Could we blame them for such thoughts? This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives. !1V"7AQau2TUqt#46BRrs35b$e%CSFc&d ? Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. Please contact Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. atlicensing@i-p-m.comor 404 526-8968. And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. The neo-gothic Riverside Church in New York City has a long history of progressive leaders and activism, dating back to its opening in October, 1930. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. endstream His speech appears below. And as 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. Dr. King's purpose is to make the church leaders he is speaking to aware that Martin Luther King Jr.'s words of April 4, 1967, now known as the "Beyond Vietnam" speech are such words. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr ., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam" in front of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. 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. Introduction Martin Luther King, Jr in his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" argued that US foreign policy was hypocritical when compared to the inequality present in the United States. Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. Harding, a native of Harlem, NYC, received his BA from City College of New York and Masters in Journalism from Columbia University before serving in the US Army (1953-55) and receiving a PhD in History at the University in Chicago in 1965. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. aYej{uOAs/9lo-6'j-gy,=F*9bt,Ukj"h jPIL 4. give the NLF a say in negotiations. King, Transformed Nonconformist, Sermon Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, 16 January 1966, CSKC. Somehow this madness must cease. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence argues his stance against the government and their decisions on war. Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech that startled even many of his supporters in the Civil Rights Movement. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong 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. Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. 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. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. The essence of the speech focused on the war in Vietnam. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nations homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. In that address he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. endstream Vincent Harding and his first wife, Rosemarie, were friends and colleagues of Martin and Coretta King in the Southern Freedom Movement, directing an interracial voluntary service unit of the Mennonite Church (Mennonite House) in . To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word (unquote). This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. 9 min read. This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. King, Interview on Face the Nation, 29 August 1965, RRML-TxTyU. What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. We have cooperated in the crushing in the crushing of the nations only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. Both sides alleged, more or less accurately, that the other side was continuously violating the terms . There is at the outset a very obvious and In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try 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. War is not the answer. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence was delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of concerned clergy and laity at Riverside Church in New York City, New York. He stated . 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? P. 206-215. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. . In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. King views the Vietnam war as only a symptom of a disease that is affecting America and the American spirit. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. 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. North Vietnam's war profoundly divided American citizens, seriously damaged American credibility around the world, and lent moral support to many radical movements in Africa and Latin America. P: (650) 723-2092 | F: (650) 723-2093 | kinginstitute@stanford.edu| Campus Map. The most serious trouble in recent decades has flared between Vietnam and China, and there have also been stand-offs between the Philippines and China. King, " The Casualties of the War in Vietnam, " 25 February 1967, CLPAC. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. The belief of the clergy took the theme of silence is betrayal. Published January 12, 2023. 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. All Rights Reserved. According to the PBS documentary MLK: A Call to Conscience (2010), the speech was denounced by 168 newspapers across the country. Procrastination is still the thief of time. A year to the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King publicly and decisively denounced not only the US war in Vietnam but the militarism that enabled the war and undermined American society. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. 3. Here's the essay I wrote in the video: In the speech "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence," Dr. Rev. 56 0 obj On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a speech named, "Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence" addressing the Vietnam War. 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. The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. In Dr. Martin Luther King's speech "Beyond VietnamA 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. Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. Credibility gap is a term that came into wide use with journalism, political and public discourse in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. Christina Knight is Managing Editor of Institutional Marketing at The WNET Group. 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. Many people believed that America had no reason to interfere, Dr. King being one of those people. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. "I think there . King's Beyond Vietnam sermon, delivered on April 4, 1967, at New York's Riverside Church . Notably, the economy grew at an average annual rate of 7.5% in 1991-2000 period. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. His indictment of the U.S. government and the war became known as The Riverside Church Speech and it was criticized by media from The New York Times to the Washington Post, and by groups such as the NAACP, which objected to the Civil Rights Movement weighing in on the war and joining anti-war protests. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. This February, the Humanities curriculum for Grade 7 is focused on the Vietnam War. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. 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. According to a recent report by Transparency International, Vietnam's corruption levels significantly decreased in 2021, down to 87th most corrupt from 104th in 2020. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an eloquent and stirring denunciation of the Vietnam War and US militarism. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. In early 1967 King stepped up his anti-war proclamations, giving similar speeches in Los Angeles and Chicago. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. This speech was released by Black Foru. PBS talk show host Tavis. 2. create an unilateral cease fire leading to peace talks. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Communist China did not spread communism beyond Vietnam [Laos and Cambodia]. Declaringmy conscience leaves me no other choice,King described the wars deleterious effects on both Americas poor and Vietnamese peasants and insisted that it was morally imperative for the United States to take radical steps to halt the war through nonviolent means (King, Beyond Vietnam, 139). Hear the entire recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.s Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence speech, including introductory applause and a greeting King makes to his fellow clergy speakers. In that address, he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. And 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. 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.