martin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcriptmartin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcript

Paul A. Schuette, King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall, Washington Post, 3 March 1965. But two, to the audio, there are only less than 10 minutes of this speech that got covered. And number two, at what cost? Copyright 2010 NPR. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. Thanks, as always for your time. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. And King gives a great speech out of that hospital called "If I Had Sneezed." Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemys point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam. 0000023610 00000 n In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in . MLK Opposed "Poverty, Racism & Militarism" in Speech One Year Before 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. We're talking with Tavis Smiley. Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his first major public address on the war in Vietnam at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. "[23], King also stated in "Beyond Vietnam" that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. Martin Luther King's Speech Against the Vietnam War by David Bromwich May 16, 2008 O ne of the greatest speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," was delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, on April 4, 1967. I've always argue that Dr. King is the greatest American we've ever produced. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Arent you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within ones own bosom and in the surrounding world. Procrastination is still the thief of time. It was a wonderful, I think, place to give the speech in the sense that it's pretty cavernous. We have destroyed their land and their crops. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.. 1967 speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - Zinn Education Project What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Dr. 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. When the Rev. It's a powerful refrain, Neal, about what would've happened in his life, what he would've missed if he had sneezed at that very moment. King, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, in A Knock at Midnight, ed. Martin Luther King Jr. was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War for years, but the "Beyond Vietnam" speech was his first major policy statement on the issue. PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley's new documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience explores King's speech. Before he was assassinated at age 39, the Rev. The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. 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. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence . These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. So 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. These too are our brothers. No, Howard, I thank you for your phone call. Martin Luther King April 4, 1967 Riverside Church, New York City . Let's get Howard(ph) on the line. (1967) Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" MLK: Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence - YouTube This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nations self-defined goals and positions. And that's the issue that King was raising. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence - Wikipedia I've always thought that was, to me, his best speech, his most consequential speech, even better than I have a dream in the mountain top speech. 0000001616 00000 n Beyond Vietnam2 in that . The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the Anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." 159. ) fuG {*pZ//e,QTx)%TuS%@^2j/?Nf7nx!]OvqJG=_oD3?VUMs+tM95X )G~1b'g])!`]:|OwHh-J6ZHg{Z9N3b!\#9"zhT\]sp2WtTal =YvkO8yu 6^,n,v$+u$|^1wUF}GGc=p!e#F\]xx6l~NTYSmc /ut^*WTPO Cp =-FQW.]y#F6NsQ2Qzqz=|v94+JC?w4,|yi4T0eIaaeD2-Y1 King delivered a speech entitled Beyond Vietnam, pointing out that the war effort was taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem (King, Beyond Vietnam, 143). Robert B. Semple, Jr., Dr. [27] Thich Nhat Hanh, who publicly held a news conference in Chicago with King in 1966, was acknowledged for urging King to oppose the Vietnam War. How are you, sir? There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. So, that's all I had to say. 0000009985 00000 n Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Manhattan's Riverside Church, April 4, 1967 . Appreciate it. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real changeespecially in terms of their need for land and peace. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his first major public address on the war in Vietnam at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. "[9], King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. By the time King made the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, Smiley tells host Neal Conan, "he had fallen off already the list of most-admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year." They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poorboth black . It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. His wife, Coretta Scott King, took a more active role in opposing the war, speaking at a rally at the Washington Monument on 27 November 1965 with Benjamin Spock, the renowned pediatrician and anti-war activist, and joined in other demonstrations. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. The Washington Post says he has done a discredit to himself, to his people, to his country. He passed the Civil Rights Act. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam Speech is in many ways even more relevant today than in 1967. . I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. (1997). 4. So this was a huge, huge speech that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever said or done. But Carson makes a powerful point in the special that you just identified, about whether or not Martin King himself would be welcome in some of these mega-churches, at certain political gatherings. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. They must see Americans as strange liberators. So you got a Nobel laureate named King, a war president with a Nobel Prize named Obama, for all that we have done over the last two years to wed King and Obama together on T- shirts and everywhere else, were King alive today at 81, he and Obama would have a tension point, Neal, on this issue. But anyway, where he says, I am mindful of those who spoke at this podium, this spot before me, including Martin Luther King and that I stand on his shoulders as a champion of civil rights. Screenshots are considered by the King Estate a violation of this notice. If you remember the speech, tell us what it meant at that time, and does the principle of nonviolence apply in the age of al-Qaida? This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. In so many words, powerful interests told him: "Mind your own business.". But I'm hoping that people will get a chance, once they see the speech, they'll be moved to go read the speech and to make comparisons, Neal. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. Grossfield, Stan. Martin Luther King's Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, 10 December 1964 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: CONAN: Indeed. Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. [citation needed]. "[14] You can also join the conversation at our Web site. Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. So practically everybody in his inner circle was against him giving it - one, because they knew the kind of pushback he was going to get. between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. Although the peace community lauded Kings willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. 0000002004 00000 n Read The Full Text And Listen To Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" Speech. Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators our chosen man, Premier Diem. But LBJ disinvites him to the White House. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. We must stop now. Check your local listings. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. 0000009147 00000 n 0000004855 00000 n 0000007566 00000 n The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done. 5 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s most memorable speeches capitalism, and the Vietnam War. Please c, ontact Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. at. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. [6] At the urging of people such as SCLC's former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, and inspired by the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali,[7] King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public.

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