A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam / A Time to Break Silence Background. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. These, too, are our brothers. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is … [20][21], In a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott, he said: "I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic ..."[22] In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I would like to see the fervor of the civil-rights movement imbued into the peace movement to instill it with greater strength. My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. Could we blame them for such thoughts? A portion of this speech is used in the track "Wisdom, Justice, and Love" by Linkin Park, from their 2010 album A Thousand Suns. Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? [13] We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. It was known as “Beyond Vietnam“. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. Shall we say the odds are too great? I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children. by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. w/ Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research January 12, 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle 4 April 1967 That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A … The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. P: (650) 723-2092  |  F: (650) 723-2093  |  kinginstitute@stanford.edu  |  Campus Map. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. 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. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. 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. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. Fifty years ago on April 4, 1967, our prophet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the historic speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at New York City’s Riverside Church. 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. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now 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. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. 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. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroy, whose culture is being subverted. They must see Americans as strange liberators. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. © Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. 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. "[10], King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms. Four: 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 any future Vietnam government. * And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict: Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. "[9], King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. Obery M. Hendricks Jr., Ph.D. (January 20, 2014). 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. 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. I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam” in … 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. [17][18] Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. Surely this madness must cease. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. 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 was written by activist and historian Vincent Harding. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, San Jose. The Uncompromising Anti-Capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr. "Why Martin Luther King Didn't Run for President", "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. This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. We must move past indecision to action. On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the United Nations. After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. The speech began conventionally. In modern times, we frequently picture Dr. King as a universally-admired champion of civil rights. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. Jamie Mason Ms. Lowe English 1102 TR, 8:25 2 February 2013 A Time to do What is Right In Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence” (1967), Dr. King asserts that the war in Vietnam is totally immoral and has far reaching negative implications not only for Vietnam, but for The United States and the rest of the World as well. "[15] They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. 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. Rhetorical Devices In Beyond Vietnam Speech 736 Words3 Pages All they wanted was “to save the soul of America” (King, Beyond, 42). The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. One of the eight "sound cells" in @Large, Ai Weiwei's 2014–15 exhibit at Alcatraz, features King's voice giving the "Beyond Vietnam" speech.[29]. We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. Part of our ongoing [applause continues], 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. 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 a hell for the poor. 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. Many of us can recite segments of his dream or his mountaintop vision. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. 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. 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. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. It incensed President Lyndon Johnson, who revoked King's invitation to the White House. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” Unquote. Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only real party in real touch with the peasants. That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break The Silence, was an unequivocal denunciation of America’s involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict. 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. What of the National Liberation front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? Martin Luther King April 4, 1967 Riverside Church, New York City 2 Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. But we must move on. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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. 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. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. And I believe everyone has a duty to be in both the civil-rights and peace movements. King, Statement on voter registration in Alabama, 9 March 1965, MLKJP-GAMK. King, Interview on Face the Nation, 29 August 1965, RRML-TxTyU. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a unified Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. King's speech in New York set the tone for the last year of his life. 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. "[25] King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and said that the U.S. should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it’s always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We must stop now. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. 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. Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? He held this speech in Manhattan's Riverside Church. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech that may have helped put a target on his back. 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. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be considered. 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. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. 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. High schools named after Martin Luther King Jr. Schools in France named after Martin Luther King Jr. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, John F. Kennedy's speech to the nation on Civil Rights, Chicago Freedom Movement/Chicago open housing movement, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, List of lynching victims in the United States, Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beyond_Vietnam:_A_Time_to_Break_Silence&oldid=995555102, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 21 December 2020, at 18:06. Martin Luther King Jr is an African American preacher and civil rights activist that along with every other African American male and female in 1976 was waging a war in America for their not-so-natural born rights. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. [19] Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. [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".[28]. Rev. MLKEC, INP, Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate Collection, In Private Hands, NYC-7A & 7B, Cypress Hall D, 466 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4146 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. Excerpts from this speech are used in the songs "Together" and "Spirit" by Nordic Giants. 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. "[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. 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