Two Statements Against Violence, One Prayer for Peace

Excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the Riverside Church, New York City, New York
--April 5, 1967
(This is the speech where Dr. King stated that America was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," meaning in 1967)

"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. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."
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Excerpt from Senator Robert Kennedy, speaking to a crowd of Blacks, giving
them the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and was dead.
by Robert Kennedy
-- April 4, 1968

"...we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

(Interrupted by applause)

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land."

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Let us pray:

Muslim Prayer for Peace

In the name of Allah,

the beneficent, the merciful.

Praise be to the Lord of the

Universe who has created us and

made us into tribes and nations,

That we may know each other, not that

we may despise each other.

If the enemy incline towards peace, do

thou also incline towards peace, and

trust God, for the Lord is the one that

heareth and knoweth all things.

And the servants of God,

Most Gracious are those who walk on

the Earth in humility, and when we

address them, we say "PEACE."