Recognizing what the new president could mean to the nation's poorest citizens, King was among the first to offer public support after the Dallas assassination put LBJ in the Oval Office. Martin Luther King April 4, 1967 Riverside Church, New York City. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. 2. War has never been good, it has never brought anything well. It reflected his widening worldview that chronic domestic poverty and military adventurism overseas infected the wealthiest nation on earth just as indelibly as did deep-rooted racism. On December 2, 1967, Minnesota Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy presented a bold and powerful speech denouncing the Vietnam War and America’s place in it. It was a blistering attack on the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War that, among other things, compared American tactics to those of the Nazis during World War II. The F.B.I.’s wiretapping of his closest advisers overheard him telling them “how immoral this is. Beyond Vietnam, speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, NYC, 4/4/67 Excerpts: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. Dr. King remained relatively mute about the war through most of 1966, but by year’s end he was expressing private disgust at how increased military spending had torn a gaping budget hole in Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs. The World is a public radio program that crosses borders and time zones to bring home the stories that matter. The Washington Post criticized his “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and lamented how “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence.”, The New York Times called Dr. King’s remarks both “facile” and “slander.” It said the moral issues in Vietnam “are less clear-cut than he suggests” and warned that “to divert the energies of the civil rights movement to the Vietnam issue is both wasteful and self-defeating,” given how the movement needed to confront what the paper called “the intractability of slum mores and habits.”, Even some of the black press lined up against him: The Pittsburgh Courier warned that Dr. King was “tragically misleading” African-Americans on issues that were “too complex for simple debate.”, Dr. King was unmoved. The Los Angeles speech, called “ The Casualties of the War in Vietnam, ” stressed the history of the conflict and argued that American power should be “ harnessed to the service of peace and human beings, not an inhumane power [unleashed] against defenseless people ” (King, 25 February 1967). Martin Luther King Jr.. “I come to this magnificent house of … In this week's issue in 1967, TIME covers Gen. Westmoreland's speech to Congress about progress being made in the Vietnam War. Example: Kitten My Father- Vietnam 1966 Vocabulary: (151-164) Martin Luther King Jr opposed the war because it was violence, he opposed also because the government payed more attention to Vietnam than at home affecting social welfare in the US. Dr. King used to always say that if a Southerner ever really gets converted, then there’s no better ally.”. “We began to see that the crisis in the cities was demanding the funds that were now being diverted to Vietnam and that the domestic crisis was more dangerous and therefore more important to the country.”. “The world now demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. Rev. “How is he going to afford the war abroad and the war against poverty at home at the same time?”, As LBJ ratcheted up the war, committing more troops and escalating the bombing of North Vietnam, the elephant in the room became too large to ignore. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. 2 Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. The war was unpopular and seemed pointless to many. Young says the Democratic Party even started organizing meetings against King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council. From 1965 through 1966, a long struggle ensued for the hearts and minds of the black community. In early April 1967, an influential voice was raised for the first time in opposition to the Vietnam War: Rev. But it would be a mistake to read Dr. King’s speech as merely an antiwar statement. King choice of the word "crippled" instead of "hurt" or "held back" is an example of using loaded language. While he needed King’s behind-the-scenes help on the legislative agenda, too cozy an association in public could hurt him with the crucial white, Southern vote. The major speech at Riverside Church in New York City, followed several interviews and several other public speeches in … Even at the time, antiwar opposition remained politically marginal, and Dr. King’s advisers were upset over his desire to participate in a forthcoming mid-April New York protest. September 29, 1967: Speech on Vietnam. … I think we thought that here was a guy who could get things done, who knew the legislative machinery of the government. On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War.King’s sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon Johnson, who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans. 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. On April 4, 1967, he delivered a speech called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." Thank you all for helping us reach our goal of 1,000 donors. “Certainly, after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, King took him at his word that Johnson was going to go much farther than any other president, before or since, to try to implement programs that he thought were essential as part of his ministry,” says historian Clayborne Carson. Start studying Speech on the Vietnam War, 1967 by MLK. The Vietnam war has many names like the second Indochina war and the resistance war against America. We couldn’t have done it without your support. Both events received modest press coverage, and in their wake Dr. King told Stanley Levison, long his closest adviser: “I can no longer be cautious about this matter. Dr. King’s Riverside Church address exemplified how, throughout his final 18 months of life, he repeatedly rejected the sunny optimism of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and instead mourned how that dream had “turned into a nightmare.” But the speech also highlighted how for Dr. King, civil rights was never a discrete problem in American society, and that racism went hand in hand with the fellow evils of poverty and militarism that kept the country from living up to its ideals. Spoke Out Against the Vietnam War Dr. King was privately distraught over the war and Dodd’s response. 