This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News in Washington. And Walt's with us from Cortez in Colorado. 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]. Ken Rudin joins guest host Rebecca Roberts. Tavis Smiley joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. 0000030467 00000 n Four years after President John F. Kennedy sent the first American troops into Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., issued his first public statement on the war. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. 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. After he gives it, 168 major newspapers the next day denounce him. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. I'm Neal Conan. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. 0000002784 00000 n This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. 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." 0000003415 00000 n Nearly five years after Kings assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other. The first signs of opposition to King's tactics from within the civil rights movement surfaced during the March 1965 demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, which were aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal voting-rights law that would provide legal support for the enfranchisement of . His speech appears below. $25.00. U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Martin Luther King Jr. Records Collection Act, King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis, The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, Joseph Schwantner: New Morning for the World; Nicolas Flagello: The Passion of Martin Luther King. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. It was a tactical mistake. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. CONAN: Walt, thank you. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. . We appreciate that. What liberators? 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. So, too, with Hanoi. At what cost? 0000003199 00000 n We must stop now. 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 . CONAN: And I think a lot of people will see your parallels regarding Iraq, where, indeed, the United States was the aggressor in that conflict. Twin towers were planned from Afghanistan. CONAN: Well, take us back to 1967. These too are our brothers. 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. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose. 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. Arent you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? 0000012541 00000 n The speech primarily concerns the Memphis sanitation strike.King calls for unity, economic actions, boycotts, and nonviolent protest, while challenging the United States to live . He was stabbed at one time. And the last poll taken in his life by Harris, the Harris Poll, Neal, found that nearly three quarters of the American people, nearly three quarters, had turned against Martin on this issue, and 55 percent of his own people, black folk, had turned against him. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. 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: I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. 0000001700 00000 n It was the speech he labored over the most. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. 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. He passed the Voting Rights Act. 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. Dr. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. But they didn't stay for the speech in its entirety. What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Mr. SMILEY: And therein lies the rub. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a rebalancing of fiscal priorities away from Americas obsession with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, Dr. And King was prescient on this. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. "Vincent Harding dies at 82; historian wrote controversial King speech", "Vincent Harding, author of Martin Luther King Jr.'s antiwar speech, dies", "The Rev. Opposes Vietnam War, New York Times, 11 November 1965. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It includes a portion of his speech. At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. In "People and Peace, not Profits and War," Shirley Chisholm repeats the words "two more years" (42). I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. Speeches, writings, movements, and protests, Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. [28], A portion of this speech is used in the track "Wisdom, Justice, and Love" by Linkin Park, from their 2010 album A Thousand Suns. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. For as popular as King was, he was a Nobel laureate, there were only one or two news crews who actually came to see the speech that night, Neal. Because, to your point now, one, I want people to go online and read the speech so you can see the text for yourself. 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. He would no longer be respected. How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of aggression from the north as if there were nothing more essential to the war? 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. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. Robert B. Semple, Jr., Dr. 0000044282 00000 n He had fallen off already the list, as you mentioned, had already fallen off the list of the most admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. Attachment 4: Are We Ready to Listen to Dr. King? [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". Mr. TAVIS SMILEY (Host, "The Tavis Smiley Show"): Neal, always an honor to be on with you. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. All rights reserved. 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. 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. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr.. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point (Opposes Vietnam War). 0000009147 00000 n I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. 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. Screenshots are considered by the King Estate a violation of this notice. 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. CONAN: Oh, the audio is terrible, though. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. Peace and civil rights dont mix, they say. 0000047501 00000 n So even McNamara eventually comes around to that point. (2)] Benjamin Hedin on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, anti-Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church in New York, which risked King's relationship with Lyndon Johnson. Copy of full text of the "Beyond Vietnam" speech. But most Americans, I think, do not know this speech, "Beyond Vietnam.". And what really got him to the point of figuring that he really, really had to address this again back to the children, he couldn't say to young folks in this country who were being denied, that they should engage nonviolence as a philosophy when he saw the children, when he saw these pictures of these Vietnamese children being bombed and the impact - the effect that napalm was having on their bodies. 16, 1967 in New York. 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. Check your local listings. As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and the editorial page writers of The Washington Post[3] and The New York Times[4] called the Riverside Church speech a mistake on King's part. But what I want - I think the question - I've always thought that Dr. King, that that speech about Vietnam was his best speech in my mind. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech, lines 413-416, he repeats the phrase "this is not just" (161). PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley's new documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience explores King's speech. Somehow this madness must cease. Why are you joining the voices of dissent? WALT (Caller): Yes. 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. 0000004621 00000 n "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. 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. In his 1967 speech on the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, Jr. employs figurative language and syntactical elements to construct his argument against the hypocrisy and cruelty of American involvement in the war. CONAN: "MLK: A Call to Conscience" premieres on PBS tomorrow night. