Before people became incenced with Rev. Wright, King also spoke out against the US and it's involvement in other countries and how it may come back to bite the US.
A lot of you here only know MLK for the "I have a Dream Speech", but what about Letters froma Birmingham Jail or I see the Promised land...they don't teach that in school.
After discussing this at length with one of my collegues, he theorizes that this speech posted here may have put him out of favor with a good portion of mainstream (read: white) America...and quite possibly what may have gotten him killed...YMMV depending on who you listen to, he cautions.
Anywho, here are portions of MLK's speech, Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence with the full text available below in the link, please read thoroughly, thank you.
You don't necessarily have to comment, this post is just offered as food for thought for an upcoming anniversary in light of what's going on in our politcal landscape today, 40 years after the fact.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...eaksilence.htm
"A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
... 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.
Why are you speaking about the 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?
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 this 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...
And 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. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village,
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.
Even though they (Vietnam) 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.
Linear Mode
