In 1967, several prominent antiwar activists urged MLK to run for president with Dr. Spock as his VP.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. never sought public office or held an allegiance to any of the major political parties. “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic Party,” he said in a 1958 interview. “They both have their weaknesses. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.”
Yet in 1967 with both the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in full swing, King briefly considered launching a presidential campaign on a third-party ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock, the noted pediatrician and the author of the bestseller Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare. Spock had risen to fame in the 1940s with his guidance on raising children, but by the 1960s, he was one of the leading antiwar demonstrators in the country. After seeing Ramparts magazine photos of Vietnam children sprayed with napalm by U.S. military forces, King came to a reckoning about the war. “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands of little children in Vietnam,” he said. This new awareness brought King closer to Spock and the antiwar movement and on the precipice of electoral politics.
K On April 4, 1967 before 3,000 people at New York’s Riverside Church, King gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, where he called for the U.S. government to take immediate steps to end the Vietnam War. “If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam,” he said. I
King would later say that he had “no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry” and that he “didn’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher.” It was this Baptist preacher who yielded a measure of political and moral authority that made his role outside of partisan politics a key element of his gift as a leader. One year to the date of his Riverside speech, Dr. King was killed outside of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by a white supremacist named James Earl Ray.