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Martin Luther King’s “Declaration of Independence From The War in Vietnam”, and the SNCC’s “Position Paper on Vietnam”

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Martin Luther King’s “Declaration of Independence From The War in Vietnam”, and the SNCC’s “Position Paper on Vietnam”
“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and other, have been waging in America.”1 In the late 1960’s, both Martin Luther King and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating committee shared the same disapproval for the war waging in Vietnam. Martin Luther King’s “Declaration of Independence From The War in Vietnam”, and the SNCC’s “Position Paper on Vietnam”, found firm disapproval for the war by illuminating and drawing from their civil rights background. Martin Luther King begins by harkening back to his civil rights roots to proclaim his disapproval. He notes that it was the vision of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to not “limit (their) vision to certain rights for black people”1, but for world where their descendants and all of America was free. However he believed that Vietnam was taking this away from America and that it was “detroy(ing) the deepest hopes of men (around) the world…”1 King was asking this basic question: How can we ever attain internal freedom if we are oppressing and murdering millions? King also marks the ironic history leading up to the war, detailing the United States’ support of French recolonization in Vietnam as well as this shocking statement: “What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.”1 King’s adamant disapproval is equally paralleled with that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “The murder of Samuel Young in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law.”2 Both King and the Committee agree that the US’s involvement in Vietnam is entirely misleading and ironic to the core. Freedom abroad can never be achieved if we cannot ensure freedom internally. “We maintain that our country’s cry of
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