king 1967 speech

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(1967) martin luther king, jr., “beyond vietnam: a time to break silence”.

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. In that address, he articulated his reasons for his opposition to the Southeast Asian conflict. His speech appears below.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. 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. The recent statement 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.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed 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.

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. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. 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. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

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. In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, 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.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. 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. 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.

The Importance of Vietnam

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.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath– America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. 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. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. 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? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate 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. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

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. 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.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. 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. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. 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. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. 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. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change–especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

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. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese –the real enemy. 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. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. 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? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on–save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front –that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the north” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? 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? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? 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? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them — the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence? 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. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. So, too, with Hanoi. 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. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. 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. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. 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 agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. 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. 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. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of 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. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. 2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. 3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. 4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. 5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

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. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

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. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. 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-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

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 investment.

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. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. 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. A true revolution of values will lay hands 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 nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. 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. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. 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. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept–so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force–has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 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. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. 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. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world — a world that borders on our doors. 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.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful–struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, Off’ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light. Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet ’tis truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above his own.

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This Day In History : April 4

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Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the war

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 City. In it, he says that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and peace movements. King proposed that the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam; declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations.

King had been a solid supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society , but he became increasingly concerned about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, as his concerns became more public, his relationship with the Johnson administration deteriorated. King came to view U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia as little more than imperialism. Additionally, he believed that the Vietnam War diverted money and attention from domestic programs created to aid the Black poor. Furthermore, he said, "The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home…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."

King maintained his antiwar stance and supported peace movements until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after delivering his "Beyond Vietnam" speech.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

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The Story Of King's 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech

Dr. Benjamin Spock (2nd-L), Martin Luther King, Jr. (C), Father Frederick Reed and Cleveland Robinson lead a huge pacifist rally protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, Mar. 16, 1967 in New York. AFP/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it.

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley's new documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience explores King's speech. The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports . Smiley spoke with both scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel.

By the time King made the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, Smiley tells host Neal Conan, "he had fallen off already the list of most-admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year." Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. It was the speech he labored over the most."

After King delivered the speech, Smiley reports, "168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." Not only that, but then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House. "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done."

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April 4, 1967: Martin Luther King Jr. Delivers “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain . . .

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in New York City at Riverside Church on the occasion of his becoming co-chairperson of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (subsequently renamed  Clergy and Laity Concerned ).

Dr. King in a March 25, 1967 antiwar march in Chicago.

Titled “Beyond Vietnam,” it was his first major speech on the war in Vietnam—what the Vietnamese aptly call the American War.

King linked the escalating U.S. commitment to that war with its abandonment of the commitment to social justice at home.

His call for a “shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society” and for us to “struggle for a new world” has acquired even greater urgency than when he issued it decades ago.

Read more from the lesson A Revolution of Values . Read and listen to the Beyond Vietnam speech.

Related Resources

Teaching the Vietnam War: Beyond the Headlines

Teaching Activity. By the Zinn Education Project. 100 pages. Eight lessons about the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, and whistleblowing.

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A Revolution of Values

Teaching Activity. By Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 3 pages. Text of speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War, followed by three teaching ideas.

The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King Jr.

Article. By Derrick Alridge. 2006. 25 pages. Critique of textbook representation of Martin Luther King Jr. as messiah, embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement, and a moderate.

Challenging Ourselves: Martin Luther King, the Movement, and Its Lessons for Today

Article. By Charles E. Cobb. 2017. Charles E. Cobb Jr. discusses the Civil Rights Movement and its lessons, and how they apply to current movements.

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Hundreds of thousands of civil rights activists marched on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

April 15, 1967: Massive Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrations

Amidst growing opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, large-scale anti-war protests were held in New York, San Francisco, and many other cities.

April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers.

The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech

On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Dr. 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 B. Johnson , who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.

From the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, King eloquently speaks of breaking “the betrayal of my own silences” and goes on to reveal the “seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.”

With this pivotal address, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner sought to bridge the movement for civil rights and justice to the antiwar movements: “I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

One year later, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis.

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Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence

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Beyond Vietnam: The MLK speech that caused an uproar

Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech that may have helped put a target on his back. That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break The Silence , was an unequivocal denunciation of America’s involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict.

The speech began conventionally. King thanked his hosts, the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. But he left little doubt about his position when he quoted from the organization’s statement.

“…I found myself in full accord when I read (the statement’s) opening lines: 'A time comes when silence is betrayal,’ “ King told the crowd gathered at Riverside Baptist Church in New York.

He indicated that his commitment to non-violence left him little choice. “…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: my own government.”

King had given an antiwar speech in February 1967. But that sentiment was often described as pro-Communist in an America that was in the midst of the Cold War. So King spoke again two months later, to ensure his position was clear.

In the April speech, King carefully laid out the history of the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. He started at 1945, when Vietnam's prime minister Ho Chi Minh overthrew the French and Japanese. He carried his audience through American support for France’s effort to regain its former colony, and for Vietnam’s dictatorial first president Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated in 1963. Through it all, King noted, America sent more and more soldiers to Vietnam.

What you didn't know about King's 'Dream' speech

Martin Luther King Jr. quotes: Here are the 10 most tweeted

Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiring Nobel Peace Prize speech

"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. … Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy, " he said.

King also accused increasing military costs of taking money from domestic programs meant to fight poverty and racism. Instead, he said, young black men "crippled by our society" were being sent "eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

In the decades since his assassination, the speech has all but disappeared from the public consciousness. His career is almost solely represented by the the last half of the 1963 I Have A Dream  speech, delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which King anticipated a world where content of character matter more than skin color.

In 1967, however, Beyond Vietnam  ignited an uproar.

In its April 7 editorial “Dr. King’s Error,” The New York Times lambasted King for fusing two problems that are “distinct and separate.”

“The strategy of uniting the peace movement and civil rights could very well be disastrous for both causes,” the paper said. Similar criticism came from the black press as well as from the NAACP.

“He created a firestorm ... of criticism,” said Clarence B. Jones, King’s adviser and the speechwriter who helped shape the iconic Dream  speech. Jones is now a diversity professor at the University of San Francisco, and a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

“People were saying, ‘Well you know you’re a civil rights leader, mind your own business. Talk about what you know about.’”

But King did not see himself as a civil rights leader at all, according to Clayborne Carson, who directs the institute. Carson is also a professor of history at Stanford University.

“…I think Rosa Parks recruited him to be that,” Carson said. “Had he not been in Montgomery in 1955 (for the bus boycott), he would have not become a civil rights leader; he would have certainly become a social gospel minister. He was already that.”

King articulated his commitment to social justice issues while a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary in the late 1940s. His stated concerns included unemployment and economic insecurity, not race relations.

King made good on that commitment in 1966, when he joined forces with local Chicago activists to fight for fair housing. But black churches refused to work with him, so he set up headquarters at an integrated West Side church, Warren Avenue Congregational Church.

“I think (the black churches) were scared of the (Richard J.) Daley administration and the political machine,” said Prexy Nesbitt , a long-time activist who worked with King. He now teaches African history at Columbia College in Chicago.

In Chicago, and later in Detroit, King was challenged by younger activists who mocked his insistence on nonviolence at home while American soldiers were killing thousands in Vietnam.

By the time of the Riverside speech, it had taken King two years to become an outspoken critic of the war. Doing so would destroy his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, who was widely revered for pushing through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965.

“Had there been some way of carrying on the Vietnam War without having any cost to domestic programs, (King) might have maintained his silence,” Carson said.

The aftermath of the speech and the mounting opposition took a personal toll on King. Nesbitt saw King in 1968 and was struck by his changed demeanor.

“What I saw was a person who was more aware of the world situation, most of all Vietnam, and the forces of mal-intent that were mobilized and mobilizing against him.”

Almost 50 years later, Nesbitt is convinced the speech was the final straw for people who were determined to kill King, who was ultimately shot to death by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

“The racists were saying, ‘That going too far. Now he’s gonna tell us how to run our country. Who does he think he is?’ ” Nesbitt said.

Carson doesn’t think the speech directly caused King’s death. But he thinks it was a factor in a fate that was “already determined.”

“There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead," Carson said. "If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ‘60s in any case.”

Vietnam War

May 11, 1961 to April 30, 1975

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. Answering press questions after addressing a Howard University audience on 2 March 1965, King asserted that the war in Vietnam was “accomplishing nothing” and called for a negotiated settlement (Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence”).

