public, on a Tuesday night in New York, a year before the moment that ended his life. The year between Riverside and Memphis was the most politically isolated period of his public career. He had lost the liberal establishment without gaining a new constituency in its place, and he kept working anyway.