On this day, April 4th, in 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his seminal speech “Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence” at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned.
By 1967, Dr. King had become one of the country’s most prominent opponents of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his groundbreaking “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Dr. King’s words were both precautionary and prophetic, providing both a diagnosis and a cure – “a true revolution of values” – for our society’s gravest illnesses, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
For the complete text and audio version of Martin Luther King’s Declaration Against War: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
