MLK Speeches

By Nancy Price for The Davis Enterprise - Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” of August 1963, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, is the most widely known of his speeches, and is remembered every year on his birthday, Jan. 15. But King’s most revolutionary speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” was given on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, a year before he died. It seems relevant today as it marked his movement from civil rights to a critique of unbridled capitalism and war. Bear in mind that King spoke at the time of the Vietnam war and the threat of Chinese communism spreading into Southeast Asia. Most broadly, he questioned a foreign policy based on interventions overseas, repression of war critics, and of colonialism and imperialism driven by resource extraction in other countries. As he declared: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” He called for a “revolution of values,” a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.