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<p>You can hear Martin Luther King's 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech on
the air on WRFU (<a
href="http://wrfu.net/?fbclid=IwAR0zNDmCqTXaDkTaKsT65kHqyxofc16AQe9yqzUNV9maSKhq_9Z4P45dDsM"
target="_blank" data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}"
rel="noopener nofollow" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy"
data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwrfu.net%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0zNDmCqTXaDkTaKsT65kHqyxofc16AQe9yqzUNV9maSKhq_9Z4P45dDsM&h=AT3M022t5jMeioHc1iauI_qQgPbtbQXpWE8hrdnQi-ns1-5mh6tK5KF8ZNU0LhQLD3iUMLzVQ_ZgUjepnoMzLkf8Z7oV9n-iuRgsdH5oKTns3zKntZ4mE20HC9QDDdtqr6KaUbZXjPJNiLftiVc9">wrfu.net</a>
and 104.5FM), each hour from 10am to 4pm today, MLK day. It was a
controversial speech, then and now. It is likely not a coincidence
that he was murdered exactly one year later.</p>
<p> This is Alternative Radio's recording of the speech. Their
description:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent
of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign
<span class="text_exposed_show">policy, which he deemed
militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New
York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day
before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."</span></p>
<div class="text_exposed_show">
<p> Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that
sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington
Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his
cause, his country, his people."</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="text_exposed_show">
<p>One quote:</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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. At the heart of
their concerns this
query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking
about war, Dr.
King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and
civil rights don't
mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people,
they ask? 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. Indeed,
their questions
suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
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.
<b>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. A
few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if
there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black
and white --
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes,
new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program
broken and
eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a
society gone mad
on war, and I knew that America would never invest the
necessary funds or
energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures
like Vietnam
continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic
destructive
suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war
as an enemy of the
poor and to attack it as such.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>Perhaps the 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. I could not
be silent in the
face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.</b></p>
<p><br>
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness,
for it grows out of
my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three
years --
especially the last three summers. 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. I have tried to offer them my
deepest
compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change
comes most
meaningfully through nonviolent action.<b> <b>But they asked
-- and rightly so --
what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't
using massive doses of
violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes
it wanted. 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. 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.</b></b>
</p>
</blockquote>
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