As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954. Beyond Vietnam / A Time to Break Silence Background. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A … Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. Through his use of imagery, diction, and parallel structure, Martin Luther King Jr associates the war in Vietnam with injustice in his famous speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence.” Martin Luther King Jr. applies imagery throughout his speech in order to illustrate the horrors of the war to arouse anger at its atrocities and injustice. And we must rejoice as well, for surely 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. The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. "Vincent Harding dies at 82; historian wrote controversial King speech", "Vincent Harding, author of Martin Luther King Jr.'s antiwar speech, dies", "The Rev. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 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. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only real party in real touch with the peasants. "The calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak," said King. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." MLK: Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence 1967 Riverside Church Published on Jul 6, 2015 In this speech, he opposes violence and militarism, particularly the war in Vietnam… The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. 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 I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, San Francisco. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. The peasants watched and cringed and Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. 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