Story of the Day: The MLK Speech the Mainstream Media Ignores

We are perennially inundated with footage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. A beautiful and brilliant oratory, indeed. But one deemed safe by the establishment. Much lesser known is "Beyond Vietnam," a blistering critique of the United States involvement in that war and the act of war itself, as well as a contextual history lesson on the region and a call for an American "revolution of values," in which "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Dr. King delivered the speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. He was assassinated one year later to the day of its utterance on April 4, 1968. As George W. Bush plans to send 20,000 more American troops to his slaughterhouse in Iraq, nothing could be more apropos than the words Dr. King delivered on that day in Riverside Church. 

"Beyond Vietnam" is a masterpiece. A perfect union of eloquence, sagacity, morality, indignation, courage and compassion. It should be taught in every classroom in the country. But when you read it, you'll know why it's not:

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about 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." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

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. 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. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have 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. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "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? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

(Read the rest...and listen to the audio...)

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

The MLK Speech the Media Ignores

[Jake]

Damn. Why don't people speak like that anymore? Is it TV? No one uses language like that anymore. Why?

Powerful speech.

[MediaBloodhound]

I don't know. Fear. Lack of courage, integrity and a sense of an allegiance to the common good. I mean there are also many people still making great speeches today, but, like this one, they are rarely ever broadcast or printed in the mainstream media. That said, Jake, MLK was, of course, also one of a kind.

[Ray]

As I, too, have moved to break the betrayal of my own silence on violence, its worth a wonder what right possibilities and true prosperities could an unborn future inherit if we should but break the night of silence in which violence stalks. "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

Martin Luther King's view was the polar opposite of violence was NOT nonviolence. "Negative peace" -- apathy and ambivalence to injustice, peacefulness without justice -- is the opposite of violence. Practicing nonviolence is the antidote to both the poison of violence and the poison of apathetic negative peace. Dr King said many accept and some prefer, "a negative peace which is the absence of [conflict] to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

Wendell Berry: "The issue of human violence is not one you are going to be able to escape. You are going to suffer it, whether you try to ignore it or try to do something about it. ... Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain 'removed' by strip mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We are living, it seems, into the culmination of a long warfare -- at first merely commercial and then industrial, always unabashedly violent -- against human beings and other creatures, and of course against the earth itself. The purpose of this warfare has been to render the real goods of the world into various forms of abstract wealth: money, gold, shares, etc. Just as technological power has increasingly served this purpose, so increasingly has political power."

Nonviolence? Why not?