About five years ago, I was listening to the radio and I tuned in partway through the program. I could tell that they were broadcasting a speech and that it was one I had not heard before. The speaker explained why he opposed the Vietnam War, and it took me many minutes before I realized that it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Because, while I had learned about him and the civil rights struggle in school, I had learned the most palatable version. The one that talked about how he believed in people being judged by the content of their character, and how he led a march on Washington, and how--if it wasn't for him--black kids and white kids would still be segregated in schools. Aside from the way that obscures what goes into movement-building and all the people who participate, which is a discussion in and of itself, I had learned about a version of Martin Luther King that did not present a challenge to the status quo today.
But that's only a sliver of his story. Here is a YouTube video with the audio of his speech explaining his opposition to the war. I want to pull out the few passages that resonate for me:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. 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.
[...]
This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
[...]
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth 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 Latin 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. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Here is the transcript linked to on the YouTube page, which is actually more complete than the audio (which seems to have clips edited out).
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