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Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Martin Luther King: "Why I Am Opposed To The War In Vietnam." (Video And Transcript)

WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE WAR IN VIETNAM, Address to Riverside Church in New York, 1967

Did you know that MLK won a Grammy? In 1971, he was awarded the honor posthumously, winning Best Spoken Word Album for this 1967 speech. King is mostly known for his words on race, but a holistic reading of King shows that his entire worldview, including his pacifism, was rooted in a general belief in equality across all aspects of society–to the point where he was often accused of leaning towards socialism. And this was King at his most controversial, condemning the American military-industrial complex and the entirety of its foreign policy. Would conservative commentators today be so quick to quote his belief that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”? Transcript here.


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