What would Martin say? (Bangor Daily News)

[struggle4progress]

... Perhaps the best indication is found in the text of his April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York City.

Although he faced criticism from many in the civil rights movement, he began by acknowledging his previous silence on the Vietnam War: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." He went on to say that religious leaders "have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history"

Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to the connections between the Vietnam War and the struggle against racism and poverty. Speaking about the way the Vietnam War had squandered the resources needed to fight poverty in the U.S., he said, "A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seems as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty program. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war...I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds ... in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such" ...

Dr. King said we were "bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." When we see the smashed homes of ordinary Iraqis, see their children and women crying in the rubble, it recalls the terrible devastation our country wrought from the air on Vietnam. King said, "I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted." We must ask ourselves by what moral justification do we allow our government to once again visit destruction on the homes of others ...

http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=127062

[grasswire]

1. outstanding read -- thanks so much

I've passed this on to a mailing list of liberal ministers.

[struggle4progress]

2. Here's the full text of the speech to Clergy and Laity Concerned:

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html