{"id":90087,"date":"2017-04-10T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=90087"},"modified":"2017-04-07T12:46:28","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T11:46:28","slug":"50-years-later-a-speech-by-luther-king-has-lessons-for-a-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/04\/50-years-later-a-speech-by-luther-king-has-lessons-for-a-president\/","title":{"rendered":"50 Years Later, a Speech by Luther King Has Lessons for a President"},"content":{"rendered":"

6 Apr 2017 – <\/em>On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most powerful, controversial speeches of his life: \u201cBeyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence.\u201d The legendary orator and organizer, this young Nobel Peace laureate, laid out a bold condemnation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, encouraging collaboration between the civil-rights and the anti-war movements. Fifty years later, as the Trump administration attempts to radically increase the Pentagon budget by $54 billion, and gut social programs and the State Department budget\u2014crucial for achieving diplomatic solutions to conflict\u2014King\u2019s \u201cBeyond Vietnam\u201d speech remains chillingly relevant.<\/p>\n

More than 3,000 people had gathered on that spring day in New York City\u2019s Riverside Church. In his speech, King called the United States \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,\u201d and committed to oppose \u201cthe giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.\u201d He detailed the history of how the U.S. role escalated in Vietnam, then linked the expense of war to poverty at home, saying, \u201cA few years ago … there was a real promise of hope for the poor\u2014both black and white\u2014through the poverty program.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThen came the buildup in Vietnam,\u201d he continued, \u201cand 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. … I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mainstream backlash against King\u2019s speech was immediate. Life magazine accused King of \u201cbetraying the cause for which he worked so long,\u201d adding that \u201cmuch of his speech was a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.\u201d The Washington Post editorialized: \u201cDr. King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies. … He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But King would not relent, continuing to pursue what people now call intersectional organizing. When he was murdered one year after that speech, he was in Memphis, supporting striking sanitation workers who were seeking union recognition. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, he gave his last speech. \u201cI\u2019ve been to the mountaintop,\u201d he declared. Living with continual death threats and FBI harassment, he went on: \u201cLike anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I\u2019m not concerned about that now.\u201d Less than a day later, he was dead. The nation\u2019s largely African-American inner cities erupted into riots, and the history of the country was forever changed.<\/p>\n

Today, the Rev. Dr. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, calls King\u2019s \u201cBeyond Vietnam\u201d speech \u201ca prophetic sermon,\u201d and is carrying King\u2019s strategy forward into the 21st century. \u201cWhere are we on racism, when we see 22 states in this country passing systemic race-based voter-suppression laws and we have less voting-rights protection today than we had in 1965 with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act?\u201d he said on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour. \u201cWhere are we, when we don\u2019t use the word \u2018poor\u2019 in our public and political conversation? When we just a few weeks ago saw an out-of-control military strike kill 200 innocent citizens, and some 400,000 citizens were killed during the Iraq War, that we should have never gone into? When we\u2019re talking about expanding an already-bloated military budget and spending some $54 billion, that if we use that same money in a modern-day war against poverty and a modern call for health care and education, we could do so much more?\u201d<\/p>\n

If Fox News Channel were to pre-empt just one episode of the program hosted by the accused serial sexual harasser Bill O\u2019Reilly and play \u201cBeyond Vietnam,\u201d or if CNN or MSNBC would air the speech in its entirety, there is a chance that President Donald Trump, a voracious cable-news consumer, might see it. Perhaps then he might think twice before escalating the war in Iraq and Yemen, or provoking one against North Korea. As the world reels in horror at the latest poison-gas attack in Syria, most likely launched by the Assad regime against its own citizens, Trump might consider leading the world, now momentarily united in outrage, in a global, diplomatic response that could lead to a political solution there.<\/p>\n

With a strong leader committed to peace, the United States could do this. Most likely, though, that difficult work remains for those in whom Martin Luther King Jr. had the most hope: the people, organizing grass-roots power for peace.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most powerful, controversial speeches of his life: \u201cBeyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence.\u201d The legendary orator and organizer, this young Nobel Peace laureate, laid out a bold condemnation of the U.S. war in Vietnam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}