Dr. King was privately distraught over the war and Dodd’s response. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam,” King said. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies and Privacy Policy. The New York Times had a great article about Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1967 speech against the war in Vietnam, broadening his concerns from civil rights to the ongoing war in Southeast Asia. At Manhattan's Riverside Church. 2. We should stop the violence and the suffering of the poor in Vietnam. While he needed King’s behind-the-scenes help on the legislative agenda, too cozy an association in public could hurt him with the crucial white, Southern vote. Name _____Period # ____ Dates —Beginning _____Ending_____ “Speech on the Vietnam War, 1967” by M.L.King, Jr. (textbook pages 151-166) Note: Your answers should completely answer each question, or points will be deducted. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. “The whole idea of paying for guns and butter at the same time: That becomes Johnson's dilemma,” says Carson. “Everything we’re talking about really boils down to the fact that we have this war on our hands,” Dr. King said in yet another wiretapped phone call. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the most politically charged speech of his life at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan. King says how the poor are sent to fight for inequality and for their lives while the wealthy are at home safe from harm. Connotation- Emotional response evoked by a word. A year later, antiwar sentiment pushed Johnson out of his re-election bid, and today we remember opposition to the war as a widespread phenomenon, so much so that Dr. King’s Riverside Church speech is often overlooked as just one more statement against an unpopular conflict. “Sometimes the public is not ready to digest the truth,” he said. In Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence” (1967), Dr. King asserts that the war in Vietnam is totally immoral and has far reaching negative implications not only for Vietnam, but for The United States and the rest of the World as well. Vietnam War 1967 Speech. “We then had to do something to counteract that. A recorded conversation between Johnson and his press secretary, George Reedy, revealed many years later Johnson’s intense agitation with this situation: Hear how LBJ sought to downplay his contact with King here: As it happened, LBJ carried the black vote by huge margins and won the white vote as well, beating Goldwater by 23 points. Protests were rampant, so in this speech Nixon defended his decision to keep U.S. forces in Vietnam and explained why negotiations had failed so far. Andrew Young, a confidant and close aide to King, said in a 1970 interview: “Dr. A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King used to always say that if a Southerner ever really gets converted, then there’s no better ally.”. Whatever his private misgivings about the war, taking them public risked antagonizing President Lyndon Johnson, the architect of that war and the man who had done more for the cause of racial and economic justice than any president since Abraham Lincoln. HOME. How can the Vietnam war of 1967 can be any different? Powerful and important to read. Rev. In late February, Dr. King joined four antiwar senators — including a Republican, Mark Hatfield of Oregon — at a Los Angeles forum, and a month later he participated in an antiwar march in Chicago. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam” in … Dr. King remained relatively mute about the war through most of 1966, but by year’s end he was expressing private disgust at how increased military spending had torn a gaping budget hole in Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs. The Washington Post criticized his “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and lamented how “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence.”, The New York Times called Dr. King’s remarks both “facile” and “slander.” It said the moral issues in Vietnam “are less clear-cut than he suggests” and warned that “to divert the energies of the civil rights movement to the Vietnam issue is both wasteful and self-defeating,” given how the movement needed to confront what the paper called “the intractability of slum mores and habits.”, Even some of the black press lined up against him: The Pittsburgh Courier warned that Dr. King was “tragically misleading” African-Americans on issues that were “too complex for simple debate.”, Dr. King was unmoved. They didn’t doubt the sincerity of his commitment to civil rights, but they felt he had “gotten himself trapped and was basically blind to what was going on around him.”. It was a blistering attack on the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War that, among other things, compared American tactics to those of the Nazis during World War II. September 29, 1967: Speech on Vietnam. A time comes when silence is betrayal. “We began to see very early that Vietnam was what it’s now come to be,” Jordan says. Your email address will not be published. On December 2, 1967, Minnesota Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy presented a bold and powerful speech denouncing the Vietnam War and America’s place in it. We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience. In 1952, in this city of Chicago, the Democratic party nominated as its candidate for the presidency Adlai Stevenson. Sign up for our daily newsletter TOP OF THE WORLD and get the big stories we’re tracking delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. … I think we thought that here was a guy who could get things done, who knew the legislative machinery of the government. Martin Luther King Jr.. “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. He insisted that “we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam” and that “we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam.” He alleged that the United States tested its latest weapons on Vietnamese peasants “just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe,” and he decried “the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets” in South Vietnam. 3. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King Jr., Dec. 3, 1963. King choice of the word "crippled" instead of "hurt" or "held back" is an example of using loaded language. King is justifying why he is speaking out against the Vietnam war. