In that address, he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. 0000008347 00000 n I'm Neal Conan. If Dr. King were to say to the organizers of these events, I'd like to show up at your church on Sunday morning, at your rally this weekend, and here's what I want to say, there is a good argument to be made that Dr. King himself might not be welcome - might not be allowed to say what was in his heart, what his conscience really was, given the political correctness of the world that we live in today. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Mr. SMILEY: That's right. 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. 2/QB(yQVz^*oU.FW King, Beyond Vietnam, in A Call to Conscience, ed. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 0000012562 00000 n Martin Luther King, Jr. utilizes figurative to emphasize the inhumanity and immorality of the war. V)U5v\@apkk;#WF. JwNt YHiA:{p . Mr. SMILEY: Indeed, he did. He criticized the Vietnam War and praised Muhammad Ali for being a conscientious objector. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. Smiley spoke with both scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel. The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports. Twin towers were planned from Afghanistan. So all that we have is less than 10 minutes of video of the speech. 0000013309 00000 n We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. 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). 0000002694 00000 n And Tavis, nice to have you back in the program. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. or 404 526-8968. 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. The United States got involved in the Vietnam War because they wanted to stop the spread of communism. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on lifes highway. "[9] He stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands", and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children. 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? 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). They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years especially the last three summers. King spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. King Leads Chicago). Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr.. 0000011437 00000 n They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. Mr. SMILEY: Neal, thank you for the opportunity. 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. Sorry, I'm a little bit emotional here. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. 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." Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter but beautifulstruggle for a new world. As Arnold Toynbee says : Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. . 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. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry Belafonte led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967. 0000047501 00000 n Tomorrow, the latest installment with the political junkie. Let's go to Walt(ph). 0000002784 00000 n The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News in Washington. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? 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 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. What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? 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. Ken Rudin joins guest host Rebecca Roberts. And so the question was, Martin, why would you antagonize the president who has been our friend? 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. [citation needed]. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. Indeed, you play parts of President Obama's speech to the Nobel Committee there in Stockholm where he received the award. Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967. CONAN: And the place - choice of place is very interesting too. 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. 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. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Dr. King in a March 25, 1967 antiwar march in Chicago. [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'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. (Unintelligible) on this program about, you know, the chances he took and even, you know, speaking truth to power to LBJ helped him so much in civil rights. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in New York City at Riverside Church on the occasion of his becoming co-chairperson of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (subsequently renamed Clergy and Laity Concerned ). In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam. 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. 0000008326 00000 n The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Free Press. What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? CONAN: We (unintelligible) to see it. HT0WJ3 O$L Mr. SMILEY: We - let me just tell you this. 0000009168 00000 n The New York Times calls it wasteful and self-defeating. King delivered the speech, sponsored by the group Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, after committing to participate in New York's April 15, 1967 anti-Vietnam war march from Central Park to the United Nations, sponsored by the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Nearly five years after Kings assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other. Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life? Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world a world that borders on our doors. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. 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. So, too, with Hanoi. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. [citation needed], One of the eight "sound cells" in @Large, Ai Weiwei's 201415 exhibit at Alcatraz, features King's voice giving the "Beyond Vietnam" speech. 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! WALT (Caller): Yes. Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Not only that, but then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House. [6], King delivered the speech, sponsored by the group Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, after committing to participate in New York's April 15, 1967 anti-Vietnam war march from Central Park to the United Nations, sponsored by the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Email us: talk@npr.org. We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence? A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. His house was bombed. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. 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. between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? 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. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. He passed the Civil Rights Act. Paul A. Schuette, King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall, Washington Post, 3 March 1965. 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. Beyond Vietnam: The MLK speech that caused an uproar. 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). He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. Keep in mind now that 1967, Neal, as you know, is the same year that Muhammad Ali, the world champion, decides to not accept that draft to go and fight in Vietnam. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. 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. 0000009964 00000 n Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. . But when he turns the corner and then says, essentially, that Martin's philosophy wouldn't work in today's world, he goes on to say that Dr. King didn't know al-Qaida, as if to suggest that Martin didn't understand evil, that Martin didn't understand violence, that he himself had not been subjected to it. So far we may have killed a million of them mostly children. But for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both. AFP/AFP/Getty Images They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? So, that's all I had to say. 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. But two, to the audio, there are only less than 10 minutes of this speech that got covered. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them the only party in real touch with the peasants. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. Why are you joining the voices of dissent? No, Howard, I thank you for your phone call. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. 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. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, organized the 1963 March on Washington, advocated for civil disobedience and. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. 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.
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