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. 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. “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. Soldier of the 25th Infantry Division, c., 1969. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” 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. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty program. I still think this is probably the best.” Speech Highlights Representative John Lewis (GA), who was among the 3,800 in the audience when King gave the speech, told the New Yorker Magazine in 2017 that the speech was “a speech for all humanity-for the world community. Senator Barry Goldwater (AZ), the Republican Party presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.”Ĭivil Rights activist and U.S. This is a case of getting out of a certain frame of mind, of a way of thinking about ourselves and about the world.” Reactions to SpeechĪccording to the PBS documentary MLK: A Call to Conscience (2010), the speech was denounced by 168 newspapers across the country. Regarding choosing “Beyond Vietnam” for the title when the country was deep in the middle of the war, Harding recalled in an interview with Tavis Smiley, “this is more than a simple case of getting out of Vietnam. He drafted several speeches for King over the years and eventually became the first director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Harding, a native of Harlem, NYC, received his BA from City College of New York and Masters in Journalism from Columbia University before serving in the US Army (1953-55) and receiving a PhD in History at the University in Chicago in 1965. Who Wrote the Speech?īeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence was actually a collaborative work largely written by a close associate and friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. King, a gifted speaker who normally wouldn’t read from text, did read out Beyond Vietnam because he planned to submit it to publications and did not want to be misquoted. Martin Luther King had spoken critically about the Vietnam War before, but it was his blistering Beyond Vietnam speech at an event sponsored by “Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam” that gained wide attention. The actual speech begins at 1:41 in the recording. Hear the entire recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence speech, including introductory applause and a greeting King makes to his fellow clergy speakers. Read on for background on the historic speech, highlights and the speech in in its entirety.
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The legacy of his speech is reflected in The Vietnam War, an 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (streaming to PBS station members). Exactly a year later, King was assassinated. The speech is considered a turning point in the public opinion’s of the Vietnam War. government and the war became known as “The Riverside Church Speech” and it was criticized by media from The New York Times to the Washington Post, and by groups such as the NAACP, which objected to the Civil Rights Movement weighing in on the war and joining anti-war protests. foreign affairs in view of the sorry domestic state of equality in America. King used his famous oration skills to point out the hypocrisy of U.S. After more than a decade in the public eye fighting racism and inequality in America, King plunged himself into another searing, divisive issue in America with his speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. gave a speech that startled even many of his supporters in the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence at Riverside Church in NYC, April 4, 1967.įifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr.
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