| Popis: |
Ater several weeks of speaking out on various occasions against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther IGng, Jr., chose to deliver his most considered statement at Riverside Church in New York, at an event sponsored by the group Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. The date—April 4, 1967—was chosen for maximum political impact (it was also exactly one year before King’s assassination). In early 2003, as opposition to the pending invasion of Iraq built up at home and abroad, “A Time to Break Silence” (the name given to the speech in King’s collected writings) gained considerable exposure at peace rallies, on alternative radio stations, and elsewhere. This is hardly surprising, given its extraordinary rhetorical power and its author’s immense reputation. What is more surprising, given those same two factors, is the speech’s relative neglect during the intervening 26 years. To vary Lincoln’s phrase, it was much noted at the time but not long remembered. The reasons for this neglect, it is not hard to assume, are the ghettoizing of King in official memory as a civil rights leader and the general amnesia that has settled over the antiwar movement of the 1960s. For King on April 4, 1967, both these issues—the nature of his career and the cause of peace—became indissolubly joined, with the result that his most considered attack on the Vietnam War is also his most considered meditation on his vocation—on what it meant to him to be “Martin Luther King.” |
