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. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Beyond Vietnam" - Zinn Education Project That night Dr. King shocked the world and his followers when . Arent you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? Legendary civil rights leader Rev. King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech was delivered at the Riverside Church in New York exactly one year before his assassination. Because, to your point now, one, I want people to go online and read the speech so you can see the text for yourself. AFP/AFP/Getty Images They were led by Ho Chi Minh. 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. 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. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. 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'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. 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. Not only that, but then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House. 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. But what I want - I think the question - I've always thought that Dr. King, that that speech about Vietnam was his best speech in my mind. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. We must stop now. ", After King delivered the speech, Smiley reports, "168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. Screenshots are considered by the King Estate a violation of this notice. 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. And when you see the piece on "Lens" tonight that's the part of the speech that set off so many of those who are in King's inner circle, so many scholars who have written about King. 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 . Du Bois to Coretta Scott King: The Untold History of the Movement to Ban the Bomb. 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. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. In "People and Peace, not Profits and War," Shirley Chisholm repeats the words "two more years" (42). For those who ask the question, Arent you a civil rights leader? and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real changeespecially in terms of their need for land and peace.

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