If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life - you might want to - ยwhen I read these to my students, they think it's Malcom X because it's so radical. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.
Bill AyersOne-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.
Bill AyersI found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
Bill AyersThere was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
Bill AyersWhen I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war. If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
Bill AyersIt's worth remembering that in 1965, something like 20% of Americans were against the war. Something like 70% were for the war. So, it wasn't a popular or an easy thing to do.
Bill AyersMy brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.
Bill Ayers