Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? 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. King Leads Chicago). Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life? Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. You can also join the conversation at our Web site. 0000005696 00000 n
Please contact Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. atlicensing@i-p-m.comor 404 526-8968. Nearly five years after Kings assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other. He passed the Voting Rights Act. 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. 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. 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. Paul A. Schuette, King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall, Washington Post, 3 March 1965. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. His speech appears below. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 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. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry Belafonte led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967. What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? So this was a huge, huge speech that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever said or done. Mr. SMILEY: And therein lies the rub. 0000001427 00000 n
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. The question is, is it a war of necessity or a war of choice at this point? This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News in Washington. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. He rarely gave speeches from a text. That night Dr. King shocked the world and his followers when . Had the president stopped by giving Martin King his just respect - as he did, to his credit - it would have been okay. 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. Carson and Shepard, 2001. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. What of the National Liberation Front that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? Check your local listings. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. 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. 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. Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. 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. or 404 526-8968. 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 . 0000002247 00000 n
"[14] The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions. And so the question was, Martin, why would you antagonize the president who has been our friend? Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their governments policy, especially in time of war. He turned that into a great speech when he got out of the hospital. 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. One of the things, I hope, Neal, will happen here is that when people get a chance to see the special, they will be moved - I think they will be - to Google or Bing, whatever search engine you use, to go online, because the speech is so readily available, Neal, as you know. 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. 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. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. 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. 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. Sorry, I'm a little bit emotional here. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. 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. 0000013330 00000 n
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his first major public address on the war in Vietnam at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. 0000006536 00000 n
They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. 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. 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. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. 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. It was a tactical mistake. 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. "I've Been to the Mountaintop" is the popular name of the last speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. King spoke on April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee. 0000009147 00000 n
Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. 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: 0000044282 00000 n
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? Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. 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. I want to thank you, as I know listeners do as well, for your service to this country. As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nations role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.