From Beyond Vietnam A Time To Break Silence Analysis
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In the 1960s both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War were very important to people at the time, opinions clashed between people setting up a lot of controversy about the two topics. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr addresses both of these topics in his speech “From Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break Silence”. Although the main topic he addresses isn’t the Civil Rights Movement, each time he does mention it in the speech, he advances the cause of African Americans. Martin Luther King stresses the fact that blacks are fighting in the Vietnam War to help Asians gain rights they haven’t yet received at home by saying “We were taking black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending the eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (6). This hypocrisy that the American government pushed onto those young men obviously frustrates Martin Luther King a great deal. And he addresses it in his speech, pleading for people to realize that they care more about people…show more content… He or she is not directly involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and while he or she may agree with it, he or she doesn’t necessarily have anything invested in the success of the movement. The editorialist makes their point of view glaringly obvious with the line “Because American Negroes are a minority and have to overcome unique handicaps of racial antipathy and prolonged deprivation, they have a hard time in gaining their objectives even when their grievances are self-evident and their claims are indisputably just.” (3) The writer of the editorial had no right to act as if he or she know about the movement and the struggles African Americans have faced all their lives. Judging Martin Luther King on the subject that he has personal experience with makes it hard to effectively dispute his