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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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