[Peace-discuss] Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech, each hour from 10am-4pm today, wrfu.net / WRFU 104.5FM

[Stuart Levy]

You can hear Martin Luther King's 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech on the
air on WRFU (wrfu.net
<http://wrfu.net/?fbclid=IwAR0zNDmCqTXaDkTaKsT65kHqyxofc16AQe9yqzUNV9maSKhq_9Z4P45dDsM>
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.

This is Alternative Radio's recording of the speech. Their description:

    By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of
    the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign
    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."

    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."

One quote:


    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.


and:

    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. *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.*

    *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.*


    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 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.**

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