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UB’s history with Martin Luther King Jr.
Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo at the invitation of two UB graduate students. Photo: UB ARCHIVES
On Feb. 16, author and broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien will deliver UB’s 36th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Lecture in Buffalo’s Kleinhans Music Hall—45 years after King himself addressed an audience in Kleinhans at the invitation of the UB Graduate Student Association (GSA).
That address on Nov. 9, 1967, five months before his assassination, was titled “The Future of Integration” and was presented before an audience of about 2,100. King spoke extemporaneously that day, not only about the importance of education and voting to the black community and to the racial violence then raking the country, but to a topic of great importance to his UB sponsors: his opposition to the Vietnam War.
We celebrate King as a hero today, a secular saint. But there were 700 empty seats in Kleinhans that night, in part because his strong opposition to the war marked him as “radical” and “communist.” As a result, many in the community reviled him, whether they understood his position or not.
“A lot of Buffalo politicians, civic leaders and leading black Baptist ministers declined to attend the talk,” one observer says. “I don’t remember an outpouring of support from the black community or from UB, either. People objected to King’s position that America was more concerned with winning ‘an ill-considered and unjust war…than in winning the war against poverty at home.’”
In fact, King had publicly broken with the Johnson administration over its Vietnam policies in a now famous April 4 speech to an audience of clergy at New York City’s Riverside Church.
“I think the April 4 Riverside Church talk actually was his greatest speech,” says John Marciano, one of the two members of the GSA executive board who hosted King that day. Marciano was a founder of the UB chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the main icons of America’s New Left. Since 1965, Marciano had been a strong opponent of the war. In fact, he had marched with King in an anti-war demonstration in Washington.
Joe Nechasek, the second GSA board member involved in hosting King’s visit, recalls that while King gave many significant talks, the speech in Buffalo “wasn’t very powerful. It wasn’t a rousing, stand-up-and-cheer speech. I thought it was ordinary; less than what he had said before.”
“But King had an amazing ability to fit himself to the audience,” Nechasek says. “He could preach in a church, give a major Washington speech, argue with LBJ, come to Buffalo and speak to students. So regardless of the size of the audience or the low-key nature of the speech, it was a very exciting time for us.
“King had no handlers, no personal security,” he notes, “although I think every black police officer in town was there to protect him.
“One reason we invited him,” Nechasek says, “is because the core of the GSA were people who had grown up into an anti-war atmosphere and were well aware of King’s position on Vietnam, as well as on race, poverty and other significant social justice issues. We supported him completely.”
Marciano agrees that the 1967 King was a much more radical figure than he previously had been.
“His turn to the left,” Marciano points out, “caused him to be vilified by major publications—The New York Times, Newsweek—and by many national political leaders. We discussed this with him when he was here.
“I remember him as a quiet, thoughtful man who was gracious and patient,” he says. “We were so excited and peppered him with questions, and he answered all of them. He was a very impressive person.”
King’s anti-war stance was prescient. After the Tet Offensive, only two months later, opposition to the war would explode and the conflict eventually would be derailed largely because of the populist uprising against it. King was assassinated in April 1968, however, and would not live to see that.
Former Buffalo Common Council President George K. Arthur, who met with the civil rights leader that day, said recently that King’s anti- war position was persistent and consistent.
“If he were alive today,” Arthur said, “he would be saying, ‘Let’s get the hell out of Afghanistan.’”
Another message King delivered on Nov. 10 in Buffalo is “the ballot is one of the keys to the door of freedom” and that that those who have no vote are powerless. Black voters, he said, should use their vote to move their agenda forward and get out of their economic trap.
And, as Arthur says, “Today there are more blacks in key political positions across the country because of the ballot and Dr. King’s teachings.”
King also spoke in Buffalo in defense of non-violence. Eight race riots had occurred in the U.S. between 1964 and 1967, and 11 more erupted in the summer of 1967, including one in Buffalo. While condemning the violence, King vigorously attacked conditions that provoked it.
“Violent revolts grow out of revolting living conditions,” he said. “Violence is the language of the unheard.” Summer riots, he said, are caused by “winters of delay” and underscored the point that “Negroes did not create” slavery, slums or unemployment, and questioned whether the nation would ever defeat poverty or save its cities.
After King’s death came the deluge of civil rights court cases and physical battles—100 more race riots would erupt in mid-1968—as well as aggressive opposition to the war. King’s death heralded his apotheosis.
He received a 1972 Grammy Award (for his recorded speech “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam”), a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Margaret Sanger Award and hundreds of other honors. His boyhood home became a national historic site, thousands of civic monuments bear his name and Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday, celebrated on a date near his Jan. 15 birthday.
In 1976, UB became part of that process when it inaugurated the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Lecture with a talk by George Arthur. Speakers of national and international stature have followed: Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Wangari Maathai, Danny Glover and Felix Justice, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Harry Belafonte Jr., Johnnie Cochran Jr., Tavis Smiley, Sidney Poitier, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, rapper KRS-ONE, Cornel West and many more distinguished jurists, authors, social activists, scholars, musicians and actors, as well as two of King’s children, Rev. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III. And later this month, Soledad O'Brien.
John Marciano, now a professor emeritus at SUNY-Cortland, spent four decades as a prominent political activist, author, teacher and scholar in the antiwar/social justice movement.
Joe Nechasek, later a professor and dean of the College of Allied Health and Nursing at the University of Bridgeport, also has remained an advocate for social justice, although on a more personal scale.
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