[Peace-discuss] King's "Beyond Vietnam" on WRFU internet stream, all day today

[Stuart Levy]

Martin Luther King Jr's speech* "Beyond Vietnam"* - of April 4, 1967, a
year to the day before he was assassinated - is playing now on WRFU's
internet stream, until the end of today.   To listen, go to

     http://wrfu.net/

(Note it's *only on the internet stream,* not the 104.5 FM broadcast.)

It's playing the Alternative Radio version, which is slightly abridged, but
nearly the entire piece.

You can also read and hear the speech here:
     http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm


If you haven't heard this speech before, it is of a different order than
the more familiar "I have a dream" speech.   In answering the question, Why
had he decided to speak out on the war in Vietnam, King said:


[...] 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. 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 againstthe violence of the
oppressed in the ghettos without having first spokenclearly to the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today -- my owngovernment. *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.

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.
In
1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, we
chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we
could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead
affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from
itself
unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the
shackles
they still wear. 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!*

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. If America's
soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can
never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world
over.
So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are
led
down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
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