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. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. Protest on the Homefront >> Martin Luther King, Jr. >> "Beyond Vietnam" - April 4, 1967 Search Tips Full-Text and Audio Excerpts of Martin Luther King's speech "Beyond Vietnam" April 4, 1967 - Riverside Church, NYC, available on this site. . 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. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there was nothing more essential to the war? They were led by Ho Chi Minh. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered his first major public statement against the Vietnam War, entitled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. Excerpts from this speech are used in the songs "Together" and "Spirit" by Nordic Giants. Obery M. Hendricks Jr., Ph.D. (January 20, 2014). They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. A portion of this speech is used in the track "Wisdom, Justice, and Love" by Linkin Park, from their 2010 album A Thousand Suns. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. 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. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. 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. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. 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. Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, San Francisco. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. 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. "[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. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western worlds, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is … 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. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. King, Interview on Face the Nation, 29 August 1965, RRML-TxTyU. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 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. 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. 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. 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. Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. [17][18] We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. [6] At the urging of SCLC's former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, and inspired by the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali,[7] King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public.[6]. Shall we say the odds are too great? * 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. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. 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. 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. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. Martin Luther King: “Beyond Vietnam” (1967) In April 1967 American civil rights leader Martin Luther King delivered his best known anti-war speech, dubbed ‘Beyond Vietnam’: “I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and … Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? The speech began conventionally. 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