Martin Luther King’s Revolution
50 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr defied his advisers and declared his opposition to the Vietnam War. Liberal supporters immediately abandoned him.
jacobin.com
I happened on the MLK "Beyond Vietnam Speech" this morning and was reading that the day after his speech, April 5, 1967, ~168 newspapers condemned him and the speech. LBJ has some very choice words as well. As I continue to watch the national media influence the personal opinions and politics of so many it struck me as ironic that a man the liberal newspapers now lionize was treated so poorly back then.
From SocialistWorkers.org website-
"What is that goddam ****** preacher doing to me?" President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
From the Jacobian (linked site)-
The day after the Riverside speech, an estimated 168 newspapers attacked King.
"The Washington Post called the Riverside speech a “grave injury” to the civil rights movement: “[King] has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” The New York Times called it a “wasteful and self-defeating” foray into foreign policy, “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate,” which did a “disservice” to both.
Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report all came out against King. Time ran an article called “Confusing the Cause” that called King a “drawling bumpkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.”
Apart from SNCC, the major civil rights leaders and organizations refused to stand by King. The organization he founded a decade before, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, issued a statement disassociating itself from King’s remarks. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP said that “civil rights groups do not have enough information on Vietnam, or on foreign policy, to make it their cause.”
In May, King compared himself to socialist leader Eugene Debs who went to prison for opposing World War I. Depressed and attacked from all sides, he cried frequently."
Unfortunately my google search skills haven't stumbled on a website that lists all 168 papers that condemned him but would be interesting to see the names. My contention is that if the media held all people to the same standard this country would be infinitely better.
