Dha Gr8 Martin Luther

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"Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellowed [sic] Americans, *who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.* There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the 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. "

Part of this speech:

delivered 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

opinion:I agree 100 percent with Martin Luther King. His points about Vietnam are great, they really get you to see the light and want to take his side. Which by the way is the right Side to me. I remember in global history class hearing this seeing this speech on video. It really moved me, he hit some key points that other people were afraid 2 mention. He stood up against people and make this speech because he wanted other people to know his points. He was an example that its OK to have different views than the people higher than you diplomatically. Would you have the courage to do that???


Questions*
Would you have supported Martin Luther King Jr on this issue?****

Could you have fought for a country that did see you as inferior to other citizens?***

How do you feel bout the people who live in Vietnam. **

******FOr COmments Click Link*******
Here!!!

Jefferson Franklin Long

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Jefferson Franklin Long (1836 - 1901) was an American politician from Georgia. He is the first African American from Georgia to be elected to the United States House of Representatives.
Long was born a slave near the city of Knoxville and Crawford County, Georgia on March 3, 1836. He was self-educated. He became a merchant tailor in Macon, Georgia. Long was elected as a Republican to the Forty-first Congress to fill the vacancy caused when the U.S. House declared Samuel F. Gove not entitled to the seat and served from December 22, 1870, to March 3, 1871. Long was not a candidate for renomination in 1870, but did serve as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1880. He resumed business in Macon, Georgia, and died there on February 4, 1901. He was interred in Lynwood Cemetery.

**The underlined information is key**

This man helped lead the way for other Afrian Americans to enter congress. He open the doorway for the young men that came after him. He was a rather importnat figure to the people in his communtity. After he died he left a grand legacy.

Febuary 13th Channel 13 9pm
The Henry Gates Show


1.Who is doctor Henry Gates?
Henry Gates is a African American man who is looking for his family history. He has a show n he is using his show to broadcast his friends for him people in socity. People like Chris Rock Maya Anglo, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner and others where on his show. His family traced back to West Virgina as far it could go back in the United States. His faimily can be traced to a few places in Africa where slaves where taken from during the Trans-atlantic slave trade.

2.Chose an interviee and than discuss the following:the historical Events of his or her family the historal significence?
For all the interviees they conduced test to find out how much percent of you was a certain race. There is a myth that a whole bunch of afrian americans are mixed with native american blood, but it turns out that very few african american do have native american blood in them. It also turned out that an african amerian most likely has more european blood in them than native american. And this is true for almost all the interveiee including the host of the show. He turned out to have Irish blood in him, more present in him than native amerian blood.

A Different Life

Click Her for Supporting Article


In 1822 the American Colonization Society established Liberia as a place to send freed African-American slaves.African-Americans gradually immigrated to the colony and became known as Americo-Liberians, where many present day Liberians trace their ancestry. On July 26, 1847, the Americo-Liberian settlers declared the independence of the Republic of Liberia.The settlers regarded Africa as a "Promised Land", but they did not integrate into an African society.When slaves where in American they wanted to back, and have real freedom.These slaves once freed had no choice but to go back to Liberia. Blacks were only granted true freedom outside the United States. Many slaveholders did not want free blacks in the country and some freed blacks actually wished to live in their ancestral homeland, Liberia.If I could contact Jacob Massaqoi i would ask him where is he getting his funding from?Where is the base of his organization loacated?How do you feel about helping so many people?Did you ever get relocated in your life? **Questions for History Teacher**How long did it take for Liberia to became an independent contury?What contury are you from?How many people mirgrated when Liberia was established?

LUk aT dAt DRezz