Martin Luther King, Jr.

An undocumented first printing of The Riverside Church Speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

• Martin Luther King Jr. (American).
• Later titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.
• n.p.: n.p, [1967].
• 8 pages.
• Printed rectos only.
• Top stapled self-wrappers.

Previously unrecorded first printing of one of King's most important speeches: his anti-war address at The Riverside Church, delivered exactly one year to the day before his assassination.

"If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

King's Riverside Church Speech (later titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence," but here untitled) was the civil rights leader's first sustained and major public statement regarding the Vietnam War. Before a crowd of more than 3000, King called for not only an end to the war, but explicitly linked the anti-war movement to the larger movements for civil rights and economic justice: "Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. 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."

This edition is unknown and unrecorded. It is not mentioned in the major King bibliographies. The introductory paragraph ("The following is the exclusive and authorized publication of the address [...] sponsored by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam") suggests it was likely printed either by that group or King's camp. Such a printing could have been issued for members not in attendance, for press distribution at or immediately following the event, or simply to secure copyright. (The text also ends with a copyright notice by King, dated 1967.)

This version differs in a number of significant ways from final published versions that appeared later. Some of these differences are accounted for by this printing's "slightly condensed" version. Others, however, clearly predate King's later revisions and finalizations which, along with the lack of title on this edition, all clearly mark the text as an early version, contemporaneous or nearly so with the event itself — and almost certainly preceding the earliest (also very rare) reprints undertaken by a number of California groups (where Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam were based, and all under the title "Beyond Vietnam") in the subsequent months. Indeed, the ditto'd presentation strongly suggests a smaller, more immediate circulation.

The speech was widely criticized at the time. In the following days, more than 150 newspapers around the country condemned King, and in the aftermath of the address President Johnson dis-invited King from the White House, a rift in their relationship from which they never recovered. Among Black leaders the reception was also decidedly mixed, with many believing King's focus on the war distracted from more pressing concerns. As journalist Tavis Smiley, who produced a documentary on the speech, explained: "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. It was the speech he labored over the most [and] got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done."

Nevertheless, its reputation has only grown in the ensuing years. James Bevel considered it King's greatest speech, and King's intersectional understanding has been increasingly recognized as prescient. A rare and revealing document from one of King's most enduring public addresses.