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Who Is Martin Luther King Jr Beyond Vietnam Speech

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Martin Luther King. Jr was a Baptist church minister and civil-rights activist. He played a pivotal role in the legal ending of racial segregation in the states. On April 4,. 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, he gave the “A Time to Break Silence”, or better known, “Beyond Vietnam” speech. The speech was about the conflict that was currently brewing across in the sea in Vietnam. “We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the world [...] If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight” (King), King states that if the US government and the audience don’t start doing something to stop the fighting that is happening in Vietnam, they too, will be pulled into the chaotic mess. In the hopes that the US can achieve world peace, King wrote this speech to encourage his people to try and stop the violence. …show more content…

“And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside church” (King), from this you can infer that King will be talking to a Christian audience and will tailor his speech to the audience's preferences whilst staying relevant to the Vietnam war that was currently happen overseas. Throughout the speech, King mentions the name of God several times, such as “This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response” (King) and “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation”

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Being an appeal to pathos, King uses descriptors to show the emotions he is having. King is saying enough is enough the South has been a state nothing getting done and it should change. He says he loves the South, but certain people have come in and “bogged down” the area with agendas that do not flesh well with the rest of the South. He is tired of speakers and talkers that do not follow up their speeches with action or even conversations. King just wants Southerners to start having conversations and working together to resolve issues instead of being told and forced to

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Dr.Martin Luther king Jr was a Baptist minister and social activist. He led the civil rights movement and he used non violent protests to get the freedom that other blacks and himself deserved. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered this speech in a time of great civil unrest and the increasing of racial tensions. He showed many outstanding qualities ,perseverance,organizational ideas,dignity and respect. He was influenced by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil and unequal system.

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These clergymen deemed his organized group activities as “unwise and untimely.” (King, 1963). These men, who at the time had higher power over King due to their race, were unwelcoming and racist, which caused King to need firm and calm but strongly expressed arguments. King’s speech, on the other hand, is positive and powerful with a direct audience to speak to instead of a letter. His speech has an optimistic tone towards his audience as he quickly claims his happiness towards the gathering and his certainty of the impact he would make with “…the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

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When speaking about how the war had initially seem to have brought opportunities, he says, “Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor.” Evidently, the program for the poor was meant to be used in helping the poor, but as soon as the funds were directed to the Vietnam War, resources were no longer cast in their direction. In other words, the resources were used for the soldiers, yet the poor still needed them just as so. A few lines after, King writes about the injustice the African-American community has faced, 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.” To further show to the audience how his community has been suffering from the war, he uses a comparison statement between the facts to illustrate how freedom has been hard to attain.

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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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King used powerful and expressive language in order to magnetize sentimental affinity to his listeners, such as: “This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.” “We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.” “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” King repeatedly used the line “ I have a dream” towards the end of the speech to trigger the emotions of his audience and give them hope. He spoke this line with an extreme emphasis as it encourages his audience to change “today” instead of being contradistinguished against.

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He attempts to call upon sympathy within the audience by using highly expressive language. For instance, he starts by stating the effects of the Vietnam War forced the American poverty program: "experiments, hopes, new beginnings." down the pipe, "I watched this program broken and eviscerated" through the "buildup in Vietnam,". Through the emotional, destruction of America's effort to support the war, King's powerful use of diction talking the loss of desire and new lives causes the audience to feel sorry for the poor of America. King uses quotes as these to suggest to convince them of the destruction of the Vietnam War, with pathos, by strongly appealing to his audience's emotion.

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In The Truth About Our Little White Lies, Karen S. Paterson quotes psychologists Jerald Jellison of the University of South Carolina in Los Angeles, B. L. Kintz at Western Washington University in Bellingham, and Dr. Irving Baran of the USC San Diego Medical School, in regards to the amount of small fibs we say on a daily basis. Paterson states, “We lie so often, with such regularity and fluency, so automatically and glibly that we’re not even aware we’re doing it.” In making this comment, Paterson argues that we lie constantly and effortlessly. So much so, that we do not recognize we are doing it. In a way, we become unconscious to those fifty plus lies we tell a day.

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He incorporated a lot of biblical allusions to insist the audience that his speech is in accordance to the Bible, as King writes that he has a dream that one day, “every valley shall be exalted,” every hill and mountain “made low,” all rough places will be “plain” and crooked places “straight” and that the “glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” (Isaiah 40:4-5). On another occasion he paraphrased one of biblical statement “weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” (Psalms 30:5 ) in his words as “It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity “cite .King’s allusions to past events help to create unite both races and inspire them to tackle this problem collectively as both colors experienced American history in some form or another. King not only references the Biblical allusions which emotionally appeal to people but also mentions legal statements like declaration of independence and Emancipation proclamation by mentioning “Five score years …” to refer to Abraham Lincoln’s address and “promissory note” to direct their attention towards their legal rights as mentioned in the constitution.

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