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Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech On Vietnam

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Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech on Vietnam was a speech raging against war. King spoke of the beliefs held by other religious figures, urging them to speak up about the current situation. King describes the misconception that men are to remain loyal to their government in the face of war. Instead he suggests that a moral precedent needs to be taken in opposition to the United States’ continued involvement in the war. All the while King goes on to note that others question his opposition to the war as he is a civil rights leader.

In King’s opinion the struggle over Vietnam is the same struggle that African Americans face on a daily basis. The war in Vietnam took away from many other programs that benefited otherwise economically unprivileged …show more content…

eventually ties the war and the fight for civil rights together by verbalizing the fact that poor blacks are being sent to fight in an essentially unwinnable war by stating “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And 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”. He ties the two together by describing the oppression of the Vietnamese people at the hands of French Imperial forces and then American forces as well. According to King, American involvement in Vietnam has destroyed both the Vietnamese family and village, “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their

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Martin Luther King Jr. was an influential civil rights leader. He wanted to bring all people together and live in a peaceful society. In his speech, King talked about how as a leader of a civil rights movement, he couldn't support the war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded his audience to not support the Vietnam war through his use of ethos and pathos.

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In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant.

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And, to argue that King 's most radical days were never fulfilled; that his next campaign was to confront the president over the Vietnam War and economic disparity, “a direct confrontation with a president over an immoral war” state Hill and Wang from the book review. Although a limitation is that in almost every book about Martin Luther King including this one, only describe King’s successes and not all the failures. This occurs because the authors do not want to portray a bad image about a good man, but it is very important for us to know these failures so that we can learn and not have to understand why King did specific things, plus this topic is one of the most important events in U.S. history that’s why we need to know exactly what happened especially its when its going to remembered for many years to

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“Even before I went to high school and college I resolve not to take insults without retaliating. Growing up in Pasadena, I encountered many situations which I considered unjust. I remember going to the YMCA and being told that Negroes were allowed to use the facilities of the Y only on a certain day of the week.” Jackie Robinson’s voice would be heard by many written in newspapers as prominent as The New York Times. In 1981 a journalist wrote on the subject of the civil rights activists and wrote, “Although Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the most prominent spokesman for civil rights, other movement leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, and Julian Bond, actively opposed the war in Vietnam or at least resented the increased amount of Federal money going toward the conflict, resources that otherwise could be spent on domestic problems.

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“There is at the outset a very obvious... connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America,”(Document E: Martin Luther King, Jr.). During the period of the Vietnam War, division struck the United States due to people’s vast opinions, this caused a rift in the country and began protests. Citizens of the USA did have legitimate reasons to protest the Vietnam War, but not all agreed with that. American citizens had many different reasons to protest the Vietnam War, but the biggest reason was that people were realizing how horrific wars truly were.

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But, as the South Vietnamese were fighting for their liberation from a communist regime and the Americans were not, the Americans could not provide the Vietnamese with the will to win. Seeing as their efforts in Vietnam were not as effective as had been hoped for, America began to lose support for the war as tensions at home increased. “It is like sending a lion to halt an epidemic of jungle rot,” [Doc E]. The lions that were being sent, as many of the time recognized, were often minorities and oppressed people. Martin Luther King, a popular civil rights activist, said, “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” [Doc C].

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Throughout the first paragraph of King’s speech, he used emotional diction with words such as struggle, poverty, and poor to prove that the war in Vietnam was bringing down the American’s and their families fighting overseas. King proved this partly with the quote, “America would never invest the necessary funds… in the rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued…” (King, Beyond, 9). King was establishing his point that America was more troubled about healing and adjusting other countries, but would never invest the same in their own country. He was in the process of proving that it wasn 't a money issue in America, but an equality issue.

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In Dr. King on the Vietnam War the article tells of how Dr.King in 1967 spoke out about the issue. Though before that he would explain how he was not proud of the war. “He said the war in Vietnam must be stopped, and he called for demonstrations and nonviolent protest “to keep this issue before the conscience of our nation,”. Dr.King wanted to set a bases in the states so that people saw that peaceful protest were needed in the states in order to spread the word about the horrors and tragedies resulting from the Vietnam War. Both in the song and article, natural forces were trying to signal soldiers and regular people about the terror of war that was happening and getting worse in the near future.

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King, a supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society, became concerned about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He believed that the Vietnam War diverted money and attention from domestic programs created to aid the black poor and would benefit only the banks who fund wars and the industries that supply the war. King said, ‘the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home… We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.'” (Document

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King appeals to the public so as to encourage them to attain non violence as an ideal weapon. King begins his argument by mentioning that he addresses the audience with a purpose of giving moral views about America's involvement about Vietnam. He appeals to his audience by mentioning that the poverty program - which developed over years - is disintegrating because the political thoughts of the society

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