Speeches on the connection between poverty, racism and the Vietnam War

After the shock of napalm burn photographs in “The Children of Vietnam” article in Ramparts magazine, dated January 1967, Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition to the Vietnam War became inseparable from his campaign for domestic civil rights, expressed in speeches until his assassination on April 4, 1968. The first was “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, from April 4, 1967, where he identified his own government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and that “our only hope lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit” in “declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism”. David Loeb Weiss’s No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, 1968, documents a conversation between three black American veterans of the Vietnam War intercut with footage of the April 1967 Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War held one week after King’s speech.