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. Though he avoided condemning the war outright, at the August 1965 annual  Southern Christian Leadership Conference  (SCLC) convention King called for a halt to bombing in North Vietnam, urged that the United Nations be empowered to mediate the conflict, and told the crowd that “what is required is a small first step that may establish a new spirit of mutual confidence … a step capable of breaking the cycle of mistrust, violence and war” (King, 12 August 1965). He supported Johnson’s calls for diplomatic negotiations and economic development as the beginnings of such a step. Later that year King framed the issue of war in Vietnam as a moral issue: “As a minister of the gospel,” he said, “I consider war an evil. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point” (“Opposes Vietnam War”).

King’s opposition to the war provoked criticism from members of Congress, the press, and from his civil rights colleagues who argued that expanding his civil rights message to include foreign affairs would harm the black freedom struggle in America. Fearful of being labeled a Communist, which would diminish the impact of his civil rights work, King tempered his criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam through late 1965 and 1966. His wife, Coretta Scott  King , took a more active role in opposing the war, speaking at a rally at the Washington Monument on 27 November 1965 with Benjamin  Spock , the renowned pediatrician and anti-war activist, and joined in other demonstrations.

In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a “rebalancing” of fiscal priorities away from America’s “obsession” with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, “Dr. King Scores Poverty”). King led his first anti-war march in Chicago on 25 March 1967, and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America” (“Dr. King Leads Chicago”). A few days later, King made it clear that his peace work was not undertaken as the leader of the SCLC, but “as an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace” (“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience”).

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. Seeking to reduce the potential backlash by framing his speech within the context of religious objection to war, King addressed a crowd of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. King delivered a speech entitled “ Beyond Vietnam ,” pointing out that the war effort was “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” (King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” 143).

Although the peace community lauded King’s willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. The  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry  Belafonte  led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967.

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. King linked his anti-war and civil rights work in speeches throughout the country, where he described the three problems he saw plaguing the nation: racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. 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). Nearly five years after King’s  assassination , American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other.

Branch,  At Canaan’s Edge , 2006.

“Dr. King Leads Chicago Peace Rally,”  New York Times , 26 March 1967.

“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience If War Intensifies,”  New York Times , 2 April 1967.

“Dr. Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” 90th Cong., 2d sess.,  Congressional Record  114 (9 April 1968): 9391–9397.

Garrow,  Bearing the Cross , 1986.

King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, Excerpts, Address at mass rally on 12 August 1965, 13 August 1965,  MLKJP-GAMK .

King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” in  A Knock at Midnight , ed. Carson and Holloran, 1998.

(Scott) King,  My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1969.

“Opposes Vietnam War,”  New York Times , 11 November 1965.

Paul A. Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall,”  Washington Post , 3 March 1965.

Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Dr. King Scores Poverty Budget,”  New York Times , 16 December 1966.

The Other America Speech Transcript – Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 14, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech entitled “The Other America” at Stanford University. Read the speech transcript here.

Transcribe Your Own Content Try Rev for free and save time transcribing, captioning, and subtitling.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 00:44 ) Mr. Bell, and members of the faculty and members of the student body of this great institution of learning, ladies and gentlemen. I have several things that one could talk about before such a large, concerned, and enlightened audience. There are so many problems facing our nation and our world, that one could just take off anywhere. But today, I would like to talk mainly about the race problem, since I have to rush right out and go to New York to talk about Vietnam tomorrow, and I’ve been talking about it a great deal this week and weeks before that.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 01:32 ) And I’d like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the other America. And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for our situation. And in a sense, this America is overflowing with the miracle of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds, and freedom and human dignity for their spirit. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America, millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 03:02 ) But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. And they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 04:12 ) In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to other children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority, farming every day in their little mental skies. And as we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams. Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America. Some are Mexican-American, some are Puerto Ricans, some are Indians, some happen to be from other groups, millions of them are Appalachian whites. Probably the largest group in this other America, in proportion to its size and the population is the American Negro. The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, ghetto-

