I'm Neal Conan. Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. But they didn't stay for the speech in its entirety. Email us: talk@npr.org. Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV). I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. Check your local listings. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us not their fellow Vietnamese the real enemy. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? And King was prescient on this. Nevertheless, I am in a different position as the president of the United States. In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a rebalancing of fiscal priorities away from Americas obsession with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, Dr. Excuse me. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News in Washington. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. 0000002516 00000 n
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. It was, to your earlier point, the most controversial speech he ever gave. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world a world that borders on our doors. 0000002427 00000 n
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. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the United Nations. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on lifes roadside; but that will be only an initial act. 0000001427 00000 n
So he was no longer on that particular list. 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. Recently one of them wrote these words: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. Tavis Smiley joins us today from the Sheryl Flowers Studios in Los Angeles. He had fallen off already the list, as you mentioned, had already fallen off the list of the most admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.. During the last year of his life, King worked with Spock to develop Vietnam Summer, a volunteer project to increase grassroots peace activism in time for the 1968 elections. Of course, again, that philosophy, when the papers got a hold of him the next day, that strategy didn't work so well. Twin towers were planned from Afghanistan. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Carson and Holloran, 1998. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond ones tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. If Dr. King were to say to the organizers of these events, I'd like to show up at your church on Sunday morning, at your rally this weekend, and here's what I want to say, there is a good argument to be made that Dr. King himself might not be welcome - might not be allowed to say what was in his heart, what his conscience really was, given the political correctness of the world that we live in today. No, Howard, I thank you for your phone call. If you remember the speech, tell us what it meant at that time, and does the principle of nonviolence apply in the age of al-Qaida? But they asked and rightly so what about Vietnam? I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. 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. In 1967, in the shadows of Columbia, Dr. King shifted the world again. And I can't tell young black men, who are being denied right here in the streets of America, that they should offer themselves up and to sign themselves up to go - to do harm to people around the world who they do not know. 0000001645 00000 n
That night Dr. King shocked the world and his followers when . It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. And the last poll taken in his life by Harris, the Harris Poll, Neal, found that nearly three quarters of the American people, nearly three quarters, had turned against Martin on this issue, and 55 percent of his own people, black folk, had turned against him. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech, lines 413-416, he repeats the phrase "this is not just" (161). What liberators? They asked if our own nation wasnt using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. But this is, again, precisely what King was concerned about, putting the lives of everyday Americans on the line in a fight that was not winnable and a war that was unjust. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just. . Tomorrow, the latest installment with the political junkie. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. But the entire speech, of course, thankfully, was recorded on audio. When the Rev. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that. 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. [18] He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. But they chose Riverside because King was going to be speaking some days later at a huge rally and march in New York City, and they knew that that rally was going to bring out a different kind of element, a more controversial element. Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam Speech is in many ways even more relevant today than in 1967. . Although the peace community lauded Kings willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports. And King had preached at this church any number of times before, of course. 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. However, you argue strongly in the film that it was completely consistent with the nature and the character of Dr. King and something he needed to say. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen . The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, organized the 1963 March on Washington, advocated for civil disobedience and. 0000012541 00000 n
Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. It's a powerful refrain, Neal, about what would've happened in his life, what he would've missed if he had sneezed at that very moment. 0000003454 00000 n
And so I think most Americans, Neal, know the "I Have A Dream" speech. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, 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. His wife, Coretta Scott King, on the other hand, critiqued the war publicly for years before her husband did. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just. It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: This is not just. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. In his last Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968, King said that he was convinced that [Vietnam] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world (King, Remaining Awake, 219). "[9] He stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands", and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children. So when the president suggests - and whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally diminishes in that Nobel speech Martin's powerful, nonviolent philosophy, it tweaked some people, and you'll see that in the presentation Wednesday night. He passed the Voting Rights Act. 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. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God. If Americas soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. In so many words, powerful interests told him: "Mind your own business.". A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? 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. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done. And at that march, he knew there would be people, as you point out in the film, waving Vietnamese flags and chanting CONAN: Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win, and that sort of thing and it would clearly be taken in a very different context. Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Mr. SMILEY: Indeed, he did. And his argument, basically, was that I cannot, as a practitioner and a true believer in nonviolence, espouse that nonviolent philosophy in our movement and then somehow sit idly by when I see violence being engaged around the world. While his legacy is commonly remembered by his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, we've sourced four powerful, lesser-known speeches from Dr. King to listen to and commemorate . The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. Challenges of the final years of Martin Luther King, Jr. We must move past indecision to action. Before he was assassinated at age 39, the Rev. In the 1950s and 1960s, his words led the Civil Rights Movement and helped change society. We have destroyed their land and their crops. Four years after President John F. Kennedy sent the first American troops into Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., issued his first public statement on the war. While King was personally opposed to the war, he was concerned that publicly criticizing U.S. foreign policy would damage his relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been instrumental in passing civil rights legislation and who had declared in April 1965 that he was willing to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war in Vietnam. 0000009985 00000 n
Martin built his speech that night, Neal, around three major points: around increasing militarism, around escalating poverty and around the issue of racism.