"The truth of these words is beyond Doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one, even when pressed by the demands of inner truth. Men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world and, moreover, when the issue is at hand, it's seen as perplexion, as they often do. In the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty, but we must move on. And some of us who have all ready begun to break the silence of the knight have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vizion, but we must speak. And we must rejoice, as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its 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. Perhaps, a new spirit is rising among us. If it ends, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way, beyond the darkness that seems so close around U.S.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: 'Why are you speaking about the War, Dr. King? Why are you joining the Voices of Dissent? Peace and Civil Rights don't mix,' they say. 'Aren't you hurting the cause of your people?' they ask. And when I hear them, though, I often understand the Source of their concern, I'm, nevertheless, greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total Situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy. Nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. They have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the United States. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. That is, that obvious and almost facile connection between the war and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago, there was a Shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. And then came the military buildup. And I watched this program of hope broken and eviscerated, as if it was some idol 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 military adventures continue to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic destructive suction tube, so I was increasingly compelled to see the War as an Enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps, a more tragic recognition of reality took place and 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 to die in extraordinarily high 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 miles away to guarantee liberties, which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem and so we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony: watching Negro and White Boys on TV screens, as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so. We watch them: in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village, when we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I cannot be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor." ~ Dr. King
