Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

Why this matters here

In the 1967 Riverside Church address “Beyond Vietnam,” King linked the war to domestic poverty and argued that militarism drained the nation’s capacity to address economic injustice—work that later fed the Poor People’s Campaign’s multiracial demands for employment, income, housing, and dignity. When Others Become Leaders follows that widening moral horizon as the movement became harder to represent as one march toward one concession. The source records King’s public break with narrow consensus; the book asks what leadership costs when the agenda outgrows the alliances that once protected it.