martin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcript

0000002694 00000 n I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. In that address, he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. Carson and Shepard, 2001. 0000002964 00000 n 0000002427 00000 n Carson and Holloran, 1998. 0000008347 00000 n How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Martin Luther King Jr. announced his strong opposition to the war in Vietnam, the media attacked him for straying outside of his civil rights mandate. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam. On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the United Nations. Martin Luther King Jr. - Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam In 1967, in the shadows of Columbia, Dr. King shifted the world again. And so I think most Americans, Neal, know the "I Have A Dream" speech. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diems methods had aroused. So practically everybody was opposed to him giving this speech. 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. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 2. 0000046786 00000 n They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. But for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. And there was a 18-year-old black Marine that picked me up since I couldn't walk, got me away from bombs and saved my life. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor both black and white through the poverty program. 0000007161 00000 n [11], King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham,[citation needed] union leaders and powerful publishers. We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. 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 . 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 will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: This is not just. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. Do you find this information helpful? 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. 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. 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. 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). 0000009147 00000 n I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. Check your local listings. [29], Excerpts from this speech are used in the songs "Together" and "Spirit" by Nordic Giants. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Cypress Hall D, 466 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4146 I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News in Washington. 0000047501 00000 n Mr. TAVIS SMILEY (Host, "The Tavis Smiley Show"): Neal, always an honor to be on with you. 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. That night Dr. King shocked the world and his followers when . 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 . What of the National Liberation Front that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? Arent you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? 0000002874 00000 n 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. I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. Martin Luther King Jr. held his acceptance speech in the auditorium of the University of Oslo on 10 December 1964. 0000003454 00000 n 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. 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. But LBJ disinvites him to the White House. 2/QB(yQVz^*oU.FW And Tavis, nice to have you back in the program. 0000023610 00000 n But certainly one of the greatest orators of our time. CONAN: We're talking with Tavis Smiley about his PBS special, "Tavis Smiley Reports MLK: A Call to Conscience." "[14][15], The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated. BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. 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. Well, it was taken in that context, anyway. And it was on that occasion that he - when he saw those pictures, said, I have to speak out about this. So 60 year(ph) is really, really a hot year here around this particular issue. 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 . ml.K-x1x*tcSO p[ endstream endobj 62 0 obj 720 endobj 63 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 62 0 R >> stream 0000002784 00000 n President Obama, this is one campaign promise that he has kept. 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. Beyond Vietnam: The MLK speech that caused an uproar - USA TODAY MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Screenshots are considered by the King Estate a violation of this notice. 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." A few days later, King made it clear that his peace work was not undertaken as the leader of the SCLC, but as an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace (Dr. Mr. SMILEY: Neal, thank you for the opportunity. CONAN: We (unintelligible) to see it. 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. It was, to your earlier point, the most controversial speech he ever gave. (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. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 90th Cong., 2d sess., Congressional Record 114 (9 April 1968): 93919397. A few other Americans know, of course, the "Mountaintop" speech given the night before he's assassinated in Memphis. 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. April 30, 1967: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" Speech 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. It was the speech he labored over the most. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. "[10], King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms. "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. PDF Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence ~ MLK Speech 1967 - CRM Vet The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. CONAN: "MLK: A Call to Conscience" premieres on PBS tomorrow night. Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Sorry, I'm a little bit emotional here. 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. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. He was stabbed at one time. 0000011739 00000 n 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. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. HOWARD: How are you doing, Tavis? The great initiative in this war is ours. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. Nearly five years after Kings assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other. 0000040748 00000 n Now let us begin. Smiley spoke with both scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel. 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. 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. Beyond Vietnam A Time To Break Silence Rhetorical Precis They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. 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. 0000005717 00000 n 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. We had to do a whole lot of work in the booth trying to get that audio right. 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. In the 1950s and 1960s, his words led the Civil Rights Movement and helped change society. Mr. SMILEY: That's right. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. Now there is little left to build onsave bitterness. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. 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. Email us: talk@npr.org. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, organized the 1963 March on Washington, advocated for civil disobedience and. 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. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Mr. SMILEY: And therein lies the rub. 0000013330 00000 n I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. 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. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: Too late. There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. In describing the ways in which the . 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. He passed the Voting Rights Act. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Beyond Vietnam" - Zinn Education Project This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. Martin Luther King's Most Controversial Speech: Beyond Vietnam - THIRTEEN Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that. 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. He supported Johnsons calls for diplomatic negotiations and economic development as the beginnings of such a step. Seeking to reduce the potential backlash by framing his speech within the context of religious objection to war, King addressed a crowd of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. King Scores Poverty Budget, New York Times, 16 December 1966. 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. Kings opposition to the war provoked criticism from members of Congress, the press, and from his civil rights colleagues who argued that expanding his civil rights message to include foreign affairs would harm the black freedom struggle in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. utilizes figurative to emphasize the inhumanity and immorality of the war. 0000002247 00000 n 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. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. (1967) Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" 16, 1967 in New York. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. CONAN: And there's an interesting point you also make in the film that - or at least some of the participants in your film make - that were he alive today and saying the kinds of things you would expect him to say, given that speech, he probably would not be invited to many Martin Luther King Day celebrations. He rarely gave speeches from a text. 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. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Legendary civil rights leader Rev. [citation needed]. [1][5], King was long opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War, but at first avoided the topic in public speeches in order to avoid the interference with civil rights goals that criticism of President Johnson's policies might have created. 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. [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. He was one of the most important and influential Civil Rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. Accuracy and availability may vary. 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. 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. Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. 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. PDF Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence - hawaii.edu (1997). Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination - HISTORY 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. How Martin Luther King, Jr.'s multifaceted view on human rights still "[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. You can also join the conversation at our Web site. 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. 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! All Rights Reserved. King linked his anti-war and civil rights work in speeches throughout the country, where he described the three problems he saw plaguing the nation: racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. Five years ago he said, Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.. They asked if our own nation wasnt using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Speeches, writings, movements, and protests, Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.. ", After King delivered the speech, Smiley reports, "168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." 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. Jazmyn Ford. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. Hb```f``; 6Pco;{Q. 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martin luther king jr vietnam war speech transcript 2023