Liberation Literacy presents a special 16mm screening of David Loeb Weiss' NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED ME N-----, to raise funds to support its social justice reading program inside of the Columbia River Correctional Facility in Portland.
The film documents a conversation between three Black Vietnam war veterans intercut with footage of the 1967 Spring Mobilization anti-war demonstration, a national action taking place just one week after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s delivery of “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” at Riverside Church in New York City. The themes of King’s Riverside speech resonate throughout the film. As he spoke then:
"…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. And 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. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."