...WAS ABOUT, HERE ARE two relevant texts: a newly discovered tape of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy expressing his profound anger at racism, and what I consider the most historically important speech Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave. The JFK report, with a gripping photograph of one of the era's ugliest realities, is here. King's speech, in which he explains in detail his reasons for opposing the Vietnam War, is here. Though of course I cannot prove it, I have always believed that what cost King his life was his decision to refocus the energies of the Civil Rights Movement onto opposing the Vietnam War and making an even greater issue of the damning contradictions of American poverty. (I stood in awe of King's courage and in fact worked for the Civil Rights Movement in East Tennessee during the summer of 1963. Even so, I did not agree with King about Vietnam: a Regular Army soldier from 1959 through 1962, I was a reservist until late 1965 and was still a hawk in 1967, and even now the way of pacifism is not a path to which I am able to commit myself. But by 1970, appalled by the continuing slaughter in a war it was now obvious the U.S. government had no intention of winning, I had joined the anti-war movement. )
Posted by Loren at January 18, 2005 06:06 AM