Beyond Vietnam – A time to break silence

1. Beyond Vietnam – A time to break silence Martin Luther King, Jr.

2. Martin Luther King, JR. • Martin Luther King, Jr., born on January 15, 1929, was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights by using non-violent civil disobedience. On April 4,, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, and after an emergency chest surgery, he was pronounced dead.

3. accomplishments • Martin Luther King, Jr. has won many awards including at least fifty honorary degrees from colleges and universities. On October 14, 1964, Martin became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was given this award for leading non-violent resistance to racial prejudice in the United States. In honor of Martin, on November 2, 1983 at the White House Rose Garden, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a holiday to honor him. Martin Luther King, Jr. day was first practiced on January 20, 1986.

4. About the Speech • Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech, Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech was an anti-Vietnam war speech and was sponsored by the group Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. A PBS commentator, in 2010, referred to this as Martin’s most controversial speech. The message directly challenged the president whohad taken great political risks to support civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King, Jr.

5. Main Points • “And 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.” • Martin Luther King, Jr. uses repetition to stress the importance of voicing one’s opinion. Although it may cause suffering because others may not agree, Martin believes people must still speak their mind.

6. Main Points • “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor– both black and white – through the 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 suction tube.” • The poverty in America will never come to an end if our government continues to be war crazy and using all its money to fund them.

7. Main Points • “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. 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, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.” • They want these young men to be equal when they are sent thousands of miles away to fight and possibly even die for their country, but they can barely live on the same block back home.

8. Main Points • “…I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greater purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” • Although everyday people play a large role in the civil rights movement and the problems that came along with it, our own government is much at fault for these issues. The easiest thing to do would be to blame the oppressed, but King believes the government is wrong for ignoring these people and their issues but rather sending them over to fight in pointless wars.

9. Main Points • “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 engage in a negative anticommunism, 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.” • Instead of going to war, which will not stop communism, we must seek positive actions to remove our problems. Martin Luther King, Jr. states that communism thrives from poverty, insecurity, and injustice. Once we remove these minor issues in a positive way, the issue of communism will also become resolved.

10. “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

11. Bonus • “Over the past two years, as I 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.” • Emotional Appeal • “…But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” • Parallelism • “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” • Parallelism

12. Bonus • “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 – in the crushing of their of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. • Parallelism & Repetition • “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?” • Rhetorical Questions