Vincent Harding Dies: Advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., Wrote Anti-American Speech Attacking the Vietnam War

At the Los Angeles Times, "Vincent Harding dies at 82; historian wrote controversial King speech":

Exactly a year before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, he delivered a speech that alienated ordinarily sympathetic politicians, liberal commentators and even some of his fellow leaders in the civil rights movement.

In a blistering address at Riverside Church in New York City, King denounced the Vietnam War, likened U.S. bombings to Nazi atrocities, and called for unilateral withdrawal. The problems eroding America, he said, were "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism," and as a Christian, he had to "speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation."

King advisor Vincent G. Harding, a historian and lay minister who wrote what is said to be the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's most controversial address, died Monday in a Philadelphia hospital from the effects of a heart aneurysm, according to the University of Denver's Iliff School of Theology, where Harding taught for many years. He was 82.

Years after King's April 4, 1967, speech, Harding recalled its explosive reverberations. Other black leaders, he said, were concerned about offending President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had pushed through landmark advances in civil rights.

"All the keepers of the conventional wisdom, especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post, simply vilified and condemned Martin," he said in a 2007 interview with Sojourners magazine. "They spoke about the fact that he had done ill service, not only to his country, but to 'his people'."

The Riverside speech — known as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" — was pilloried by 168 newspapers, said commentator Tavis Smiley, who produced an hourlong PBS special on it in 2010.

It "led to the demonization of King," Smiley told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that year. "The speech caused black leaders to turn against him. It got him disinvited by LBJ to the White House. He couldn't get a book deal. It's fascinating, given the adulation and adoration we have for MLK today." ...

In 1965, Harding, then chair of the history and sociology department at Atlanta's Spelman College, wrote an open letter about Vietnam to King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"I raised the question as to whether or not we could, in conscience, keep still about what was going on in Vietnam," Harding recalled in 2007, describing the war's origin as an "anti-colonial struggle."

King and other black leaders wrestled with the question for two years.

"Down deep within all of it," Harding said, "was America's racist attitude, which essentially said, 'It's all right, King, for you to talk about colored things but, when it comes to foreign policies, that's our business. We really don't want to hear anything from you about it because that's our business."

More.

Shoot, Noam Chomsky would have had nothing on MLK's anti-Americanism. Indeed, Life Magazine denounced King at the time, calling the Riverside speech "a demogogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."

Frankly, I never liked MLK's views on Vietnam, and the record here tarnishes an otherwise noble legacy on civil rights. Clearly, those who then attacked MLK as a tool of global Communism were on firm ground when they referenced Dr. King's bankrupt anti-Americanism on Vietnam.

At the video, Vincent Harding is interviewed by Tavis Smiley, and notice how the far-left '60s radicalism bleeds through. These are the kind of people who have destroyed the moral firmament of America. They have created a cut-and-run ideology in which America is always questioning the rightness of its cause. Tavis Smiley himself has compared Vietnam to Afghanistan, a move besmirching American national security policy and the war on terror as a "racist imperialist paradigm." In short, what people thought was the extreme radicalism of MLK in the 1960s has become the mainstream of the Democrat Party left today. It's a shame that we're not honest enough as a nation to recognize the roots of treasonous national destruction in the coterie of advisers, speechmakers and friends who influenced the 20th century's greatest leader on civil rights.