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.