MLK: Get on right side of world revolution
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
This speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1967 is less often remembered because of its sharp indictment of reckless foreign wars, poverty and corporate greed.
"So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."
It was King's most controversial speech, denounced by newspapers nationwide and harming his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson. King was condemned as a communist and a traitor. It was one of his last speeches. He was assassinated one year later, to the day.
Listen to Beyond Vietnam, delivered April 1967 at Manhattan's Riverside Church.
Listen here.
The text is here.
Check out these stories on the speech from Tavis Smiley and NPR.
