In the spring of 1967 — with a string of victories and a Nobel Peace Prize behind him — Martin Luther King Jr., could have settled in his lane as the foremost face of the civil rights movement.
Instead, on April 4, exactly a year before his assassination, he said his "conscience leaves me no other choice," but to come out strongly against the Vietnam War.
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in a blistering speech in New York. “I cannot be silent.”
»RELATED: Read the AJC's full coverage of the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr.
Some 51 years later, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," is not heavily quoted and remembered, but it liberated King even as it cost him. Civil rights leaders and the highest rungs of government lined up against him.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that “based on King’s recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeing to undermine our nation.”
Ralph Bunche, who was the first African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, said King “ought not be both a civil rights leader and an anti-war spokesman” and should give up one role or the other.
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The criticism set off a tumultuous year in which King fought depression and his staff, as he searched for new causes.
Read more about King’s Vietnam speech the lasting impact that it had on him during the last year of his life in Honoring King.
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