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence ", also referred as the Riverside Church speech, is an anti–Vietnam War and pro– social justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. 1967 Anti-War Speech And Today adapted by E. Martin Schotz with assistance from David Ratcliffe 20 June 2016 ratical.org Martin Luther King speaking at Riverside Church, NYC, 4 Apr 1967 Almost fifty years ago Martin Luther King gave a major speech against the Vietnam war and US militarism in general. This source advised that Wachtel, Levison and King were in conference on April 9, 1967, concerning King's position on the Vietnam … Young says the Democratic Party even started organizing meetings against King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council. The Los Angeles speech, called “ The Casualties of the War in Vietnam, ” stressed the history of the conflict and argued that American power should be “ harnessed to the service of peace and human beings, not an inhumane power [unleashed] against defenseless people ” (King, 25 February 1967). Finally, in early 1967, he had had enough. Less than two weeks after leading his first Vietnam demonstration, on 4 April 1967, King made his best known and most comprehensive statement against the war. Required fields are marked *. This article is based on LBJ's War, a podcast hosted by David Brown. “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation.”. Your donation directly supported the critical reporting you rely on, the consistent reporting you believe in, and the deep reporting you want to ensure survives. But it would be a mistake to read Dr. King’s speech as merely an antiwar statement. NEAL CONAN, host: In 1967, a year to the day before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. departed from his message of civil rights to deliver a speech that denounced America's war in Vietnam. 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. War has never been good, it has never brought anything well. PRX is a 501(c)(3) organization recognized by the IRS: #263347402. Fifty years ago today — and one year to the day before his assassination — the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1967 speech against the war in Vietnam. They pulled together all the Negro newspaper editors to support the administration’s stand,” Young explains. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his first major public address on the war in Vietnam at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. It reflected his widening worldview that chronic domestic poverty and military adventurism overseas infected the wealthiest nation on earth just as indelibly as did deep-rooted racism. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Important Terminology: Vietnam- 1966 Inductive Reasoning- the process of logical reasoning from observations, examples, and facts to a general conclusion or principle. One day Dr. King pushed aside a plate of food while paging through a magazine whose photographs depicted the burn wounds suffered by Vietnamese children who had been struck by napalm. Speeches-USA presents The Speech Vault printable speech transcripts. “The world now demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr.. “I come to this magnificent house of … King was always very optimistic about President Johnson. This speech will combine both King's speech in Los Angeles and his speech of April 4, 1976 at New York City and will be written by Wachtel and Levison on Monday, April 10, 1967. Background and Tradition of United Nations International Day of Peace, Thank you to Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1967 speech against the war in Vietnam. His speech appears below. Speeches on Vietnam war, 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr He opposed it What is happening in Vietnam? David J. Garrow is the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” and the forthcoming “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.”, Your email address will not be published. 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. I feel so deep in my heart that we are so wrong in this country and the time has come for a real prophecy and I’m willing to go that road.”, Levison and others arranged for a respectable antiwar group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to schedule an appearance at Riverside Church, a bastion of establishment liberalism. Johnson had indeed gotten himself trapped: between those who wanted to end the war and those who sought to prosecute it more aggressively; between fear of igniting a larger conflict and fear of being the first president to lose a war; and between guns and butter. April 1967. 2. Every morning, the editorial team at public radio’s international news show The World meets to plan what they'll cover that day. When Martin Luther King Jr. The images were unforgettable, he said. For Dr. King, the speech couldn’t come soon enough. A year after he was elected, on November 3, 1969, President Nixon gave the following address on the situation in Vietnam. On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War.King’s sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon Johnson, who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans. Both events received modest press coverage, and in their wake Dr. King told Stanley Levison, long his closest adviser: “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. In order to atone for our sins, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.”. We couldn’t have done it without your support. Speech on the Vietnam War, 1967 Questions 1. Even at the time, antiwar opposition remained politically marginal, and Dr. King’s advisers were upset over his desire to participate in a forthcoming mid-April New York protest. Lyndon B. Johnson. “I was determined to be a leader of war and a leader of peace,” LBJ told an interviewer not long before he died, “and I believed America had the resources to provide for both.”. On April 4, 1967, he delivered a speech called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." So, the Johnson administration was pulling the preachers together one week and we pulled them together a month later and explained our side.”, Young says by this time, King and his allies had lost faith in Johnson. When “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” He concluded by calling for “a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation.”, The Riverside crowd gave Dr. King a standing ovation, but editorial denunciations were swift and harsh. About this speech. 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