Read some background information about Dr. Martin Luther King in Write to Be Read, pp. 149-153. (Part 4, Focus on Writing Skills is helpful too.) Then read and react to the speech excerpt I have retyped below, a speech given by Dr. King in 1968 at the height of America's war against Communist forces in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle [for equality for black Americans]. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietman, and I watched the 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 so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube. And so I was increasingly compelled to see the war not only as a moral outrage but also as an enemy of the poor, and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily higher proportions relative to the rest of the population. 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 the TV screen as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to even deeper level of awareness, but it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers. As I walked among the desperate, rejected, angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion, while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But, they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?"—and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace—I answer that I have worked too long and hard now against segregated accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible. It must also be said that it would be rather absurd to work passionately and unrelentingly for integrated schools and not be concerned with the survival of a world in which to be integrated.
To me the relationship of this [Christian ministry] to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. We [clergy] are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
This extraordinary speech connects themes of violence, inequality, injustice, moral outrage, and human brotherhood. At the time it was written, black Americans were still viciously oppressed at home, yet they served in Vietnam to defend their country in numbers far larger than their percentage of the population. Dr. King's words bring chills of recognition to this reader who, at the time the speech was delivered, was a young, privileged white male American, subject to the military draft but much less likely to serve and die in Vietnam than black Americans my age.
Some questions to get the conversation started:
1. What's the particular tragedy of an expensive, politically challenging war breaking out when it did?
2. What's the irony of the out-of-proportion black soldiers serving half a world away?
3. How does King answer critics who can't reconcile his civil rights advocacy with his anti-war advocacy?
ASSIGNMENT: Make a significant, relevant and responsive contribution to a conversation about Dr. King's speech. Remember, the theme of the chapter is "Questions of Right and Wrong." Don't be distracted. Make close references to the text or context of the speech itself.
MINIMUM ACCEPTABLE PRODUCTION: While one extraordinary comment would be sufficient, to be safe, make several, some of which respond to classmate comments. Never write merely to agree. Differ, support, argue, amplify or counter; but never just applaud.
DEADLINE: Midnight (11:59 PM) THU SEP 23.