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 05:32 ) Is to deal with this problem, to deal with this problem of the two Americas. We are seeking to make America one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 05:50 ) Now, let me say that the struggle for our civil rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America is much more difficult today than it was five, 10 years ago. Fought about a decade or maybe 12 years. We’ve fought across the South, in various struggles to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation. In a sense, this was a struggle for decency. We could not go to a lunch counter, in so many instances, and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back. In transportation within cities, we often had to stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote, in so many areas of the South.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 07:13 ) And the struggle was to deal with these problems. Certainly, they were difficult problems. They were humiliating conditions. By the thousands, we protested these conditions. We made it clear that it was ultimately more honorable to accept jail cell experiences than the accept segregation and humiliation. By the thousands, students and adults decided to sit in at segregated lunch counters, to protest conditions there. And when they were sitting at those lunch hours, they were, in reality, standing up for the best in the American dream and seeking to take the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 08:23 ) Many things were gained, as a result of these years of struggle. In 1964, the Civil Rights Bill came into being. After the Birmingham Movement, which did a great deal to subpoena the conscience of a large segment of the nation, to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. After the Selma Movement in 1965, we were able to get a voting rights bill. All of these things represented strides.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 09:00 ) But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality, and it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good, solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine quality integrated education a reality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 09:54 ) And so today, we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality. It’s not merely a struggle against extremist behavior toward Negros. And I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in the South are not willing to go all the way now. I came to see this in a very difficult and painful way in Chicago, over the last year, where I’ve lived and worked. Some of the people who came quickly to march with us in Selma and Birmingham weren’t active around Chicago. And I came to see that so many people who supported morally and even financially what we were doing in Birmingham and Selma were really outraged against the extremist behavior of Bull Connor and Jim Clark toward Negros, rather than believing in genuine equality for Negros. And I think this is what we’ve got to see now, and this is what makes the struggle much more difficult.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 11:06 ) And so as a result of all of this, we see many problems existing today that are growing more difficult. It’s something that is often overlooked, but Negros generally live in worse slums today than 20 or 25 years ago. In the North, schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954, when the Supreme Court’s decision on desegregation was rendered. Economically, the Negro is worse off today than he was 15 and 20 years ago. And so the unemployment rate among whites, at one time, was about the same as the unemployment rate among Negros. But today, the unemployment rate among Negros is twice that of whites. And the average income of the Negro is today 50% less than whites.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 12:24 ) And as we look at these problems, we see them growing and developing every day. We see the fact that the Negro economically is facing a Depression in his everyday life that is more staggering than the Depression of the ’30s. The unemployment rate of the nation as a whole is about 4%. Statistics would say, from the Labor Department, that among Negros, it’s about 8.4%. But these are the persons who are in the labor market, who still go to employment agencies to seek jobs, and so they can be calculated. The statistics can be gotten because they are still somehow in the labor market. But there are hundreds of thousands of Negros who have given up. They’ve lost hope. They’ve come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor for them, with no exit sign. And so they no longer go to look for a job. There are those who would estimate that these persons who are called the discouraged persons would be 6% or 7% in the Negro community. And that means that unemployment among Negros may well be 16%. And among Negro youth in some of our large urban areas, it goes to 30 and 40%. And so you can see what I mean when I say that in the Negro community, that is a major, tragic, and staggering Depression that we face in our everyday lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 14:10 ) Now the other thing that we’ve got to come to see now, that many others didn’t see too well during the last 10 years, and that is that racism is still alive in American society, and much more widespread than we realize. And we must see racism for what it is. It is a myth of the superior and the inferior race. It is the false and tragic notion that one particular group, one particular race, is responsible for all of the progress, all of the insights in the total flow of history. And the theory that another group or another race is totally depraved, innately impure, and innately inferior. In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 15:19 ) Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion, and he ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about six million Jews. And this is a tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him, if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, to have a good, decent job or to go to school with him, merely because of my race, he is saying, consciously or unconsciously, that I do not deserve to exist. To use a philosophical analogy here, racism is not based on some empirical generalization. It is based, rather, on an ontological affirmation. It is not the assertion that certain people are behind, culturally or otherwise, because of environmental conditions. It is the affirmation that the very being of a people is inferior. And this is a great tragedy of it. I say that however unpleasant it is, we must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America. It’s still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 16:53 ) This leads me to say something about another discussion that we hit a great deal, and that is the so-called white backlash. I would like to honestly say to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon. It’s not something that just came into being because shouts of black power or because Negros engaged in riots in Watts, for instance. The fact is that the state of California voted a fair housing bill out of existence before anybody shouted black power or before anybody rioted in Watts. It may well be that shouts of black power and riots in Watts and the Harlems and the other areas are the consequences of the white backlash, rather than the cause of them. What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single, solid, monistic, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of civil rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of goodwill to admit.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 18:16 ) It is said on the Statue of Liberty that America is a home of exiles. But it doesn’t take us long to realize that America has been the home of its white exiles from Europe, but it has not evinced the same kind of maternal care and concern for its black exiles from Africa. And it is no wonder that in one of its sorrow songs, the Negro could sing out, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” What great estrangement, what great sense of rejection caused a people to emerge with such a metaphor, as they looked over their lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 19:06 ) What I’m trying to get across is that our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the question of racial justice and racial equality. But over and over again, at the same time, it made certain backwards steps. And this has been the persistence of the so-called white backlash. In 1863, the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period, America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic flower that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic flower to its black peasants, so to speak.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 20:15 ) And this is why Frederick Douglass could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time, but it does not stop there.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 20:47 ) In 1875, the nation passed a civil rights bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill, and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty-stricken, for the disadvantaged, and brought into being a poverty bill. But at the same time, it put such little money into the program that it was hardly and still remains hardly a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath, contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things, tell us that America has been back lashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negros and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 22:03 ) So these conditions, persistence of widespread poverty, of slums and of tragic conditions in schools and in other areas of life, all of these things have brought about a great deal of despair and a great deal of desperation, a great deal of disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities. Today, all of our cities confront huge problems. All of our cities are potentially powder kegs, as a result of the continued existence of these conditions. Many, in moments of anger, many, in moments of deep bitterness, engage in riots.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 22:56 ) Let me say, as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapons available to oppress people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve, that in a real sense, it is impractical for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. Continue to affirm that there is another way.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 23:54 ) But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities, as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. And in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. So in a real sense, our nation’s summer’s riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 25:40 ) Now, let me go on to say that, if we are to deal with all of the problems that I’ve talked about, that we are to bring America to the point that we have one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, there are certain things that we must do. The job ahead must be massive and positive. We must develop massive action programs all over the United States of America, in order to deal with the problems that I have mentioned.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 26:23 ) Now, in order to develop these massive action programs, we’ve got to get rid of one or two false notions that continue to exist in our society. One is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. I’m sure you’ve heard this idea. It is the notion almost that there is something in the very flow oF time that will miraculously cure all evils. And I have heard this over and over again. There are those, and they’re often sincere people, that will say to Negros and their allies in the white community, that we should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray. And in 100 or 200 years, the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 27:19 ) I think there is an answer to that myth, and it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists in our nation, have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill, and it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people, who sit around and say, wait on time. Somewhere, we must come to see that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must have time, and we must realize that the time is always right to do right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 28:36 ) Now, there’s another notion that gets out. It’s around everywhere. It’s in the South, it’s in the North, it’s in California and all over our nation. It’s the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem, it can’t do anything in this area. And those who project this argument, contend that you’ve got to change the heart, and that you can’t change the heart through legislation. Now, I’ll be the first one to say that there is real need for a lot of heart changing in our country. And I believe in changing the heart. I preach about it. I believe in the need for conversion, in many instances, and regeneration, to use theological terms. And I would be the first to say that if the race problem in America is to be solved, the white person must treat the Negro right, not merely because the law says it, but because it’s natural. Because it’s right. And because the Negro is his brother.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 29:45 ) And so I realize that if we are to have a truly integrated society, men and women will have to rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable. But after saying this, let me say another thing, which gives the other side. And that is that although it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. Even though it may be true that the law cannot change the heart, it can restrain the harvest. Even though it may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. And so while the law may not change the hearts of men, it can and it does change the habits of men. And when you begin to change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes will be changed. Pretty soon, the hearts will be changed. I am convinced that we still need strong civil rights legislation. And there’s a bill before Congress right now to have a national, federal open housing bill. A federal law declaring discrimination in housing unconstitutional. And also a bill to make the administration of justice real, all over our country.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 31:22 ) Now, nobody can doubt the need for this. Nobody can doubt the need, if he thinks about the fact that since 1963, some 58 Negros and white civil rights workers have been brutally murdered in the state of Mississippi alone, and not a single person has been convicted for these dastardly crimes. There have been some indictments, but no one has been convicted. And so there is a need with the whole question of the administration of justice. There is a need for our fair housing laws all over our country. And it is tragic, indeed, that Congress, last year, allowed this bill to die. When that bill died in Congress, a bit of democracy died, a bit of our commitment to justice died. If it happens again in this session of Congress, a greater degree of our commitment to democratic principles will die. I can see no more dangerous trend in our country, than the constant developing of predominantly Negro-central cities, ringed by white suburbs. This is only inviting social disaster. And the only way this problem will be solved is by the nation taking a strong stand and by state governments taking a strong stand against housing segregation and against discrimination in all of these areas.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 33:05 ) Now, there’s another thing that I’d like to mention, as I talk about the massive action program, and time will not permit me to go into specific programmatic action to any great degree. But it must be realized now that the Negro cannot solve the problem by himself. There again, there are those who always say to Negros, why don’t you do something for yourself? Why don’t you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps? And we hear this over and over again. Now certainly, there are many things that we must do for ourselves, and that only we can do for ourselves. Certainly, we must develop within a sense of dignity and self-respect that nobody else can give us, a sense of manhood, a sense of personhood, a sense of not being ashamed of our heritage, not being ashamed of our color. It was wrong and tragic that the Negro ever allowed himself to be ashamed of the fact that he was black, or ashamed of the fact that his ancestral home was Africa. And so there’s a great deal that the Negro can do to develop self-respect. There is a great deal that the Negro must do and can do to amass political and economic power within his own community and by using his own resources.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 34:38 ) And so we must do certain things for ourselves, but this must not negate the fact and cause the nation to overlook the fact that the Negro cannot solve the problem himself. Man was on the plane with me some weeks ago, and he came and talked with me, and he said, “The problem, Dr. King, that I see with what you all are doing is that every time I see you and other Negros, you are protesting. And you aren’t doing anything for yourselves.” And he went on to tell me that he was very poor at one time, and he was able to make it by doing something for himself. “Why don’t you teach your people,” he said, “to lift themselves by their own bootstraps.” And then he went on to say other groups are faced disadvantages, the Irish, the Italians, and he went down the line. And I said to him that it does not help the Negro, it only deepens his frustration, for unfeeling, insensitive people to say to him that other ethnic groups who migrated, are immigrants to this country that’s 100 years ago or so, have gotten beyond him, and he came here some 344 years ago.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 35:57 ) I went on to remind him the Negro came to this country involuntarily, in chains, while others came voluntarily. I went on to remind him that no other racial group has been a slave on American soil. I went on to remind him that the other problem that we have faced over the years is that the society placed a stigma on the color of the Negro, on the color of his skin. Because he was black, doors were closed to him that would not close to other groups. And need to say to people that you are to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And the fact is that millions of Negros, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. And they find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do, if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 37:18 ) Now, one of the answers, it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people and for all families of our country. It seems to me that the civil rights movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income, begin to organize people all over our country and mobilize forces, so that we can bring to the attention of our nation, this need and this something which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 38:12 ) Now, I said I wasn’t going to talk about Vietnam, but I can’t make a speech without mentioning some of the problems that we face there, because I think this world has diverted attention from civil rights. It has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country, and it’s brought to the forefront the military industrial complex that even President Eisenhower warned us against at one time. Above all, it is destroying human lives, destroying the lives of thousands of the young, promising men of our nation. Destroying the lives of little boys and little girls in Vietnam. But one of the greatest things that this war is doing to us in civil rights is that it is allowing the great society to be shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam every day. And I submit, this afternoon, that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it. National gross product of America will rise to the astounding figure of some 780 billion dollars this year. We have the resources. The question is whether the nation has the will. And I submit that if we can spent 35 billion dollars a year to fight an ill-considered war in Vietnam and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, our nation can spend billion of dollars on their own two feet, right here on earth.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 40:13 ) Let me say another thing that’s more in the realm of the spirit, I guess. That is if we are to go on in the days ahead and make true brotherhood a reality, it is necessary for us to realize, more than ever before, that the destinies of the Negro and the white man are tied together. Now, there’s still a lot of people who don’t realize this. The racists still don’t realize this, but it is a fact now that Negros and whites are tied together, and we need each other. The Negro needs the white man to save him from his fears, the white man needs the Negro to save him from his guilt. We are tied together in so many ways, our language, our music, our cultural patterns, our material prosperity, and even our food are an amalgam of black and white.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 41:27 ) And so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes. There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster. It does not recognize the need of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and justice. We must come to see now that integration is not merely a romantic or aesthetic something, where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure. Integration must be seen also in political terms, where there is shared power, and where black men and white men share power together, to build a new and a great nation. In a real sense, we’re all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. John Donne placed it years ago in graphic terms, no man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And he goes on toward the end to say any man’s death diminishes me because I’m involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. And so we all in the same situation, the salvation of the Negro will mean the salvation of the white man, and the destruction of the life of the ongoing progress of the Negro will be the destruction of ongoing progress of the nation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 43:12 ) Now, let me say, finally, that we have difficult days ahead. But I haven’t despair. Somehow, I maintain hope in spite of hope, and I’ve talked about the difficulties and how hard the problems will be, as we tackle them. But I want to close by saying this afternoon that I still have faith in the future. And I still believe that these problems can be solved. And so I will not join anyone who will say that we still can’t develop a coalition of conscience. I realize and understand the discontent and the agony and the disappointment, and even the bitterness of those who feel that whites in America cannot be trusted. And I would be the first to say that there are all too many who are still guided by the racist ethos.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 44:15 ) And I am still convinced that there are still many white persons of goodwill. And I’m happy to say that I see them every day in the student generation, who cherish democratic principles and justice above principle, and who will stick with the cause of justice and the cause of civil rights and the cause of peace throughout the days ahead. And so I refuse to despair. I think we are going to achieve our freedom because however much America strays away from the ideals of justice, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star Spangled Banner were written, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebears labored here without wages. They made cotton kings. They built the homes of their masters, in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. Yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to grow and develop.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 45:43 ) I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will surely fail. We’re going to win our freedom. Because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. No lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. Truth crushed to earth will rise again. We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. Truth forever on the scaffold wronged, forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope, this faith. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nations into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: ( 46:56 ) With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and live together as brothers and sisters, all over this great nation. That will be a great day. That will be a great tomorrow. In the word sure to speak symbolically, that will be the day when the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy. Thank you.

