The King Who Led on World Peace by Derrick Jackson
The King Who Led on World Peaceby Derrick Jackson
One of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speeches was his April 4, 1967, condemnation of the Vietnam War. He said America could never end poverty at home as long as ''adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."
King confessed in his speech that it took him two years to ''break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart." A prior, 1965 declaration that ''the war in Vietnam should be stopped" resulted in a massive backlash from the White House and other black civil rights leaders who were afraid that an angry President Lyndon B. Johnson would dump them.
In the shadows of history, Coretta Scott King, who died yesterday at age 78, stoked her husband's fire until the blaze could not be contained. She was active in the global peace movement before her husband. In 1962, she traveled with an American delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to monitor nuclear test-ban talks. In her 1969 autobiography, she said the delegation was received by the US representative to the talks as if they were ''hysterical females."
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