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By 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had become a passionate opponent of t

12-12-2009 at 05:47:39 PM
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By 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had become a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War

Beyond Vietnam — April 4, 1967
By 1967, King had become a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War. In this speech delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City, King referred tp the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. 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. 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. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Robert Frost (1875-1963) American Poet.