This is a photo is known world wide for being awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. As you can see it is a picture of a self-immolation, one of many that took place during the Vietnam war. The man in this picture, Thích Quảng Đức, is a South Vietnamese monk and is the most famous of all those who partook in similar acts. He was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by the U.S. supported Diem administration. In the U.S. there were two men that protested in the exact same way, there was Norman Morrison on November 2, 1965 and one week later Roger LaPorte. Both men had separate reasons for their actions, Morrison was a Quaker who was outraged at a bombing of a village in Vietnam, and LaPorte was from the Catholic Worker movement who was against the war and all wars.

Now, some people might think that these types of protests were a bit extreme and done in poor taste but they were highly effective at getting their causes noticed. President Kennedy commented on the monks' self-immolation, "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."1. That was a statement coming from the leader of the free world and it gripped him enough to go public with that thought.


1.Jacobs, Seth (2006), Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam, 1950–1963, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2008/11/another-self-immolation.html