Martin Luther King’s Legacy
For Jonathan Alter at Newsweek:
the central story of the last act of King’s life takes place in Chicago.
Respectfully, I disagree. I believe the speech he made against the Vietnam war on April 4, 1967 - a speech i never heard in school, this was the focus of his life at the end. MLK travelled the country and delivered this speech again and again until he was shot April 4, 1968… funny coincidence, eh?
Speaking out his experiences in the Chicago ghettoes, MLK said,
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it 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 change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
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 hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
(Don’t just listen- download them all and play on MLK Day!)
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