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How Martin Luther King Jr. Changed His Mind About America

M ore than fifty years after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. remains a towering figure in the history of American civil rights. As with most influential thinkers, there is a certain amount of ambiguity in the public understanding of King and his legacy. White Americans were very skeptical of King while he was alive, but as his reputation and popularity grew, advocates of very different positions tried to claim him for their own. Nowadays conservatives are fond of invoking his most famous speech, 1963’s I Have a Dream , with its vision of a world in where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Progressives are fonder of The Other America , a more radical speech from 1967, where he said that we may “have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say ‘wait on time.’”

Those two Kings are ones we know, but there are other Kings we need to listen to as well. The I Have a Dream speech gives us the standard story of America. According to this story, America starts with the Declaration of Independence, which states our foundational values, particularly equality. The Founders’ Constitution turns these values into law—imperfectly at first, but American history is a progress towards redeeming the “promissory note” of the Declaration, and one day we will “live out the true meaning of … ‘all men are created equal.’”

This story is comforting and reassuring, but it is actually a barrier to progress, as the King of The Other America came to see. For one thing, it supports what he called the indifference of the good people, the idea that social progress “rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.” For another, it tells us to look to Founding America and the Declaration of Independence as the source of our fundamental ideals. But doing that tells us that those ideals can co-exist with white supremacy. The truth is that Founding America was not a nation dedicated to our idea of equality. The Betsy Ross flag shows us thirteen stars in a circle, and every star represents a state where slavery was legal.

The idea that the Declaration provides the way forward is deeply problematic. A younger King saw this. As a junior in high school in 1944, competing in a debate contest, he delivered a speech called The Negro and the Constitution . Like I Have a Dream , this speech examined whether the treatment of Blacks in America was consistent with American values. But unlike I Have a Dream , it did not locate those values in the Founding. “America gave its full pledge of freedom seventy-five years ago,” King said: in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. The Civil War and Reconstruction created a “new order,” he said, “backed by amendments to the national constitution.” It is these amendments, not the Declaration, that promised equality.

Read More: What It Is Was Like Hearing Martin Luther King Jr. Give ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

The focus on Reconstruction gives us a different origin story. This one tells us our mission is to take up the struggle of a war for liberty and a remaking of society in pursuit of justice and equality. It is less reassuring, which is presumably why King abandoned it in I Have a Dream , seeking to enlist white moderates in his cause. But the allies he won turned out to be the“good people” of The Other America who sat by and counseled patience. And if this story is more divisive, it is also more true. In the Civil War, the U.S. issued an emancipation proclamation—in the Revolution, the British did. In the Reconstruction Constitution, the U.S. banned slavery—in the Founders’ Constitution, they protected it. And it is more inclusive; it locates our values not in documents written by white slaveowners but by those who fought to end slavery, blacks as well as whites.

This is a better story. And it is the story that King came back to. The day before his assassination in 1968, he spoke in Memphis, where sanitation workers were striking for decent wages and working conditions . King was ill that night and had asked a friend to speak in his place, but when he heard that hundreds of supporters were waiting to hear him, he went to the Mason Temple, took the stage, and spoke extemporaneously. I’ve Been to the Mountaintop starts by considering the question of what moment in human history King would like to live in. He considers some of the high points of antiquity—classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance. He ignores the Founding entirely—the first moment of American history that gets a reference is the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the end, King says he would like to live just where he is, because “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And … the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’”

We march for freedom, King told his listeners, and we will win if we stick together. He knew that freedom had a cost. “I may not get there with you.” But “we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” And he sent the audience out into the night with one final spur, invoking the great clash where white and black Americans fought together for the freedom of all. The last line of the last speech that King ever delivered is not from the Declaration or the Constitution. It is from the Civil War; it is the first line of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

That is when our America was born, not with the Revolution and the Founding but with the Civil War and Reconstruction. The values we must carry forward are not those of Thomas Jefferson and the Framers of the Constitution; they are the values of Abraham Lincoln and the Reconstruction Congress. It is time for us to see this. It is time for us to join that march.

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Breaking the Silence

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• April 19, 2021

Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech can teach us about race and class today

Fifty years ago the times were tumultuous, as they are now. Activists were fragmented by gender, race, tactics and issue silos then too. The machinery of surveillance and repression by local, state and federal government was intense and about to become more so.

Despite knowing the risk of speaking out, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King stepped forward to offer clarity and direction. His speech,  Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence  was delivered on April 4, 1967, to an overflow crowd at Riverside Church in New York City.

Now the speech is receiving new attention, not for reasons of wistful nostalgia but as a vision even more relevant to our times than it was then. To learn more about events already organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “A Time to Break Silence” speech or how to help initiate one yourself, go  here .

In his speech, Dr. King identified the triplets of racism, militarism and materialism as the legacy we must overcome. Why triplets? Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a peace movement veteran,  explains : “Why did Dr. King use the word ‘triplets’ when ‘three’ or ‘triad’ would have been enough? Perhaps because biological triplets share a great deal of their DNA. What DNA do these triplets share? The DNA of subjugation, of top-down power.”

To be clear, Dr. King’s remarks did not incorporate the possibility of ecocatastrophe or the structures of patriarchy and sexism into his analysis and call. Can there be any doubt that today he would?

What’s more important is that we desperately need Dr. King’s coherent and comprehensive explanation of the system that we seek to change. That system is designed to frustrate and confuse us. It sorts us into categories so that some focus on immigration, some on tax policy, some on opposing war, some on gun control, some on the status of women, some on the environment, some on mass incarceration, some on labor issues. And so on. It’s as though some hidden overseer was demanding that whatever you do, don’t you dare see the forest. Just look at the trees. Or else.

The reaction to Dr. King’s 1967 speech proves the point. “Dr. King’s Error” was the headline on the New York Times  editorial  of April 7, 1967. Its concluding sentence read, “There are no simple answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial justice in this country. Linking these hard complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion.”

The Washington Post piled on too. As Tavis Smiley reports in his excellent  book ,  Death of a King , the Post said: “[King] has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies. … and an even graver injury to himself. Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause to his country and to his people.” Even other civil right leaders including Bayard Rustin and Whitney Young opposed King’s systemic analysis.

One year to the day after giving the speech, Dr. King was assassinated.

Of all the points made in  Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence , the notion of a radical revolution in values is the most enlightening. Why? For 400 years the see-saw political debate between what are now called “liberals and conservatives” (those terms are relatively modern) has been essentially the same.

The argument has two moving parts: Should the violently established white male private property power system on which the nation is based be moderated? If so, in what way?

