deathly support. Is it really worthwhile to take on this fight when those who rule embody guile and always employ formidable might. Is the assertion of personal essence enough when the larger goal is gone? And the world is ever

more cruel and rough with no one able to atone.

To think it came to this, was there no other way?

Why a bullet and not a kiss, on or before that fateful day. On April 4th, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a passionate speech at Riverside Church in New York, staking out his opposition to the war in Vietnam. A time comes when silence is betrayal.

That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

One year later to the day, he was assassinated.

Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

At 710 this evening, Martin Luther King was shot.

Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight.

Memphis...

Now, 50 years after that fateful day, the truth about the assassination of Dr. King can King Jr. a pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, rose to national attention in 1955 by leading a boycott of the racial segregation on the public transit system in Montgomery, Alabama.

Seeing the boycott through to a victory in the Supreme Court, where segregated buses were ruled unconstitutional,

Dr King, still just 28 years old, became in 1957 the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Leading nonviolent protests in Birmingham in 1963, King was arrested and penned his letter

from Birmingham jail, outlining his strategy of nonviolent opposition to racism and cementing his place as the leader of the National Civil Rights Movement.

But by 1967, that movement was fracturing.

Many activists were becoming restless and were enticed away from King's nonviolent strategy by fiery speakers like Malcolm X who were advocating violent revolution.

The Vietnam War had become a key focus for political activists and a point of division for those in the civil rights movement,

with many seeing opposition to the war as a distraction from the movement and its goals.

Up to that point, Dr King had made passing references to the war, but he had never connected the anti-war effort to his civil rights advocacy.

That changed in January 1967, when Rampart's magazine published The Children of Vietnam by William F. Pepper, a freelance

correspondent who spent six weeks in the country documenting the effects of the war.

...