Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment.  President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were allies in the fight for civil rights in America. The Civil Rights Act survived strong opposition when it passed through Congress in 1964, and President Johnson rallied behind the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Recorded phone conversations between King and Johnson show the evolution of a working relationship that made great strides for America's pursuit of racial equality. But in 1967, Dr. King chose to risk that partnership to oppose a view of American glory and honor that the president was fighting for overseas. King, a civil rights leader at home, could not ignore what was happening abroad, and on April 4th, 1967 — 50 years ago today — King spoke before a packed crowd at the Riverside Baptist Church, a focal point of activism in New York's Morningside Heights neighborhood. King's speech was called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." It was his first major public statement against the war. “Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war," said King. "If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read 'Vietnam.'" The speech was met with controversy and condemnation. Some 168 newspapers across America denounced Dr. King's position, and The New York Times ran an editorial titled "Dr. King's Error." But Dr. King was steadfast in his belief that if he were to be a civil rights leader in this country, representing the cause of those marginalized and brutalized by poverty and racism, then he must continue his commitment against violence of the oppressed, even when the oppressed were more than 8,000 miles away. “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," said King. "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. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor." For President Johnson, the speech marked a turning point in their relationship. A break that could not be rectified. Their calls grew less frequent, and there is little record of their conversations after the 1967 speech. President Johnson had question King's positioned on the war years earlier. The Takeaway revisits King's speech and President Johnson's conversations with the civil rights activist with help from the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, which shared some of the archival material we used in this piece. Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear the full segment and archival audio. A special thanks to producer Steve Atlas for bringing it to our attention. "We Knew JFK," an earlier work of Atlas’s in the same oral history form, will be re-released by Public Radio International this coming month, around the centennial of President Kennedy’s birth. You can listen to Dr. King's full speech from Riverside, here.