Over time white male property power has been mitigated. In most cases, blood was shed in the process, our delusional belief in “peaceful transitions of power,” notwithstanding. What we call the Revolutionary War, which overthrew control by British white male property power in favor of local control was neither the first nor the last violent struggle. The viciousness of slavery and the slaughter of Indians created the military basis for the Revolutionary War in the first place.

Later, the war that ended chattel slavery and the counter revolution that followed generated enormous death, injury and destruction.

Some change has been more peaceful. Although the struggle was long and difficult, women gained the right to vote without loss of life, perhaps because women’s suffrage was seen as less threatening. For a brief time the union movement was able to offset some of the power of rapidly evolving corporate juggernauts with minimal violence.

More recently however, despite its dedication to nonviolence, the 1960s movement that overthrew the Jim Crow system was met with the assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, four little girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church and many others. Peaceful demonstrators were routinely attacked with dogs, fire hoses, ax handles and other weapons.

Each diminution of white male private property power was met with ferocious resistance and backlash. By way of just one current example, the value of the vote for all citizens is under assault from many fronts including but not limited to gerrymandering, money in politics, mass incarceration, emergency management of local governments and voter suppression. Voting rights for African Americans are especially insecure.

This tendency of white male power to roar back like a cancer out of remission is a defining characteristic of U.S. history. Political parties come and go. But the underlying dynamic remains the same. As if to celebrate the continuity of the power class, one of President Trump’s first acts was to install in the Oval office a portrait of one of the most racist, bloodthirsty and sexist presidents of all time—Democratic Party icon Andrew Jackson.

“This is not who we are,” say those who deplore assaults and bigotry toward women, African Americans, immigrants or Muslims. But what if it IS who we are? What if we were able to admit to ourselves that fairness, equality and peace are the deviation, not the other way around.

What if we deeply understood the presidency of Donald Trump as a symptom, not the disease itself.

Dr. King’s speech, to which the late Dr. Vincent Harding was a major contributor, is a beacon drawing us to be honest with ourselves.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in Northern ghettoes] I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion 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 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 ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

What if, as Dr. King preached, the values are themselves the problem? What if the core American value is hypocrisy? Did not the Founding Fathers proclaim in 1776 that all men are created equal while simultaneously creating the very first apartheid state in which only white male property owners had citizenship rights and some humans were bought, sold and brutally abused by the millions?

In 2017, when  slavery is compared to immigration  or the  founding of historically Black colleges to schools of “choice,”  it is tempting to cringe or laugh. Or both. But something far deeper is going on here. We are not just a divided nation. Our individual minds are often confused and divided as well.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars needs restructuring.

To revisit Dr. King’s speech is to open the possibility of more productive kind of conversation about our nation and the world in which find ourselves now.

Across the nation people are coming together in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, community centers, and living rooms to read and reflect on Dr. King’s speech and how we can use it to build today’s movement. If there is no event near where you are, you can read  Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence  here or organize one.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. 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. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

ifty years ago the times were tumultuous, as they are now. Activists were fragmented by gender, race, tactics and issue silos then too. The machinery of surveillance and repression by local, state and federal government was intense and about to become more so.

Across the nation people are coming together in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, community centers, and living rooms to read and reflect on Dr. King’s speech and how we can use it to build today’s movement. If there is no event near where you are, you can read  Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence  here or organize one.

https://www.salon.com/2018/01/15/martin-luther-kings-1967-speech-can-teach-us-about-race-and-class-today_partner/

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Martin Luther King Jr. Saw Three Evils in the World

Racism was only the first.

The Hungry Club Forum began as a secret initiative of the Butler Street YMCA, in Atlanta. It was a place where sympathetic white politicians could meet out of the public eye with local black leaders, who were excluded from many of the city’s civic organizations. King, an Atlanta native, addressed the club on May 10, 1967. He acknowledged that progress had been made in civil rights, but warned that the “evils” of racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War endangered further gains for black Americans.

T hree major evils —the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. These are the three things that I want to deal with today. Now let us turn first to the evil of racism. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racism is still alive all over America. Racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame. And we must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans. We must face the fact that we still have much to do in the area of race relations.

Now to be sure there has been some progress, and I would not want to overlook that. We’ve seen that progress a great deal here in our Southland. Probably the greatest area of this progress has been the breakdown of legal segregation. And so the movement in the South has profoundly shaken the entire edifice of segregation. And I am convinced that segregation is as dead as a doornail in its legal sense, and the only thing uncertain about it now is how costly some of the segregationists who still linger around will make the funeral. And so there has been progress. But we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism. The plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower. And there is no area of our country that can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Every city confronts a serious problem. Now there are those who are trying to say now that the civil rights movement is dead. I submit to you that it is more alive today than ever before. What they fail to realize is that we are now in a transition period. We are moving into a new phase of the struggle. For well now twelve years, the struggle was basically a struggle to end legal segregation. In a sense it was a struggle for decency. It was a struggle to get rid of all of the humiliation and the syndrome of depravation surrounding the system of legal segregation. And I need not remind you that those were glorious days. We cannot forget the days of Montgomery , when fifty thousand Negroes decided that it was ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than to accept segregation within, in humiliation. We will not forget the 1960 sit-in movement , when by the thousands students decided to sit in at lunch counters, protesting humiliation and segregation. And when they decided to sit down at those counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We will not forget the Freedom Rides of sixty one, and the Birmingham Movement of sixty three, a movement which literally subpoenaed the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgement seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We will not forget Selma, when by the thousands we marched from that city to Montgomery to dramatize the fact that Negroes did not have the right to vote. These were marvelous movements. But that period is over now. And we are moving into a new phase.

And because we are moving into this new phase, some people feel that the civil rights movement is dead. The new phase is a struggle for genuine equality. It is not merely a struggle for decency now, it is not merely a struggle to get rid of the brutality of a Bull Connor and a Jim Clark. It is now a struggle for genuine equality on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle. You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period. We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. It was freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. And it is a miracle that the Negro has survived.

In 1875 the nation passed a civil rights bill, and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill and even to this day has failed to enforce it in all of its dimensions. In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered a decision outlawing segregation in the public schools. And even to this day in the deep South, less than five per cent of the Negro students are attending integrated schools. We haven’t even made one per cent progress a year. If it continues at this rate, it will take another ninety seven years to integrate the schools of the South and of our nation …

Now let us be sure that we will have to keep the pressure alive. We’ve never made any gain in civil rights without constant, persistent, legal and non-violent pressure. Don’t let anybody make you feel that the problem will work itself out …

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The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will …

Now I want to deal with the third evil that constitutes the dilemma of our nation and the world. And that is the evil of war. Somehow these three evils are tied together. The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war … We have left ourselves as a nation morally and politically isolated in the world. We have greatly strengthened the forces of reaction in America, and excited violence and hatred among our own people. We have diverted attention from civil rights. During a period of war, when a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs inevitably suffer. People become insensitive to pain and agony in their own midst …

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Now I know that there are people who are confused about the war and they say to me and anybody who speaks out against it, “You shouldn’t be speaking out. You’re a civil rights leader, and the two issues should not be joined together.” Well … the two issues are tied together. And I’m going to keep them together. Oh my friends, it’s good for us to fight for integrated lunch counters, and for integrated schools. And I’m going to continue to do that. But wouldn’t it be absurd to be talking about integrated schools without being concerned about the survival of a world in which to be integrated …

For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can’t do that. I’m against segregation at lunch counters, and I’m not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions, cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there’re times when you must take a stand that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but you must do it because it is right.

This article is an excerpt of a speech originally titled “ America’s Chief Moral Dilemma .” © 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, © renewed 1995 Coretta Scott King. All works by Martin Luther King Jr. have been reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., care of Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York.

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Dr. Martin Luther King's 1967 Anti-War Speech & Today

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Almost fifty years ago Martin Luther King gave a major speech against the Vietnam war and US militarism in general. In that speech he tied together our militaristic and repressive response to the movements of national liberation throughout the world that were threatening certain economic interests. He called for a revolution in our values from an orientation toward wealth and physical things toward a concern with others and particularly the poor. He warned that history did not stand still, that if we did not seize the opportunity, the tides that seemed to be rising against injustice might recede. Looking back we can see that his warning was all too true. The lessons of the movement against of the Vietnam War were not learned by us. We allowed ourselves to be mesmerized by the manufactured drama of Watergate. We allowed our revulsion over the Vietnam War to be labeled our “Vietnam Syndrome”, something to be cured by another more successful First War against Iraq.