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. Mr. SMILEY: Yeah. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. [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. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. Cypress Hall D, 466 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4146 With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. 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. So far we may have killed a million of them mostly children. 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. 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. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington. But certainly one of the greatest orators of our time. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. "MLK: A Call to Conscience" premieres on PBS tomorrow night. BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. So this was a huge, huge speech that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever said or done. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry Belafonte led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967. [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. Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. They brought in extra chairs. 0000008347 00000 n So Martin's advisors basically said, if you are intent on giving the speech, at least allow us to craft a speech and to create a setting that will allow you to speak to clergy members and laity so at least before you get to this rally that we know is going to be controversial, we could at least roll this thing out with a different kind of a crowd. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. James L. Bevel dies at 72; civil rights activist and top lieutenant to King", "Martin Luther King Jr. made our nation uncomfortable", "The Uncompromising Anti-Capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr", "Why Martin Luther King Didn't Run for President", "Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Master and Political Reformer, Dies at 95", "The Story Of King's 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech", "Dragons, legos, and solitary: Ai Weiwei's transformative Alcatraz exhibition", Full transcript of the speech from Commondreams.org. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. W. E. B. Mr. SMILEY: That's right. CONAN: Tavis Smiley, author, journalist, political commentator, host of his talk show on PBS, joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. 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." 39 0 obj << /Linearized 1 /O 44 /H [ 1739 286 ] /L 149455 /E 105346 /N 8 /T 148557 >> endobj xref 39 54 0000000016 00000 n They asked if our own nation wasnt using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. We were 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. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. Mr. SMILEY: We - let me just tell you this. Five years ago he said, Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.. 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). 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. 0000043425 00000 n Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi",[9] and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people. 0000003503 00000 n 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. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. 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? CONAN: Indeed. I would like to see the fervor of the civil-rights movement imbued into the peace movement to instill it with greater strength. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. And let's see if we can get another caller on the line. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. All Rights Reserved. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence . The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. That's my own personal assessment. "[24] King quoted a United States official who said that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution. between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. While his legacy is commonly remembered by his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, we've sourced four powerful, lesser-known speeches from Dr. King to listen to and commemorate . And he starts out in the opening line at Riverside Church by saying: I am here tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", also referred as the Riverside Church speech,[1] is an antiVietnam War and prosocial justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. 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. They must see Americans as strange liberators. 0000013309 00000 n So they go primarily women and children and the aged. Screenshots are considered by the King Estate a violation of this notice. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. [26], The same year, King nominated Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was not awarded to anyone that year. The New York Times calls it wasteful and self-defeating. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. You can also join the conversation at our Web site. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that. 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. And I think that if nothing else what we need to wrestle with in a contemporary sense, Neal, is the question of whether or not there is another way that King would have us consider were he allowed to do. 0000040748 00000 n 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. So practically everybody was opposed to him giving this speech. We're talking with Tavis Smiley. Vietnam War | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute Vietnam War Event May 11, 1961 to April 30, 1975 Four years after President John F. Kennedy sent the first American troops into Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., issued his first public statement on the war. If Americas soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. This speech was written and basically read word for word so that they could have a copy to give to mainstream newspapers across the country for their consideration, because King did not want to be misquoted Mr. SMILEY: or misunderstood, although that didn't work. King Scores Poverty). "The press is being stacked against me", King said,[13] Mr. SMILEY: He'd wanted to give it two years earlier and had attempted a dry run at this speech, to your appoint, Neal, a couple of years prior to when he gave it. In that address, he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. The problem was that practically everyone in his inner circle - not all, there was James Bevel and a couple of others - but practically everyone in his inner circle advised him strongly not to give this speech. And so he does in New York City. King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism", he also rejected communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism", and its "political totalitarianism. I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. *];\n~~/iQ|h Q For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on lifes roadside; but that will be only an initial act. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. It basically ruined their working relationship. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? On 4 April 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his seminal speech at Riverside Church condemning the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. 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. We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. 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. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. And he said these three issues of racism and poverty and militarism are going to destroy this nation. trailer << /Size 93 /Info 36 0 R /Root 40 0 R /Prev 148547 /ID[<8f2b4dd6f2f061944c7ff807c44fcc1f><651247ae294a1a197a948cb3bc3f8412>] >> startxref 0 %%EOF 40 0 obj << /Type /Catalog /Pages 38 0 R /Metadata 37 0 R /Threads 41 0 R /Names 43 0 R /OpenAction [ 44 0 R /XYZ null null null ] /PageMode /UseNone /PageLabels 35 0 R >> endobj 41 0 obj [ 42 0 R ] endobj 42 0 obj << /I << /Title (A)>> /F 45 0 R >> endobj 43 0 obj << /Dests 33 0 R >> endobj 91 0 obj << /S 76 /E 200 /L 216 /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 92 0 R >> stream That's what set so many of them off. 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..
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