MLK spoke out against war, not just racism

Editor,

The prophet Martin Luther King, Jr. refused to castrate truth into safe generalities. The FBI hounded, harassed and persecuted him because he made truth specific. He damned the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and the evils of U.S. imperialism and capitalism.

Exactly one year before he was assassinated, he delivered his monumental speech “A Time to Break Silence” in New York City on April 4, 1967.

Hear him: “…many persons have questioned me … ‘Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? … Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?’ Such questions mean that the inquirers have not known me, my commitment or my calling … they do not know the world in which they live.

“As I have walked about the desperate, rejected and angry young men in the ghettos of the North, I have told them that Molotov Cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintain my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? … I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam … So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children … What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out … new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe … This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows … of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love…”

Why do most U.S. media and official King commemorations refuse to quote that speech as often as “I Have a Dream”? They deliberately focus our attention only on King’s civil rights legacy. They cannot erase him from U.S. history, so they delete monstrously from his radical message against war and greed.

Also, King’s words on Vietnam should especially be heard now.

Contact Congress and Obama now to oppose a U.S. attack on Syria.

Don Schrader
Daily Lobo reader