Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence - 1967 I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves...

Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence – 1967 I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work o f the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time come s when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. . . . There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I wa tched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war . . . . . . . [Another reason] grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. 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 c hange comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? 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 having first 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. . . .Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. . . . We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. . . . We stil l have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. . . . Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. . . . If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Why did King decide to oppose the Vietnam War? What is a “civil right”? Is peace a “civil right”?