Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

You are here: Home / Politics / America / 4 April 1967: Dr. King’s Speech on Vietnam

4 April 1967: Dr. King’s Speech on Vietnam

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Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis Tennessee. He gave his final speech that day in support of striking sanitation workers. It was also one year to the day from his speech about the Vietnam War. MLK’s Beyond Vietnam speech was delivered 50 years ago today. Given all the tumult going on in general, and the events of the day in specific, it is important to stop, step back, and reflect on Dr. King’s life’s work and the words he spoke on two different April 4ths a year apart.

Reader Interactions

51Comments

  2. 2.

    Adam L Silverman

    @H.E.Wolf: You are quite welcome. Given how the day went, I was beginning to worry something else horrific and national security related was going to happen and I wasn’t going to be able to get to it…

  3. 3.

    Omnes Omnibus

    My dad’s 25th birthday was 4/4/68. He went to a AA house on the campus where he was a student to pick up the friend with whom he was supposed to go out to dinner. Mom and 3y/o me stayed in the car. Everyone in the house was armed and ready for the world to go bad. Dad was acknowledged as okay, but the dinner was cancelled.

  4. 4.

    Villago Delenda Est

    It always pisses me off that today’s GOP, the party of Donald Trump and Jefferson FUCKING Beauregard FUCKING Sessions the FUCKING third dare to claim Dr. King as one of their own. No way, assholes.

  6. 6.

    Mike J

    My first reporting gig was the tenth anniversary of King’s assassination. I was 12 years old, hanging out at the radio station. They handed me a tape recorder and sent me off to the COGIC temple and had me get audio. Sermons, singing, whatever I could get. I had been on the air already dj’ing music, but I didn’t go on the air that day. I did get a thanks. A couple of years later I was interviewing councilmen.

  8. 8.

    lamh36

    saw the titile and I’ll admit i figured it was likely a post by you Adam!

    Was just online checking out the tweet from the FBI abut this date and of course the righteous snark being thrown the FBIs way, even if the twitter acct is well meaning.

    I may have missed it, but did the Cheeto admin even turn away from its stupidity to even fake acknowledge the significance of this date.

    BTW, my fav tweet today is from Bernice King just a pic of young Bernice in her dad’s arms and captioned “Missing You”

    https://twitter.com/berniceking/status/849230910474072065

    ETA: Bernice King tweeted all day about MLK and how her family were honoring him today

  9. 9.

    John Revolta

    And today, April 4th 2017, the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act also applies to LGBT employees. The arc of the moral universe keep on bending.

  11. 11.

    eemom

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I was 5, and in the hospital having my tonsils out.

    To this day I don’t actually know what a tonsil even is. I got to eat a lot of ice cream when I got home, though.

  13. 13.

    Mike J

    I hate to go off topic, but did anyone see this?

    WASHINGTON — A short section in Judge Neil Gorsuch’s 2006 book appears to copy — at times word-for-word — from a 1984 law review article by a lawyer in Indiana. Other sections of his book that were reviewed by BuzzFeed News contain additional apparent attribution errors.

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lamh36: I feel bad I haven’t gotten to that attack on the homeless guy in NY yet. I can’t keep up! We need interns! Or something…

    Here’s that FBI tweet, perhaps the most surreal tweet of the day. Below it I’ve embedded the Bernice King one you provided the link for.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mike J: I’m not so sure about this part of the article:

    Dr. Chris Mammen, who was a stadent at Oxford while Gorsuch was there, said in a statement provided by Gorsuch’s team, “The standard practice in a dissertation is to cite the underlying original source, not a secondary source, that supports a factual statement.”

    It would depend on the style requirements he was subject too. I prefer to do the above, but note that the source is via where I found it. Other style’s require you put the source you found it in, not the original. Or to cite both.

  17. 17.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @eemom: It stuck out to me because we didn’t go into the house like we normally would have. And did many times in the past. Later, I understood why. How close to violent revolution were we?

  19. 19.

    Steeplejack

    @eemom:

    Is removing tonsils still a thing? It happened to a lot of kids when I was a kid, but that was back in the Dark Ages. I don’t seem to hear about it anymore from the parents of kids that I know.

  22. 22.

    Truegster

    Imo, Beyond Vietnam ranks as one of the best of all time, ever. Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech ranks above it, but just barely. I’ve listened to “Beyond Vietnam” countless times, at work and going to sleep, I’ve even mixed it with Peace Orchestra on a computer, it picks up rhythm and tempo kind of parallel to the speech, if annotated. It’s become a part of me to the point that I even use phrases from it accidentally – we must move away from a object oriented society to a people oriented society, for example. The speech is beautiful, prescient and powerful, you have to listen to it.

