; Whereas Dr. King noted the challenge of telling aggrieved Americans that violence would not solve their problems while their country was using violence to address its problems abroad, explaining that As I have walked [in the ghettos of the North over the last three years] among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, What about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. ; Whereas such an observation remains particularly relevant today, as people in cities nationwide are rising up in protest against injustices such as police brutality and are similarly urged to air their grievances peacefully