October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suggests dividing Nobel Peace Prize laureates into groups—“those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. . . . those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made . . . future wars less likely . . . [and] those, such as the Society of Friends, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Eli Weisel, who opposed war (or violent means to obtain domestic political goals) or particular aspects of war and who were given the prize for their eloquence or symbolic value in the cause of peace.” Finally, Mr. Gordon writes, there are the “political peace prizes.” The problem with this scheme is that Martin Luther King said virtually nothing about the related topics of war and peace at the time he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He did not deliver his first public address against the Vietnam War until 1965, when he told a group at Howard University that the conflict was “accomplishing nothing.” Several weeks later he called on the U.S. government to negotiate with the National Liberation Front and endorsed a halt to the bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets. Under intense pressure from allies in the civil rights movement who feared the consequences of antagonizing Lyndon Johnson’s presidential administration, King said little else about Vietnam until two years later, when he delivered a strong and controversial antiwar speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. The decision to award him the Nobel Prize in 1964 thus had little to do with his opposition to war or his espousal of peace, per se, but instead indicated approval of his embrace of nonviolent means to right injustice at home. Mr. Gordon’s categorization hints at this possibility, but some clarification seems helpful.
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