Martin Luther King Jr. considered that the government has been using black soldiers to fight in wars in the front lines, causing thousands of deaths and the suffering of black families.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not want to speak against the war. He thought this could distract people’s attention from the civil rights movement. So, on April 4, 1967, nearly 3,000 people attended Riverside Church in Manhattan, N.Y. to hear Dr. King’s speech on the Vietnam War
In that speech, he literally said: “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,” . He also stated: “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.”
