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| Legacy of Martin Luther King - the antiwar speech that most likely killed him |
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| National News |
| Posted by Florida Greens |
| Tuesday, 17 February 2009 00:00 |
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One year to the day after Martin Luther King delivered a speech at the Riverside Church in NYC, he was gunned down in Memphis. If you haven't yet heard them (and even if you have), it behooves you to hear the words of our then highest moral public figure that challenged the US role in Vietnam and beyond. Try to get your public speakers, newspapers and public as well as private TV stations to refer to that speech, instead of the endless broadcasting of the "I have a dream..." speech. The latter has its rightful place in history, but the Riverside Church speech is the one most needed to be heard by ALL communities today. It is a sad statement to say that America then, as now, has not politically reached sufficient maturity to allow its people hear true words of righteous justice. This, in "the land of the free..." Even the ironies have ironies. There is nothing funny about it, however. Oh, you can hear it—even get it online—but play it for the general public, play it on Martin Luther King Day...? Just try. What made that speech both memorable and controversial was that King voluntarily and with great clarity shed the restricting mantle of "civil rights leader only" and assumed the larger mantle of advocate of human rights and world justice. It was this stepping out and stepping up to an "unassigned role" that likely led to his planned demise. "Stay in your place" was the call not only from the government and media, but sadly also from many clergy and activists attached to the Civil Rights Movement who either feared his "diluting" the struggle for black citizens' rights, or feared the well-known wrath attached to the epithet of "uppity Negro." Many expected his moral leadership to stop at the suburbs, much less the border. As FOIA requests and other documents have shown, MLK already was on Hoover's CIA watch-list (his wife Coretta, too). Powerful people in government (or in the nearby shadows) already were not too happy with the man and his influence on the black and civil rights community. Ironically, within the Movement, MLK's leadership and organizing was often seen as too peace-oriented and passive for those seeking to finally end hundreds of years of injustice. A Call to Lay Down Arms
See and hear words from that immortal speech, put to images in this video. "War is the enemy of the poor...""A nation that continues...to spends more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."...from"Beyond Vietnam" MLK's speech on April 4th, 1967 — one year to the day of his assasination.Read the complete speech. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U In the full speech he takes on the critics in a way never before heard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3zwcQlWsPU |
| Last Updated on Saturday, 27 June 2009 23:38 |