Martin Luther King, Jr. & Vietnam
In honor of MLK Day on Monday, January 15, 2024
Some years ago, I was visiting the CIA with my daughter and was caught unawares by a flood.
Note: Despite my origins as the daughter of a Central Intelligence Agency official, this particular “CIA” was actually the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.
Oddly enough, what I remember from the day was not anything to do with cooking or classes, but standing in the bookshop with a flood of tears rolling down my cheeks.
Is it embarrassing, then, to admit that I do not recall what I read? Only that it was by Dr. King?
It is possible that it was his April 4, 1967 speech on the Vietnam War. I had not yet answered the call to write about Vietnam, but perhaps the whispers were getting stronger even then.
Yesterday, I was in the local high school library covering the resource desk and I had a few quiet moments, so I pulled a collection of their Vietnam books off the nonfiction shelf.
I was more than a little startled when two of the books highlighted King on their opening pages.
The Foreward of Great Speeches in History, The Vietnam War begins with a quote from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Perhaps no speech in American history resonates as deeply as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream,” delivered in 1963 before a rapt audience of 250,000 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Decades later, the speech still enthralls those who read or hear it, and stands as a philosophical guidepost for contemporary discourse on racism.
The book contains the full text of his April 4, 1967 speech, “The Vietnam War is a Symptom of an American Spiritual Malady.”
In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies, he quotes that very speech in his prologue. (Nguyen is the author of the 2015 Pulitzer-prize winner, The Sympathizer.)
. . . the most succinct explanation that I have found about the meaning of the war, at least for Americans, comes from Martin Luther King Jr. “If America's soul becomes totally poisoned,” he said, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’ . . . [it] is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”
I am quite awed at the happenstance of coming across those quotes just days before the national holiday on Monday.
Like many things in my Vietnam project, the coincidence seem both propitious and fated to encourage me.
I hope they fill you with wonder as well.
I wish you a very happy—and thoughtful—Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday.
Oh dearest you. Propitious indeed. Onward.