Breaking the Silence

WHY BREAKING THE SILENCE?April 4 is the date Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while he was in Memphis, Tennessee to support sanitation workers. Exactly one year before, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King gave one of his most consequential speeches titled, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”. This speech was the first time he publicly called for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam and for unity and action to end the triple threats of militarism, racism, and extreme materialism.By April 1967 over 1 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians and 16,000 U.S. military personnel had died in the Vietnam war. The countryside and cities in the south and the north had been devastated by combat, bombing, and use of toxic defoliants like Agent Orange. In the U.S. the anti-war movement had mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in local and national demonstrations plu…