  23. 23.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: White people lucked out. Largely because of people like my parents. They convinced a generation that because they treated everyone equally and worked so hard to get the radio stations from Memphis and OKC, that everyone of their cohort weren’t assholes.

  24. 24.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Glad to see the FBI being taken to the woodshed in the comments to its Twitter account for the way it hounded Dr. King when he was alive. Should have kept a discreet silence. Of course no apology would or will be forthcoming.

  27. 27.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yep. My Dad was involved too. Marched with (as in was somewhere in there with all the other marchers) Dr. King on more than one occasion.

  28. 28.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: I was at the ’68 Dem. Convention things because my parents couldn’t afford a baby-sitter. It is a strange world.

    ETA: Not trying to one up. And off to bed.

  32. 32.

    StringOnAStick

    @Steeplejack: No, removing tonsils is no longer a thing based on age, only on need. They are part of your immune system and now are only removed if the kid is struggling with lots of tonsillitis.

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne

    @lamh36:

    Here in LA, I got to hear Lisa Collins speak for MLK Day. She was basically his goddaughter — her father was the SBLC’s representative in So Cal.

  37. 37.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    Goddamn it, now Stephanie Ruhle is on Brian Williams’s show. (I’m about 30 minutes behind on the DVR.) She already befouled the airwaves on Hardball earlier.

    . . . She sounds slightly less crazy than she did earlier tonight. But Ivanka is passionate about women’s issues!

  38. 38.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    Brian Williams going to John McCain after the break. Aw, hell, no. I’m out, bro. Over to Colbert.

  39. 39.

    bemused senior

    I was a Stanford student in SF meeting up with my dad on April 4, 1968. He was shipping out to SE Asia. We watched the coverage of King’s death on the TV in his hotel. I dropped out of college for the year and worked for the poverty program, and “clean for Gene”. What an awful period it was.

  41. 41.

    Amir Khalid

    @Steeplejack:
    Apparently, tonsillectomies are still performed, but the procedure has rather fallen out of favour with doctors. Per Wikipedia:

    The scientific evidence indicates that tonsillectomy is on average only modestly effective at reducing the frequency and severity of sore throats, and does not get rid of sore throats altogether. Benefits also appear to only last for a year after surgery.]

  43. 43.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    Today would have been my younger sister’s 52nd birthday. She died a little over a year ago. We were living in Hawai’i when Dr. King was murdered, and word began to filter in to the adults at her birthday party before it was over – the first political assassination I remember, although sickeningly only the first of many.

    I asked her once if she ever thought about the fact that her birthday was the same date as Dr. King’s death. She said wryly, “only every April 4.”

    She was a foreign service officer who loved having Hillary as her boss. One of the few comforts I have for her loss is that at least she didn’t have to witness our current state of clusterfuckedness.

  44. 44.

    NotoriousJRT

    @Steeplejack:
    I don’t know about now. When I was 6 and my brother was 3 (early 60’s dark ages), we had our tonsils out to address ear infections. For me, it was a god-send & an end to chronic painful ear aches. By the time another brother ( 6 yrs younger), had his ear troubles, removing tonsils was out of fashion. He waited until he was 12 or 13 to finally get the relief of having his tonsils out. Just testifying that having tonsils out can have real benefits…

  46. 46.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @NotoriousJRT:

    Ah, that was the thing that was nagging at my memory! A lot of kids had their tonsils out because they had problems related to ear infections, in addition to sore throats.

  47. 47.

    opiejeanne

    @Omnes Omnibus: I was 16 when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Inspiring. My Republican dad who did not approve of MLK agreed with every word of that speech. There were many times when I wondered why Dad was still a Republican.

  49. 49.

    Ohio Mom

    @Steeplejack: Another reason tonsils are still taken out is sleep apena or other airway issues. Which are conditions that weren’t on the radar until fairly recently.

    My kid went from having severe apnea — with very little REM sleep as a result — to none at all with the removal of his tonsils and adenoids.

    Fun fact: your adenoids can grow back — that didn’t happen to my kid but it did to a teen we know, and he had to have a second surgery.

    Also, and unfortunately, while removing tonsils in kids usually cures apnea, it doesn’t work for adults. Hello, CPAP machine…

  51. 51.

    Bonnie

    Thank you, Adam, for posting this. 1968 was truly a bad year. The leaders of that year were so far and above any leaders we have now.

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