Community Reading of “Beyond Vietnam” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The reading of the speech will be a remembrance of the assassination of Dr. King April 4, 1968, one year after giving this revolutionary call to action on April 4, 1967.

Resolving to end the “three evils” named by Dr. King and co-writer Dr. Vincent Harding:

Poverty, Racism, and Militarism.

Dr. King lived a lonely “vocation of agony” during a troubled and precarious year between April 4, 1967 and April 4, 1968, when many allies and companions, and the U.S. government, blasted King for connecting these “triple evils”, and created a context for his assassination.

In the speech Dr. King and Dr. Harding warned of “our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…we will be marching… without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.”

We will have community members from the NAACP Santa Cruz County Branch, Black Surf Club, The Santa Cruz County Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity, and the Resource Center for Nonviolence.

Readers include:
Esabella Grace Bonner
Bhavananda Lodkey
Brenda Griffin
Celestino Rodriguez
Cheryl Williams
Chris Davis
David H. Anthony III
Rev. Deborah Johnson
Joe Williams
NormaAlicia Pino
Peter Klotz-Chamberlin
Sarah Cruse
Thairie Ritchie