Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”

Glossary

• Arnold Toynbee a twentieth-century British historian who examined the rise and fall of civilizations
• Castro Fidel Castro, who was then the Communist dictator of Cuba
• Dien Bien Phu a town in North Vietnam, the site of a decisive battle between the Communists and the French in 1954
• good Samaritan reference to a parable told by Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, in which a Samaritan (member of an ethnoreligious group) helps a Jew on his way to Jericho who has been beaten and robbed; symbolic of a kind person who helps a stranger
• Hanoi the capital of North Vietnam
• Ho Chi Minh the leader of the Communist forces during the Vietnam War
• James Russell Lowell nineteenth-century American poet; the quotation is from his 1845 poem “Once to Every Man and Nation.”
• junta a dictatorship run by a group of military officers
• Langston Hughes a prominent African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance; the quote is from his 1939 poem “Let America Be America Again.”
• “Let us love one another …” from the First Epistle of John, chapter 4
• Mao Mao Zedong, the Communist dictator of China
• Marxism the philosophy of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German writer whose name is often used synonymously with Communism
• Molotov cocktails improvised bombs, usually made with gasoline and a bottle; named after Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet foreign minister during World War II, by the Finns, who used them to resist the Soviet Union
• “The moving finger writes …” quotation from verse 51 of Edward FitzGerald's poem Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
• napalm a highly flammable explosive often used to burn forested areas thought to hold troops during the Vietnam War
• National Liberation Front Communists who led the insurgency in Vietnam
• Nietzsches a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher
• “The people who sat in darkness …” quotation from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 4, verse 16
• Premier Diem Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, who was assassinated in 1963
• “tide in the affairs of men” quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3
• VC abbreviation for Vietcong
• Vietcong the Western name for the Communist insurgents in Vietnam