11/12/2022 0 Comments Mlk speechHere King arrives at the heart of his subject: "Some of us," he confesses, "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." Members of the black community would charge that by his new commitment he was diluting the single-minded pursuit of civil rights for which he was known to stand. King knew that his uncompromising dissent would draw bitter attacks. Even the tactical objection that said, "The war cannot be won," was still a marginal view, though now steadily gaining adherents. Moral protest, which said "The war is wrong," was still, as it would remain, very much a minority position. This speech was King’s public announcement of his opposition to the war. In such a situation, says King, "we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty but we must move on." The trouble is all the greater in a case like this, where evil is on both sides but where America’s violence has greatly exceeded that of the enemy, since American resources for violence through the use of air power are so much greater. 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." "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. Yet to support concrete acts of nonviolent protest or non-cooperation remains a difficult choice. Mlk speech full#King began by acknowledging his solidarity with the organizers of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam and he pledged himself in full accord with their recent statement: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." In Vietnam, says King, "that time has come for us." It protests the command and deployment by Lyndon Johnson of almost unlimited violence against the people and the land of Vietnam for the declared purpose of protecting them from the menace of world communism. Yet like that extraordinary earlier appeal, "A Time to Break Silence" is also addressed to the evils of a particular time and place. It is a statement against war in principle, in the same sense in which King’s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," published four years earlier, had been a statement against social injustice in principle. One of the greatest speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," was delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, on April 4, 1967.
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