Now fifty years later we are in darker times. The military industrial intelligence complex, the national security state, the corporations and their media are all more entrenched. We find ourselves living inside a monster to which we have a parasitic relationship, a monster which progressively threatens the environment upon which life on our planet depends.

January 18 was Martin Luther King Day. Is this really a day of celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or is it a day designed to further consign him to history and truncate his message? In an effort to explore this, let’s go back to his speech at Riverside Church of 49 years ago on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, and, re-working it, take from it what we can for today. Perhaps this can help us come closer to truly resurrecting Martin Luther King, Jr in ourselves. In the following 2016 re-work, Dr. King’s original words are set in italics and bold.

Read 2016 re-work

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Gateway for Truth

King in 1967: My dream has 'turned into a nightmare'

By Andrew K. Franklin, Senior Producer, NBC News

Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech was a defining moment for the civil rights movement, for America, and for King himself. Fifty years ago this week, King’s soaring words marked a turning point in this country’s long and bitter conversation about race, and earned King a place in history. When we remember Martin Luther King, we remember his dream. It helped awaken an entire nation.

So it’s hard to believe that just over three and a half years after that triumph, King would tell an interviewer that the dream he had that day had in some ways “turned into a nightmare.” But that’s exactly what he said to veteran NBC News correspondent Sander Vanocur on May 8, 1967. In an extraordinary, wide-ranging conversation, King acknowledged the “soul searching,” and “agonizing moments” he’d gone through since his most famous speech. He told Vanocur the “old optimism” of the civil rights movement was “a little superficial” and now needed to be tempered with “a solid realism.” And just 11 months before his death, he spoke bluntly about what he called the “difficult days ahead.” To mark the 50 th anniversary of King’s speech, we present highlights from that exclusive, rarely seen interview, newly restored from the original color film.

A lot had changed for King since 1963. John F. Kennedy was gone. He had been impressed by King and had delivered his own historic, nationally televised speech on civil rights in June of that year. Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson won passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, declaring in a memorable 1965 speech to Congress, “We shall overcome.” But by 1967 Johnson had taken the country deeply into the war in Vietnam.

Click here for powerful images capturing the struggle for civil rights

King opposed that war – in fact he was one of its most prominent and vocal critics. Just four days before his interview with Vanocur, King delivered a scathing anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church, calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” It cost him white support, and even angered many blacks, who felt King should confine his message to civil rights. And crucially, it poisoned his relationship with Johnson, who had been a key ally.

By 1967, King also had to contend with the fact that he was no longer the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement. A new generation, impatient to build on his hard-won gains, increasingly rejected his message of non-violence – preaching “Black Power,” and encouraging oppressed blacks to fight back. In growing numbers, they did. And following the victories of the early Sixties in desegregating schools and lunch counters and securing the right to vote, King took on the far more difficult challenge of battling poverty and economic injustice. He brought his campaign to northern cities, where he was met with fierce, entrenched opposition.

Facing all that, King was embattled and increasingly isolated in 1967. NBC News, which had distinguished itself with its coverage of the civil rights movement since the mid-50s, gave the go-ahead to Vanocur and producer Stuart Schulberg to prepare a special report called “After Civil Rights: Black Power.” It aired on June 11, 1967 – the fourth anniversary of Kennedy’s landmark civil rights speech. The centerpiece of the special was Vanocur’s interview with King. It was shot on color film, something still relatively new in television news in 1967. And it was conducted in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was a pastor, as his father had been. King’s parents were married there. He was baptized there. And on April 9, 1968, his funeral was held there. Mourners that day included President Johnson, soon-to-be president Richard Nixon, soon-to-be martyred Robert Kennedy, and JFK’s widow Jacqueline Kennedy.

If Martin Luther King had lived he would be 84 now. We can only imagine how he would see things today. But as the world celebrates his dream 50 years later, it’s important to remember how King himself saw it in his own lifetime: as a vision of a promise still unkept.

Author’s note: A special thanks to Sander Vanocur – not only for his extraordinary interview with Martin Luther King, but for the generosity he’s shown in sharing his recollections and insights. One year older than King himself, Sandy is still going strong, enjoying retirement in Santa Barbara. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Audio Recordings & Podcasts

• Book Spotlights
• Audio Recordings & Podcasts

Audio recordings, podcasts, and radio stories

Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence

Audio recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 speech in New York. In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam.  Posted to YouTube by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

The Three Evils of Society

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech at the National Conference on New Politics in Chicago. Here, he speaks about what he calls the Triple Evils: War, Racism and Poverty.  Posted to YouTube by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

• First Name Basis Podcast - Stop Using MLK to Justify Racism Jan 13, 2022 We are going to dispel 3 myths that people have perpetuated about Dr. King to justify their racism. Those 3 myths are: Dr. King would have been against riots Dr. King would have been anti-Critical Race Theory Dr. King’s dream has already been achieved I hope by the end of this episode you feel like you have a better understanding of what this incredible man really felt about each of these issues, and I hope you feel inspired to learn more about his teachings yourself.
• First Name Basis Podcast - The One Thing I Wish You Knew About Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jan. 18, 2021 Unfortunately, Dr. King's dream has not yet come true. In this episode I explain the second phase of his dream that we are still working on today.
• First Name Basis Podcast - The Untold Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jan 12, 2021 We have the opportunity to celebrate one of America’s greatest heroes this month, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. During the month of January we will learn about the untold story of Dr. King and give you the tools you need to confidently teach your children about his life and his legacy.
• Letter from America by Alistair Cooke Archives - Martin Luther King Day Nov 11th, 1983 Rosa Parks' refusal to recognise segregation, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the passing of a bill to recognise Martin Luther King Jr Day as a national holiday.
• NPR - Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. A series of stories from NPR on Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Professor Buzzkill History Podcast - The Unknown Martin Luther King Apr 3rd, 2018 Martin Luther King did so much more for American society, and wanted so much more from the US government and US elite, than most people realize. Popular history has airbrushed out far too much about his life and work. Professor Phil Nash reminds us of the importance of King’s work, especially during the forgotten period between his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and his assassination in 1968. Listen and learn.
• Still Processing - We Celebrate the REAL MLK Day Apr 5th, 2018 This week, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. While MLK’s birthday is celebrated on a national level, we spend time processing why his death holds a significant importance as well. We examine the months leading up to MLK Jr.’s death, including his iconic speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and discuss the ways in which his ideals shifted after his “I Had A Dream” speech. MLK day is a celebration of King’s birthday, and we suggest that maybe what we should really be marking is the day of his assassination.
• WBEZ's Worldview Apr 4, 2018 On today's show: Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon at New York’s Riverside Church 51 years ago on April 4th, 1967. It was called “Beyond Vietnam,” and it set the tone for Reverend King’s final year of life, which ended in assassination precisely one year later. In it, Rev. King refers to the evil triplets: Racism, Materialism, and Militarism, and how they uphold one another. Several weeks after that first speech at Riverside, he delivered another address about why he opposed the war in Vietnam at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA. We play extended excerpts from those two speeches in King’s last year, which made him reviled even within the Black community. We also make connections to the press, military, market economy, and government today with writer Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and chief editor of LeftWord Books.
• Witness - Photographing Martin Luther King and His Family Aug 14th, 2018 In 1969 photo journalist Moneta Sleet became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He won for the black and white image of Coretta Scott King the widow of Martin Luther King taken at the funeral of the murdered civil rights leader. Farhana Haider has been speaking to Moneta Sleet's son Gregory Sleet about his father's remarkable career capturing many of the images that defined the struggle for racial equality in America.
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MLK's 1964 speech at ASU subject of new, permanent exhibit

Martin Luther King Jr. with community leaders and then-ASU President G. Homer Durham (to King's left) at his speech in Goodwin Stadium in 1964. Photo courtesy ASU archives

On June 3, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Goodwin Stadium, then the home of Arizona State University’s football team.

The speech was titled “Religious Witness for Human Dignity” and was delivered just days before the Civil Rights Act was passed by the U.S. Senate.

“The bill must pass,” King said before a crowd of 8,000 people, “and it must pass soon if our nation is to maintain its health.”

King’s speech got lost in the passage of time until 2014, when Phoenix resident Mary Scanlan was shopping at a Goodwill store and found a box of 35 reel-to-reel recordings that had been donated by deceased Phoenix businessman and civil rights leader Lincoln Ragsdale Sr.

One of the tapes was a recording of King’s speech .

Now, 10 years later and on the 60th anniversary of King’s speech, ASU is honoring King’s legacy with a permanent exhibit at Durham Hall.

