“We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.  So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.” 

Dr. King unapologetically criticized what he saw as the "giant triplets" of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. Remembered today as one of the most influential civil rights icons in history, Dr. King's "poor people's campaign" and involvement in the antiwar movement have been largely forgotten in American public memory. But during the war, King spoke out forcefully against a nation that asked poor Americans to go to war against poor Vietnamese people while the struggle for civil rights, justice, and economic security continued in the US. 
 

“A few years ago … there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program … Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war … I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

In Vietnam, Black soldiers engaged in various forms of resistance to what many increasingly considered a "white man's war." As a consequence, Black soldiers were disproportionately punished, incarcerated in military jails and brigs, and often kicked out of the military without veterans' benefits.

Military prisons became sites of racial conflict and rebellion, and after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, violence engulfed the nation at home, and racial violence erupted in Vietnam. By 1971, the Army reported that it was in a state of "near collapse."

Arguably, the GI resistance movement and the coalition of antiwar and civil rights activists forced the Nixon administration and the Army to end the draft while still at war. The widespread unpopularity of the war compelled the administration to withdraw US troops from Vietnam.

But the lasting consequences of a discriminatory military justice system caused unforeseen problems for many Vietnam veterans, leading to disproportionate unemployment, readjustment difficulties, and incarceration rates among Vietnam veterans.