Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Riverside Speech and Cold War Civil Rights

Abstract

This article examines Martin Luther King, Jr.'s controversial Riverside Speech where he denounced the Vietnam War. Although King's biographers and other scholars have written about the Riverside speech, they have not analyzed King's Riverside speech through the prism of Cold War Civil Rights. This examination of King's Riverside speech remedies this omission by explaining why King waited so long to speak out against the war, and why civil rights activists as late as 1967 were still wary about criticizing American Cold War foreign policy because of the legacy of the Red Scare. While the Cold War helped spur civil rights advances, this article demonstrates that the civil rights movement was a casualty of the Vietnam War.