Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 speech in New York. (1947) Moranda Smith Addresses The Congress Of Industrial Organizations Annual Convention, Boston, (1974) Congresswoman Barbara Jordans Statement: The Richard Nixon Impeachment Hearings, African American History: Research Guides & Websites, Global African History: Research Guides & Websites, African American Scientists and Technicians of the Manhattan Project, Envoys, Diplomatic Ministers, & Ambassadors, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html, Foundation, Organization, and Corporate Supporters. CONAN: We're talking with Tavis Smiley about his PBS special, "Tavis Smiley Reports MLK: A Call to Conscience." We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. 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. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. And Tavis, nice to have you back in the program. King Leads Chicago Peace Rally, New York Times, 26 March 1967. But for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both. 0000006515 00000 n If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet tis truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above his own. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. One of his great advisers and great admirers, Stanley Levison, who was always with Dr. King in his corner, was against Martin giving this speech. PBS talk show. 0000002964 00000 n Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. ml.K-x1x*tcSO p[ endstream endobj 62 0 obj 720 endobj 63 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 62 0 R >> stream King, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, in A Knock at Midnight, ed. 0000002605 00000 n So even McNamara eventually comes around to that point. 0000002516 00000 n 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. Check your local listings. Dr. Benjamin Spock (2nd-L), Martin Luther King, Jr. (C), Father Frederick Reed and Cleveland Robinson lead a huge pacifist rally protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, Mar. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. 2/QB(yQVz^*oU.FW But they asked and rightly so what about Vietnam? During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War. 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. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. During the last year of his life, King worked with Spock to develop Vietnam Summer, a volunteer project to increase grassroots peace activism in time for the 1968 elections. 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.. Copyright 2010 NPR. Watch a newsfilm clip of the speech . HOWARD: How are you doing, Tavis? And he said these three issues of racism and poverty and militarism are going to destroy this nation. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.. These too are our brothers. [citation needed] Content [ edit] 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. 0000002784 00000 n I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict: 1. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is known for being one of the greatest orators of the twentieth century, and perhaps in all of American history. King Leads Chicago). 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. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nations only non-Communist revolutionary political force the unified Buddhist church. PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley's new documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience explores King's speech. 0000001645 00000 n His tireless work advocating for the end of. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. A few other Americans know, of course, the "Mountaintop" speech given the night before he's assassinated in Memphis. 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. Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Beyond Vietnam: The MLK speech that caused an uproar. King, Beyond Vietnam, in A Call to Conscience, ed. "[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. 0000009168 00000 n Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. Though he avoided condemning the war outright, at the August 1965 annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) convention King called for a halt to bombing in North Vietnam, urged that the United Nations be empowered to mediate the conflict, and told the crowd that what is required is a small first step that may establish a new spirit of mutual confidence a step capable of breaking the cycle of mistrust, violence and war (King, 12 August 1965). Speeches, writings, movements, and protests, Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. In so many words, powerful interests told him: "Mind your own business.". 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! Tavis Smiley joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. The march was organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and initiated by its chairman, James Bevel. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. I just wanted to say that I was an 18-year-old Marine in Vietnam when the speech was given, and I didn't hear it until three or four years ago. The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports. "[24] King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and said that the U.S. should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. 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. So he was no longer on that particular list. 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. 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. But Martin understood very clearly that what we ought to be doing at home is being - we are being distracted, rather, by our engagement around the world. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. It makes for an excellent teaching tool for a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, Cold War and Vietnam, or as a bridge to combine the two! I guess the question now is whether or not Afghanistan is a war of necessity or a war of choice. Martin Luther King Jr. held his acceptance speech in the auditorium of the University of Oslo on 10 December 1964. The Washington Post says he has done a discredit to himself, to his people, to his country. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr.. 3. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam. [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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. $25.00. [27], In 2010, PBS commentator Tavis Smiley said that the speech was the most controversial speech of King's career, and the one he "labored over the most". It was, to your earlier point, the most controversial speech he ever gave. They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. That's what set so many of them off. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops. They asked if our own nation wasnt using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [18] He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. 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). 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. Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. 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. And that's just the Times and the Post. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. 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. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. 0000003415 00000 n It was a wonderful, I think, place to give the speech in the sense that it's pretty cavernous. Beyond Vietnam2 in that . And I believe everyone has a duty to be in both the civil-rights and peace movements. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. 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. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr ., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam" in front of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in. Mr. SMILEY: Well, I think the question is whether or not - I hear your point, Neal, and I take it. Carson and Shepard, 2001. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. Of course, he's assassinated in Memphis a year to the day later after giving this speech. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. He turned that into a great speech when he got out of the hospital. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech, lines 413-416, he repeats the phrase "this is not just" (161). They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. 0000002874 00000 n How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement. Mr. SMILEY: We - let me just tell you this. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. King contemplated but ultimately decided against the proposal on the grounds that he felt uneasy with politics and considered himself better suited for his morally unambiguous role as an activist.[25]. 0000009147 00000 n A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches. 0000005696 00000 n CONAN: Howard, thanks very much for the call. 0000002337 00000 n Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 90th Cong., 2d sess., Congressional Record 114 (9 April 1968): 93919397. 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. To me 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. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. Now there is little left to build onsave bitterness. Peace and civil rights dont mix, they say. 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." In his last Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968, King said that he was convinced that [Vietnam] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world (King, Remaining Awake, 219). What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? hide caption. PDF. Now let us begin. 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? A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. Somehow this madness must cease. Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point (Opposes Vietnam War). 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. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.