MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

From his speech "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break the Silence," after which, a year later, he was assassinated:

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 ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask 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 the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Full text here.

It is an artificial intellectual construction to separate the oppression here within our borders from the oppression our government spreads abroad. It's all the same thing, driven by the same forces, benefitting the same people, the people at the very top. And they killed Dr. King for being brave enough to point out the obvious.

Listen:



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