A groundbreaking for the exhibit will be held at 4 p.m. on Monday, followed by a keynote address from former NBA great Earvin “Magic” Johnson at the Student Pavilion. Following his playing career, Johnson, the chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises, has provided products and services primarily for diverse and underserved urban communities.

“The exhibit shows how ASU had a pivotal moment in its history where it brought the religious community, the political community and the civil rights community together in a climate that wasn’t welcoming,” said Mark Brantley, the assistant director of operations for the School of International Letters and Cultures. “Nevertheless, it stood on the frontier of making this happen.”

The exhibit consists of five acrylic panels that will explore themes like segregation in Arizona; King’s visit to ASU; Black faith leaders; the discovery of the speech tapes; and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Katy Kole de Peralta, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, said she’s hopeful the exhibit will shed a light on how pervasive racism was in the United States during King’s lifetime.

“The Civil Rights Movement isn’t just something that just happened in the South,” de Peralta said. “This isn’t just about Montgomery, Alabama. It was a problem here in Phoenix, too. So this is a way to kind of circle back to a message of inclusivity. Just because this story has been left out of the popular narrative doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t kind of return to revitalizing this and understanding the history for what it’s worth.”

Brantley said he got the idea for the exhibit in 2020 while attending an MLK Day celebration at First Institutional Baptist Church in downtown Phoenix. The church’s pastor, Warren Stewart, mentioned that King had visited ASU in the 1960s.

“I was like, ‘Wow, you’ve got to be kidding. I never heard of that,’” Brantley said.

With the help of Shannon Walker, who oversees ASU’s archives, Brantley found a photo of King and others, including then-ASU President Homer Durham, at Goodwin Stadium. He then discovered that the tape of King’s speech had been found at Goodwill.

Later that year, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, ASU President Michael Crow asked students, deans and faculty to facilitate initiatives and programs that would protect and defend the rights of individuals.

“When that email went out, I sort of put one and one together and said, ‘Why not highlight the fact that we have a former university president who invited Dr. King to speak?’” Brantley said.

To facilitate the research, Walker reached out to Erin Craft, program coordinator for the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. Craft runs a public history undergraduate research experience that includes eight to 10 students every semester. Two students, Catherine Wise and Nicholas West, were hired to do the research, and graduate student Arturo Perez Lopez oversaw their work.

Craft asked the students to tell the story of why King came to ASU, and why his speech was somewhat forgotten.

“This is what historians do,” Craft said. “We pull threads.”

With Craft’s charge in mind, the students researched King’s visit to Tempe, but also discovered broader stories about the Civil Rights Movement in Arizona, including a story about a mother who went back to school after Phoenix schools were desegregated and graduated within a year of her daughter.

“Arizona as a whole is overlooked in the civil rights narrative of this country,” Craft said, “and the students kind of found ways to (show it was a part of it). And the fact that MLK chose to visit Phoenix a month before the civil rights bill was passed is a big deal. He knew that there were things going on in Phoenix that needed to be addressed. The students uncovered just really, really interesting stuff. We were so impressed with their work. They knocked it out of the park.”

In April, Lopez and Wise presented their findings on civil rights pioneers in Phoenix at the National Council for Public History’s annual conference in Salt Lake City.

“I found that the broader narrative of the Civil Rights Movement often overlooks the struggles in the Southwest,” Perez said. “These civil rights pioneers effectively fought against discriminatory, housing, education and employment policies that segregated them from Anglo Phoenix, ushering in a more inclusive era.”

Lopez called his time working on the exhibit a “fantastic experience that enriched me both academically and personally.”

“I gained extensive knowledge about national and local history, particularly about key local figures who played crucial roles in Arizona’s Civil Rights Movement,” he said.

That knowledge even persuaded Lopez to change the topic of his dissertation, from the Black Panther Party to the Civil Rights Movement in Arizona and, in particular, south central Phoenix.

“Working on a project of this magnitude contributed to my professional development and provided me valuable experience in team collaboration,” Lopez said. “Overall, it was an incredible experience.”

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King Charles Becomes the Patron of His “Tough” Scottish Boarding School

This week, King Charles III accepted a surprising new honor that harkens back to his secondary school days. On the occasion of the anniversary of his coronation, the BBC reports that the king will now be the new patron of the Gordonstoun Association, the organization that runs the small boarding school in north-east Scotland where the king was a student from 1962 to 1967.

The school’s principal Lisa Kerr praised the king in a statement . “As our most prominent former student, His Majesty exemplifies so many of the qualities we seek to instill in our students, notably a lifelong commitment to service,” she said. “That His Majesty has chosen a patronage of our alumni body is a great honor both for the school and all members of the Gordonstoun Association.”

The patronage is the king’s first official link to the school since his graduation. For the last few years, Charles’s sister Princess Anne has been the family’s primary liaison with the remote Scottish boarding school, serving as the patron for the Campaign for Gordonstoun, a fundraising drive. Anne was not a student there herself as it did not admit girls, but her children Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall attended in the 1990s.

The royal association with the school in Moray stretches back to its 1934 founding, when Prince Philip became one of its earliest students, and Philip previously served as its patron. Though Gordonstoun says it is “immensely proud to be the first senior school to educate a king” on its website, the king wasn’t its most enthusiastic student. Charles was more interested in music and drama than outdoorsmanship, and in his letters home, he complained about his classmates. “The people in my dormitory are foul,” he wrote in a letter home, according to biographer Christopher Andersen . “Goodness, they are horrid. I don’t see how anybody could be so foul.”

By the time the king reached his late 20s, his opinion about the school had started to soften. “It was only tough in the sense that it demanded more of you as an individual than most other schools did—mentally or physically,” he said in a 1975 speech to the House of Lords. “I am lucky in that I believe it taught me a great deal about myself and my own abilities and disabilities. It taught me to accept challenges and take the initiative.”

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Retro Louisville: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visits Louisville

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Louisville numerous times during the 1960s and the Courier Journal chronicled his various speeches and marches.  Reporter Martha Elson, in a 2015 retro article, listed King’s appearances here beginning in 1960 when he spoke before 9,000 at a voter registration rally at the old Armory (now known as Louisville Gardens).

Elson noted King’s address before the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, April 19, 1961, and perhaps his most high-profile event, the "March on Frankfort," March 5, 1964.  In 1966, King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., attended Zion Baptist Church, 2200 W Muhammad Ali Blvd., where the Rev. A. D. Williams King — brother of Martin Luther King Jr. — was installed as pastor. And, the Courier Journal provided extensive coverage of King’s visit in March 1967 as part of an "Open Housing" initiative.  

On Thursday, March 30, 1967, King spoke to law students at the University of Louisville, then later that evening, he was at a civil rights rally at West Chestnut Street Baptist Church (1725 W. Chestnut Street) where he said:  "We aren't going to achieve our freedom sitting around waiting for it. Let us stand up in Louisville and say to the power structure that our movement is just beginning.

"Don't stop," he said, until the city "is willing to put something on paper (for) a fair open-housing law."

After his speech, King heard that eighteen demonstrators had been arrested at an Open Housing event at Memorial Auditorium. He and several hundred followers then departed on buses from the church to Fourth and Breckinridge where the arrests occurred.  King, saying "we still have our marching shoes," and then led a protest march to Police Headquarters. 

In a related article, Third District Rep. William O. Cowger said he "favors a Federal Open Housing Law ... There should be a uniform regulation across the nation." The Louisville Republican said Congress, not local governments, should deal with the open housing problem.

"I have always been in favor of open housing," he said, in an obvious reference to King’s local activism. “I would hope that those who came in from outside to aggravate the problem would go elsewhere."

One smaller article on page A-18 of the March 31, 1967, Courier Journal, which probably few noticed at the time due to all the other King-related articles in the newspaper that day, but in retrospect was especially poignant, was coverage of King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who visited here with him. 

Staff writer Sally Bly interviewed Coretta Scott King, noting she normally did not travel with her husband. Bly provided a nice bio of her life, musical background and how she met Martin. 

At the end of that report, was this ominous concluding text: "Realizing her husband is performing a dangerous job, Mrs. King said she doesn't feel she has any unusual fear for him. 'You get accustomed to it and learn to live with it.' she said. 'We realize that even in the North something could happen. He's not really safe any place.' But 'in this kind of involvement, you feel the cause is just and you go on with assurance in your own commitment,' she said. 'You accept the danger as part of the necessary cost of your convictions.'" 

