Last year the peace movement joined in San Antonio's annual Martin Luther King Jr. March — banners, signs, drums, chants.

I made several hundred signs myself, using King's own words: "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."

"We must either learn to live together as brothers, or we are all going to perish together as fools."

"... say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace ..."

The day after the march I had a couple of phone calls from people who felt the peace movement was trying to co-opt the march. One man told me, "Dr. King had nothing to do with peace. He was about civil rights, voting rights. You didn't belong there."

But we did. By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War.

He first spoke about war in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

He said, "We must find an alternative to war. ... A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and spiritual disillusionment. ... If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno."

He began to speak out specifically against the war in Vietnam in 1965, but his watershed speech was given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated. Some sources call this speech "Beyond Vietnam"; others call it "A Time to Break Silence."

He said, "A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

It was in this speech that King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

In this speech, it is clear his own people were criticizing him for becoming entangled in the quagmire of Vietnam. He first cited his Nobel Prize, which he said was "a commission to work harder for the brotherhood of man."

He then turned to his faith: "The relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war."

In his "Christmas Sermon on Peace," delivered Dec. 24, 1967, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, he said: "Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather that sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

"No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world.

"Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools."

It would be presumptuous to extrapolate King's remarks to this current conflict. It would be equally presumptuous to dismiss his anti-war writings as mere footnotes. His testimony was profound and just as relevant today as it was in 1967.

On Monday, then, I will once again be marching with my brothers and sisters for justice, for equality, for voting rights — call me a drum major for peace.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.