The struggle against racism and colonialism and the movement to abolish nuclear weapons have always been united.
Many of the leaders of the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, including Coretta and Martin King, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, actively participated in the global movement to “Ban the Bomb,” abolish atomic and nuclear weapons, and prohibit all nuclear testing. These leaders for racial justice in the United States joined Erich Fromm, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, Paul Tillich, and many other prominent intellectuals and faith leaders to form the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) as an organizing platform for coordinated nonviolent action to achieve nuclear disarmament.
For these leaders, the struggle to protect Black lives in the United States, the global struggle against colonialism, and the movement to abolish nuclear weapons were mutually reinforcing elements of an uncompromising political commitment to nonviolence and equality at home and abroad. Fighting against racism and fighting for nuclear disarmament went hand in hand; as James Baldwin emphasized at a 1961 protest against nuclear weapons, “racial hatred and the atom bomb both threaten the destruction of man as created free by God.” Asked to explain his participation in the protest rally, Baldwin explained:
“What am I doing here? Only those who would fail to see the relationship between the fight for civil rights and the struggle for world peace would be surprised to see me. Both fights are the same. It is just as difficult for the white American to think of peace as it is of no color… Confrontation of both dilemmas demands inner courage.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasized the same linkages repeatedly in sermons, speeches and interviews.
In December 1957, Dr. King was asked directly: “Do you believe that the development and use of nuclear weapons of war should be banned?” Here is his response:
I definitely feel that the development and use of nuclear weapons of war should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion. If so-called “dirty bombs” were used, large areas would be made uninhabitable for extended periods of time, and additional hundreds and millions of people would probably die from delayed effects of local fall-out radiation—some in the exposed population from direct radiation injury and some in succeeding generations as a result of genetic effects. Even countries not directly hit by bombs would suffer through global fallouts. All of this leads me to say that the principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war. War must be finally eliminated or the whole of mankind will be plunged into the abyss of annihilation.
In a 1959 address to the War Resisters League, Dr. King explained why his call for nuclear weapons abolition internationally was inextricably linked to his call for racial justice in America.
Not only in the South, but throughout the nation and the world, we live in an age of conflict, an age of biological weapons, chemical warfare, atomic fallout and nuclear bombs. It is a period of conflict between the mammoth powers. It is an age of conformity. It is a period of uncertainty and fear. Every man, woman and child lives, not knowing if they shall see tomorrow’s sunrise.
We are in a period when men who understand the dimensions of our tragic state must be heard. We must stand up and accept the consequences of our convictions. First of all, we must resist war. With all our energy we must find our alternative to violence as a means to deal with the terrible conflicts that beset us…
We must no longer cooperate with policies that degrade man and make for war. The great need in the world today is to find the means for the social organization of the power of non-violence. In this connection, I salute the War Resisters League, which for 36 years [has] courageously carried on the fight against war. I applaud its members, many of whom chose prison rather than break their faith in the power of love. [Some] chose to be ostracized rather than engage in the brutalization of their fellow man.
As you know, the establishment of social justice in our nation is of profound concern to me. This great struggle is in the interest of all Americans and I shall not be turned from it. Yet no sane person can afford to work for social justice within the nation unless he simultaneously resists war and clearly declares himself for non-violence in international relations. What will be the ultimate value of having established social justice in a context where all people, Negro and White, are merely free to face destruction by strontium 90 or atomic war?
… In a day when Sputniks and Explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. The colored peoples may be God’s appeal to this age—an age drifting rapidly to its doom. The eternal appeal takes the form of a warning: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
Fourteen years after Dr. King’s assassination, as a leading speaker in a major New York demonstration calling for a Nuclear Freeze in the US-Soviet arms race, Coretta Scott King emphasized that economic justice cannot be realized in the United States when investments in military arsenals overwhelm investments in human welfare, security and development, nor in a world threatened by nuclear annihilation.
Today, more than a half-century after Dr. King’s assassination, and 75 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Coretta King’s words resonate with truth and power.