Just over a year later, April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s young life would end at age 39 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Steve Wiser, FAIA, is a local historian, author, and architect

Moroccan King’s Efforts in Favour of Palestinian Cause Highlighted in Bahrain

A ccra, May 30, GNA – Minister of Youth, Culture and Communication, Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, highlighted, on Wednesday in Manama, the efforts of His Majesty King Mohammed VI in favour of the Palestinian cause.

In a speech delivered on his behalf by Morocco’s ambassador to Bahrain, Mustapha Benkhyi, at the opening of the 54th session of the Arab Information Ministers’ Council, Bensaid stressed that Morocco, under the enlightened leadership of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, continued to firmly support the Palestinian people in obtaining all their legitimate rights, first and foremost their right to establish their independent state on the June 4, 1967 borders with Al-Quds as its capital.

Bensaid noted that the Bayt Mal Al-Quds Asharif Agency, under the personal supervision of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, Chairman of the Al-Quds Committee, is pursuing its missions to improve the living conditions of the Holy City’s inhabitants and respond directly to their needs through economic, social, housing, education and cultural projects, with a budget of nearly 65 million dollars, encompassing 200 major projects and dozens of small and medium-sized projects.

He added that the Moroccan presidency of the Arab Information Ministers’ Council took place in a delicate context marked by a strong dynamic in the media and communication sector, in light of the profound geopolitical upheavals in the Arab region.

In this context, he said, it had become necessary to focus collective efforts on strengthening joint Arab media action, with a view to qualifying it, adapting it and raising its level of effectiveness.

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Full text: President Xi's keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 10th ministerial conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum

BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 10th ministerial conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum.

The following is the full text of his speech:

Further Deepening Cooperation and Moving Forward to Step up the Building of a China-Arab Community with a Shared Future

Keynote Speech by H.E. Xi Jinping

President of the People's Republic of China

At the Opening Ceremony of the 10th Ministerial Conference

Of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum

Beijing, May 30, 2024

Your Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa,

Your Excellency President Abdul Fatah Al-Sisi,

Your Excellency President Kais Saied,

Your Highness President Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan,

Your Excellency Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit of the League of Arab States,

Heads of Delegations,

Distinguished Guests,

It gives me great pleasure to attend the opening ceremony of the Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum. I always find it heart-warming to meet Arab friends. The friendship between the Chinese and Arab peoples is deeply rooted in our friendly exchanges along the ancient Silk Road, in our joint struggles for national liberation, and in our win-win cooperation in promoting national development.

China-Arab relations have kept scaling new heights since the beginning of the new century. At the first China-Arab States Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December 2022, my Arab colleagues and I agreed unanimously to build a China-Arab community with a shared future in the new era. China is satisfied with the progress we have made in delivering on the Summit's outcomes. It will work with the Arab side to enhance the role of the Summit in providing strategic guidance for continued leapfrog growth of China-Arab relations. I am pleased to announce that we will host the second Summit in China in 2026, which will be another milestone in China-Arab relations.

As changes unseen in a century unfold rapidly across the world, both China and Arab states strive to accomplish their historical missions of national rejuvenation and faster national development. Building a China-Arab community with a shared future is a strong statement of our common desire for a new era of China-Arab relations and a better future for the world.

China will work with the Arab side as good partners to make our relations a model for maintaining world peace and stability. In this turbulent world, peaceful relations come from mutual respect, and lasting security is built on fairness and justice. We will, together with the Arab side, respect the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, the independent choice of every nation and the reality formed in history, and strive together for solutions to hotspot issues that uphold fairness and justice and sustain peace and security.

China will work with the Arab side in the spirit of equality and mutual benefit to make our relations a fine example of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. The Silk Road spirit is passed on from generation to generation. It keeps China-Arab relations abreast with the times to the benefit of the two peoples. In this interdependent world, we will further synergize development strategies with the Arab side. We will strengthen cooperation in key areas such as oil, gas, trade and infrastructure, step up fostering new growth areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), investment, financing and new energy, and embark together on an innovative and green path to prosperity.

China will work with the Arab side in the spirit of inclusiveness and mutual learning to make our relations a paradigm of harmonious coexistence between civilizations. In a world of growing diversity, more dialogue means less confrontation, and more inclusiveness means less estrangement. Peace, truth, integrity and inclusiveness are the common pursuit of Chinese and Arab peoples. We are ready to work with the Arab side to promote people-to-people exchanges, champion the common values of humanity, and create a stellar example of mutual learning among civilizations in the new era.

China will work closely with the Arab side to make our relations a model for promoting good global governance. The entire humanity shares one common future, which has become an inevitable trend. But deficits in governance, trust, peace and development are getting wider. This calls on us to improve global governance under the principle of "planning together, building together, and benefiting together." We are ready to work with the Arab side to jointly champion an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization, and set a model of South-South cooperation on global governance.

At the first China-Arab States Summit, I put forward "eight major cooperation initiatives" for our practical cooperation. Since then, the Belt and Road cooperation documents we signed have expanded to cover a full range of areas thanks to our joint efforts over the past one year and more. New progress has been made in scientific R&D and technology transfer. Trade and energy cooperation have scaled new heights. Small and beautiful livelihood projects are advancing in parallel with signature flagship projects. Cooperation in areas such as food security, green innovation and health is deepening and getting more substantial. Platforms for people-to-people exchanges and cooperation are functioning well. Early harvests have been achieved in all the "eight major cooperation initiatives." Moving forward, China is ready to work with the Arab side on that basis to put in place the following "five cooperation frameworks" to step up the building of a China-Arab community with a shared future.

The first is a more dynamic framework for innovation. China will build with the Arab side ten joint laboratories in such areas as life and health, AI, green and low-carbon development, modern agriculture, and space and information technology. We will enhance cooperation on AI to make it empower the real economy and to promote a broad-based global governance system on AI. We also stand ready to build with the Arab side a joint space debris observation center and a Beidou application, cooperation and development center, and step up cooperation in manned space mission and passenger aircraft.

The second is an expanded framework for investment and finance cooperation. We are ready to establish with the Arab side an industry and investment cooperation forum, continue to expand the China-Arab states interbank association, and implement at a faster pace the cooperation projects that are financed by the special loans in support of industrialization in the Middle East as well as by the credit line for China-Arab financial cooperation. China supports closer cooperation between financial institutions from the two sides, welcomes Arab states to issue panda bonds in China, and welcomes Arab banks to join the Cross-border Interbank Payment System. China is also ready to deepen exchanges and cooperation on central bank digital currency with the Arab side.

The third is a more multifaceted framework for energy cooperation. China will further enhance strategic cooperation with the Arab side on oil and gas, and integrate supply security with market security. China is ready to work with the Arab side on new energy technology R&D and equipment production. We will support Chinese energy companies and financial institutions in participating in renewable energy projects in Arab states with total installed capacity of over 3 million kilowatts.

The fourth is a more balanced framework for mutually beneficial economic and trade ties. China will continue to implement vigorously the development cooperation projects with a total worth of RMB3 billion yuan. It stands ready to accelerate the negotiations on bilateral and regional free trade agreements and advance the dialogue mechanism for e-commerce cooperation. It welcomes active participation of the Arab side in the China International Import Expo, and is willing to expand import of non-energy products from the Arab side, especially agricultural products.

The fifth is a broader framework for people-to-people exchanges. China is ready to establish with the Arab side the China-Arab Center of Global Civilization Initiative, expand the size and influence of the China-Arab Research Center on Reform and Development, accelerate the establishment of such platforms as the think tank alliance, the youth development forum, the university alliance, and the research center on cultural and tourism cooperation. China will invite 200 leaders of Arab political parties to visit China every year. We plan to work with the Arab side to achieve the goal of 10 million two-way visits of tourists in the next five years.

The Middle East is a land bestowed with broad prospects for development, but the war is still raging on it. Since last October, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has escalated drastically, throwing the people into tremendous sufferings. War should not continue indefinitely. Justice should not be absent forever. Commitment to the two-State solution should not be wavered at will. China firmly supports the establishment of an independent State of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. It supports Palestine's full membership in the U.N., and supports a more broad-based, authoritative and effective international peace conference. On top of the previous RMB100 million yuan of emergency humanitarian assistance, China will provide an additional RMB500 million yuan of assistance to help ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and support post-conflict reconstruction. We will donate U.S.$3 million to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in support of its emergency humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

As an Arab saying goes, friends are the sunshine in life. We will continue to work with our Arab friends to carry forward the spirit of China-Arab friendship, build together a better future, and make the road sunny toward a China-Arab community with a shared future!

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