martin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcript

complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children. Nearly five years after Kings assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other. 0000002247 00000 n Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today my own government. But they didn't stay for the speech in its entirety. Fearful of being labeled a Communist, which would diminish the impact of his civil rights work, King tempered his criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam through late 1965 and 1966. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr: A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War) M artin L uther K ing, J r. Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City [Photo Credit: John C. Goodwin] [AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio. Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), African American founding fathers of the United States, Statue of Martin Luther King Jr. (Pueblo, Colorado), Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, San Francisco. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? These are the times for real choices and not false ones. The speech and its echoes for Afghanistan and Iraq are the subject of "Tavis Smiley Reports MLK: A Call to Conscience.". "MLK: A Call to Conscience" premieres on PBS tomorrow night. 0000010534 00000 n King 's work to eradicate racial segregation was abruptly halted when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The message directly challenged the president who'd taken great political risks to support civil rights legislation and also challenged many of his colleagues in the movement who've called it a tactical mistake. Mr. SMILEY: Indeed, he did. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? 159. For those who ask the question, Arent you a civil rights leader? and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. That Vietnam was a mistake. [12] Later that year King framed the issue of war in Vietnam as a moral issue: As a minister of the gospel, he said, I consider war an evil. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. I've always argue that Dr. King is the greatest American we've ever produced. 0000002025 00000 n 0000011739 00000 n Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence - American Rhetoric 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 nations homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. Of course, the Nobel Peace Laureate, a man who clearly believed in nonviolence down to his very soul CONAN: but he'd wanted to give that speech two years earlier. n/a martin luther king jr. (born michael king january 15, 1929 april 1968) was an american baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in . But two, to the audio, there are only less than 10 minutes of this speech that got covered. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, San Jose, April 15, 1967 Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, John F. Kennedy's speech to the nation on Civil Rights, Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, Chicago Freedom Movement/Chicago open housing movement, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), "Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed On Freedom)", List of lynching victims in the United States, Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beyond_Vietnam:_A_Time_to_Break_Silence&oldid=1133369048, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 13 January 2023, at 12:35. Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV). He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. 0000003996 00000 n We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a controversial sermon opposing the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, then helped lead a large antiwar march from Central Park to the United Nations later that month. Tavis Smiley joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: To save the soul of America. We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. Twin towers were planned from Afghanistan. [24], King's stance on Vietnam encouraged Allard K. Lowenstein, William Sloane Coffin and Norman Thomas, with the support of anti-war Democrats, to attempt to persuade King to run against President Johnson in the 1968 United States presidential election. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. King, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, in A Knock at Midnight, ed. 0000047501 00000 n Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. He supported Johnsons calls for diplomatic negotiations and economic development as the beginnings of such a step. And his argument, basically, was that I cannot, as a practitioner and a true believer in nonviolence, espouse that nonviolent philosophy in our movement and then somehow sit idly by when I see violence being engaged around the world. Is it among these voiceless ones? Now let us begin. Mr. SMILEY: Well, I think the question is whether or not - I hear your point, Neal, and I take it. CONAN: And one thing that I was unaware of was the timing of the speech in that he had wanted to say something along these lines. Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam Speech is in many ways even more relevant today than in 1967. . Dr. 0000002784 00000 n Answering press questions after addressing a Howard University audience on 2 March 1965, King asserted that the war in Vietnam was accomplishing nothing and called for a negotiated settlement (Schuette, King Preaches on Non-Violence). Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Recently one of them wrote these words: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. dH(*b(jGB@'k1zTR~{dA9|\b. 0000013309 00000 n Email us: talk@npr.org. 0000040748 00000 n In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier: O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath America will be! I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. Less than two weeks after leading his first Vietnam demonstration, on 4 April 1967, King made his best known and most comprehensive statement against the war. King led his first anti-war march in Chicago on 25 March 1967, and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: The bombs in Vietnam explode at homethey destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America (Dr. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. I feel that Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali are two of the, you know, greatest Americans we've ever had. ", In 1967, a year to the day before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. departed from his message of civil rights to deliver a speech that denounced America's war in Vietnam. It includes a portion of his speech. PDF Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence - hawaii.edu And it was on that occasion that he - when he saw those pictures, said, I have to speak out about this. Mr. SMILEY: Indeed he did, Neal. There is.a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. Thanks, as always for your time. All rights reserved. The Story Of King's 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech : NPR A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. 0000002337 00000 n 3. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? Legendary civil rights leader Rev. CONAN: Walt, thank you. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nations history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Dr. King in a March 25, 1967 antiwar march in Chicago. Hundreds of folks listened outside on loudspeakers. As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated: Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, Gods new Messiah, Offring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us not their fellow Vietnamese the real enemy. And secondly, so many civil rights leaders were opposed to him giving it because LBJ had been the best president to black people on civil rights. Robert B. Semple, Jr., Dr. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. Appreciate it. 0000012562 00000 n Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. "I've Been to the Mountaintop" is the popular name of the last speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. King spoke on April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry Belafonte led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions. [citation needed]. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. I guess the question now is whether or not Afghanistan is a war of necessity or a war of choice. He would no longer be respected. "[10], King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms. Martin Luther King, who was already beginning to lose some of his influence, nevertheless made a huge challenge to the establishment. Shall we say the odds are too great? 800-989-8255. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. Smiley spoke with both scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel. And let's see if we can get another caller on the line. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Martin Luther King Jr. held his acceptance speech in the auditorium of the University of Oslo on 10 December 1964. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. AFP/AFP/Getty Images Mr. SMILEY: It's a powerful point made by Clayborne Carson at Stanford who is in charge, as you know, Neal, of the King papers.

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