Danielle (Dani) Cutler | |
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He was born January 15, 1929. If he lived, he
would have turned 79 years old. In the early 1960s, King focused his challenge on
legalized racial discrimination in the South where police dogs and bullwhips and cattle
prods were used against Southern blacks seeking the right to vote or to eat at a public
lunch counter. After passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained
that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights”—including economic rights.
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam
War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.
In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4,
1967—a year to the day before he was murdered—King called the United States “the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for
Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness
to his cause, his country, his people.”
We turn now to that speech that King gave in April 1967.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at
Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967.
For more of King’s speeches check: Pacifica
Radio Archives.
King gave his speech “Beyond Vietnam” a year to the day before he was assassinated
at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. On the day of King’s assassination, Robert
Kennedy was in Indianapolis, Indiana campaigning for president. He announced the assassination
of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968.
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Sen. Robert Kennedy, speaking in Indianapolis, IN, April 4, 1968.
For more of King’s speeches check: Pacifica
Radio Archives.
The night before he was killed, King gave his last major address in Memphis, Tennessee.
He was there to support striking sanitation workers as he built momentum for a Poor
Peoples March on Washington.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his “I Have Been to the Mountain
Top” speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968.
For more of King’s speeches check: Pacifica
Radio Archives.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/21/dr_martin_luther_king_jr_1929
Something special in honor of MLK
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