ABSTRACT
In April 1967, at a time of escalating violence both at home and abroad, Dr Martin Luther King, Jnr spoke from the pulpit at Riverside Church in New
York City. King was focused not only on the violence suffered by African
Americans in conditions of racial injustice, nor only on the violence suffered
by soldiers and peasants in Vietnam. He was also gravely concerned with
the commands of soldiers to inflict violence on others and on the growing
inclination of African Americans and other citizens to turn to violence in
the struggle for justice in the United States. Invoking his responsibility as a
Nobel laureate, as a Christian minister, and as a citizen, with anguish and despair in his voice King offered the harrowing conclusion that his nation,
his United States, was ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’.
Breaking his silence – a silence born of fear, dismay, shame, pride, and
disbelief – King challenged himself and his listeners to consider what the
nation had become, what worlds it was destroying, what world it was
creating, and what other possibilities might be pursued. Such reflections,
King suggested, ought to begin by listening to the voices of those who had
been made to suffer at home in the United States and in Vietnam, to listen to their grief, to acknowledge their sorrow and their longing.