1967 Anti-War Speech And Today adapted by E. Martin Schotz with assistance from David Ratcliffe 20 June 2016 ratical.org Martin Luther King speaking at Riverside Church, NYC, 4 Apr 1967 Almost fifty years ago Martin Luther King gave a major speech against the Vietnam war and US militarism in general. For King, the decision was fraught with political danger. Yoichi R. Okamoto/Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. 3. We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience. How can the Vietnam war of 1967 can be any different? The speech drew widespread condemnation from across the political spectrum, including from this newspaper. Martin Luther King’s Speech Against the Vietnam War O ne of the greatest speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," was delivered at … A time comes when silence is betrayal. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Name _____Period # ____ Dates —Beginning _____Ending_____ “Speech on the Vietnam War, 1967” by M.L.King, Jr. (textbook pages 151-166) Note: Your answers should completely answer each question, or points will be deducted. “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation.”. Johnson had indeed gotten himself trapped: between those who wanted to end the war and those who sought to prosecute it more aggressively; between fear of igniting a larger conflict and fear of being the first president to lose a war; and between guns and butter. “Everything we’re talking about really boils down to the fact that we have this war on our hands,” Dr. King said in yet another wiretapped phone call. Lyndon B. Johnson. “They had a conference of preachers in Detroit. A Time to Break Silence. April 4, 2017. Dr. King then turned his full wrath against the war. King Jr delivered his “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” in 1967 in NewYork City. “We began to see very early that Vietnam was what it’s now come to be,” Jordan says. Finally, in early 1967, he had had enough. King was among Johnson’s first post-election thank you calls. This article is based on LBJ's War, a podcast hosted by David Brown. LBJ's War is a new, limited-edition podcast that unearths previously unheard audio that helps us better understand the course of the Vietnam War and how Lyndon Johnson found himself where he did. Protests were rampant, so in this speech Nixon defended his decision to keep U.S. forces in Vietnam and explained why negotiations had failed so far. “Sometimes the public is not ready to digest the truth,” he said. In order to atone for our sins, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.”. We should stop the violence and the suffering of the poor in Vietnam. In early April 1967, an influential voice was raised for the first time in opposition to the Vietnam War: Rev. Vietnam War 1967 Speech. NEAL CONAN, host: In 1967, a year to the day before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. departed from his message of civil rights to deliver a speech that denounced America's war in Vietnam. One day Dr. King pushed aside a plate of food while paging through a magazine whose photographs depicted the burn wounds suffered by Vietnamese children who had been struck by napalm. They didn’t doubt the sincerity of his commitment to civil rights, but they felt he had “gotten himself trapped and was basically blind to what was going on around him.”. I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular,” for “I really feel that someone of influence has to say that the United States is wrong, and everybody is afraid to say it.”. A year after he was elected, on November 3, 1969, President Nixon gave the following address on the situation in Vietnam. 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. Whatever his private misgivings about the war, taking them public risked antagonizing President Lyndon Johnson, the architect of that war and the man who had done more for the cause of racial and economic justice than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Three days prior he told a reporter, “We are merely marking time in the civil rights movement if we do not take a stand against the war.”, At Riverside, Dr. King told the 3,000-person overflow crowd that “my conscience leaves me no other choice” than to “break the betrayal of my own silences” over the past two years. David J. Garrow is the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” and the forthcoming “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.”, Your email address will not be published. “The whole idea of paying for guns and butter at the same time: That becomes Johnson's dilemma,” says Carson. A recorded conversation between Johnson and his press secretary, George Reedy, revealed many years later Johnson’s intense agitation with this situation: Hear how LBJ sought to downplay his contact with King here: As it happened, LBJ carried the black vote by huge margins and won the white vote as well, beating Goldwater by 23 points. In 1952, in this city of Chicago, the Democratic party nominated as its candidate for the presidency Adlai Stevenson. King was always very optimistic about President Johnson. For Johnson, striking the right political balance with Dr. King was a tricky proposition. In Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence” (1967), Dr. King asserts that the war in Vietnam is totally immoral and has far reaching negative implications not only for Vietnam, but for The United States and the rest of the World as well. Want to see what's on deck? 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