20 POINTS = 2 QUESTIONS
From a 1967 speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“There is at the onset a very obvious and almost facile [easy] 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. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated [gutted] 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 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. . . .”
1. According to King, how did the Vietnam War affect U.S. policy at home?
2. Why might some people have supported King’s speaking out against the war? Why might others have opposed it?
