○  名人演讲： a time to break silence  ○

e rest of the population. we were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in southeast asia which they had not found in southwest georgia and east harlem. and so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching negro and white boys on tv screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. and so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in chicago. i could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

my third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the north over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. as i have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, i have told them that molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. i have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. but they ask -- and rightly so -- what about vietnam? they ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. their questions hit home, and i knew that i could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. for the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, i cannot be silent.

for those who ask the question, "aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, i have this further answer. in 1957 when a group of us formed the southern christian leadership conference, we

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