Robert B. Semple, Jr., Dr. 0000047501 00000 n V)U5v\@apkk;#WF. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in 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 authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 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 ). Carson and Holloran, 1998. 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. 0000001739 00000 n M ost Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content. And at that march, he knew there would be people, as you point out in the film, waving Vietnamese flags and chanting CONAN: Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win, and that sort of thing and it would clearly be taken in a very different context. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. P: (650) 723-2092 | F: (650) 723-2093 | kinginstitute@stanford.edu| Campus Map. Tavis Smiley joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. 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. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. 800-989-8255, email us talk@npr.org. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. or 404 526-8968. Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond ones tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poorboth black . Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. And let's see if we can get another caller on the line. So 60 year(ph) is really, really a hot year here around this particular issue. 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. It was a wonderful, I think, place to give the speech in the sense that it's pretty cavernous. But there was a great turnout for the speech. They asked if our own nation wasnt using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. But certainly one of the greatest orators of our time. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.. 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. Copyright 2010 NPR. Mr. SMILEY: We - let me just tell you this. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on lifes roadside; but that will be only an initial act. As the head of state, I cannot necessarily embrace the same principles that, as you point out, Martin Luther King, a prophet, an outsider could embrace. 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. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. (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. He passed the Voting Rights Act. [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. 0000011739 00000 n And Tavis, nice to have you back in the program. 2. 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. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. 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 Because he received a letter from a little white girl who said, Dr. King, I read the newspaper that had you sneezed that blade would've moved, ruptured your aorta and you would've drowned in your own blood. The New York Times calls it wasteful and self-defeating. Paul A. Schuette, King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall, Washington Post, 3 March 1965. Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? 0000004855 00000 n 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. And they, as news crews tend to do, they stayed to get just enough B-roll, as we call it Mr. SMILEY: for the news that night. 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." Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington. 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. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted conceptso readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly forcehas now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. Mr. SMILEY: Yeah, Walt, I thank you for sharing that story as well, for being courageous to tell it, number one. Because, to your point now, one, I want people to go online and read the speech so you can see the text for yourself. Opposes Vietnam War, New York Times, 11 November 1965. 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. The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. 0000009168 00000 n In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. And after I was wounded, we had four or five 100-pound bomb dropped on us, and 10 Marines were killed outright and 24 were wounded. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. And thank you for sharing what had to be a difficult story to tell. And so I think most Americans, Neal, know the "I Have A Dream" speech. 0000002004 00000 n 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. 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. But most Americans, I think, do not know this speech, "Beyond Vietnam.". If Americas soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. 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. Thanks, as always for your time. Hundreds of folks listened outside on loudspeakers. He did say he was going to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, so he's kept that promise. 0000010534 00000 n America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. 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. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 90th Cong., 2d sess., Congressional Record 114 (9 April 1968): 93919397. When the Rev. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. The United States got involved in the Vietnam War because they wanted to stop the spread of communism. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "[22] CONAN: We (unintelligible) to see it. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War "The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the. Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist that led the Civil Rights Movement, and other movements until his assassination in 1968. 0000003199 00000 n There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 speech in New York. Thank you. After he gives it, 168 major newspapers the next day denounce him. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. A few other Americans know, of course, the "Mountaintop" speech given the night before he's assassinated in Memphis. Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Manhattan's Riverside Church, April 4, 1967 . Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. ml.K-x1x*tcSO p[ endstream endobj 62 0 obj 720 endobj 63 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 62 0 R >> stream We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. 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. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point (Opposes Vietnam War). 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. 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. We had to do a whole lot of work in the booth trying to get that audio right. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. "[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. "[8] He connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change: A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. That Vietnam was a mistake. So they go primarily women and children and the aged. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. 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. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam. 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 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. 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. "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. hide caption. 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. Why are you joining the voices of dissent? We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. CONAN: Indeed, it was Oslo. Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Free Press. So he was no longer on that particular list.
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martin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcript