Martin Luther King Jr.

Every recording

In order, from 1954 to 1968.

1. 1954

   Rediscovering Lost Values

   Preached when King was a 25-year-old Boston University doctoral student filling a Detroit pulpit, a month after his trial sermon at Dexter, this is the earliest surviving recording of King preaching.

2. 1955

   Address to the first MIA mass meeting

   Elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association that afternoon, the 26-year-old King had about twenty minutes to prepare the speech that launched the bus boycott before a crowd of several thousand inside and outside the church.

3. 1956

   Statements after the boycott conviction

   The earliest surviving sound film of King: brief statements to newsreel cameras on the day Judge Eugene Carter convicted him of leading an illegal boycott, saying the protest would continue and defending the right to protest.

4. 1956

   Statement on continuing the bus protest

   A one-minute filmed statement in which King says the boycott will continue despite city officials’ defiance of a bus-company move toward desegregation, after the April 23 Supreme Court action in a South Carolina bus case that briefly seemed to settle the issue.

5. 1956

   Call for Maladjustment

   Eleven minutes of synchronized-sound film of King addressing a boycott audience in May 1956 on nonviolence (‘they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’) and on being ‘maladjusted’ to segregation, a theme he would repeat for a decade. It is the longest surviving film of King speaking from the boycott year.

6. 1956

   Legitimacy of the Struggle in Montgomery

   A two-minute filmed statement defending the boycott as a legitimate, nonviolent protest, shot two days after ‘Call for Maladjustment’ and preserved in the research files of ‘King: A Filmed Record’.

7. 1956

   The Montgomery Story

   Seven months into the boycott, King told the NAACP’s national convention the story of Montgomery as proof that Black Southerners could sustain a nonviolent mass protest. The 48-minute audio held by the King Center is the longest surviving King recording from the boycott year.

8. 1956

   Report on a meeting with Montgomery City Lines officials

   A 40-second filmed statement in which King reports on an MIA meeting with the bus company, preserved in the research files of ‘King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis’.

9. 1956

   Paul’s Letter to American Christians

   An imagined epistle from the Apostle Paul to ‘American Christians’, preached to his own congregation nine days before the Supreme Court’s bus ruling: Paul marvels at American technology but warns of a ‘moral and spiritual lag’, condemns segregation as a denial of ‘the unity which we all have in Christ Jesus’, and counsels nonviolence toward oppressors.

10. 1956

    Mass meeting the night after the Supreme Court ruling

    On the day after the Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle, mass meetings voted to end the boycott once the mandate arrived.

11. 1957

    The New Negro

    King’s earliest surviving long-form television interview: a half-hour conversation with host Richard Heffner and Judge J. Waties Waring, the South Carolina federal judge whose dissent anticipated Brown, on ‘the new Negro’ emerging from Montgomery.

12. 1957

    Interview in Accra on Ghana’s independence

    Hours after the midnight independence ceremony at the Accra polo grounds, singer and broadcaster Etta Moten Barnett, traveling with Vice President Nixon’s delegation, recorded King’s reaction for Chicago radio: ‘the birth of this new nation will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world.’

13. 1957

    The Birth of a New Nation

    Two weeks after returning from Ghana’s independence celebrations, King retold the Exodus story through Nkrumah’s struggle and the midnight moment when the Union Jack came down: ‘freedom never comes on a silver platter’.

14. 1957

    Garden of Gethsemane

    A Palm Sunday sermon on accepting God’s will through suffering, preached during the months when segregationists were bombing Montgomery’s Black churches and parsonages; survives on the King Estate’s Dexter tapes with several gaps.

15. 1957

    Give Us the Ballot

    King’s first address to a national audience in Washington, closing the Prayer Pilgrimage on the third anniversary of Brown v. Board.

16. 1957

    Statement after meeting Vice President Nixon

    A newsfilm sound bite from the day King and Abernathy had a two-hour conference with Vice President Nixon about civil-rights legislation and voting. King tells the Baltimore station’s camera that President Eisenhower could do more and that Republicans were not supporting the bill.

17. 1957

    Techniques of Persuasion in the Montgomery Bus Boycott

    King’s lunchtime talk to Berkeley students six months after the boycott’s end: a history of Black America from 1619, a step-by-step account of how Montgomery was organized, and the philosophy of agape and nonviolent resistance, followed by questions.

18. 1957

    Overcoming an Inferiority Complex

    The opening sermon of a summer 1957 series on psychology and faith, drawing on Harry Emerson Fosdick, in which King applies the problem of the inferiority complex to the psychological wounds of segregation; 37 minutes of audio survive on the King Estate tapes.

19. 1957

    Conquering Self-Centeredness

    In a hot, shortened August service, King preached on Matthew 10:39 and, unusually, on himself: he confessed his struggle with self-importance as a suddenly famous man and described praying to be seen as ‘just a symbol of a movement’. The recorded sermon is the most personal of the surviving Dexter tapes.

20. 1957

    A Look to the Future

    King’s Labor Day address closing Highlander’s 25th-anniversary seminar on ‘The South Thinking Ahead’, with Rosa Parks and Aubrey Williams in the audience.

21. 1957

    Look Here with Martin Agronsky

    A nationally broadcast NBC interview filmed in King’s own church, covering the boycott, his adoption of Gandhian nonviolence, his support for Eisenhower’s use of troops at Little Rock, and ‘all deliberate speed’.

22. 1957

    Loving Your Enemies

    King’s most-anthologized early sermon, on Matthew 5:43–45: how to love one’s enemies (begin by analyzing yourself; find the good in the enemy; refuse to defeat him), why (hate scars the soul; love alone transforms), and the warning that ‘hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate’.

23. 1957

    Some Things We Must Do

    On the second anniversary of the boycott’s first mass meeting, King returned to Holt Street to open the MIA’s annual Institute on Nonviolence with a 67-minute address on what Black Americans must do next: economic self-help, voter registration, high standards and continued nonviolent protest.

24. 1958

    Address at Galilee Baptist Church, Shreveport

    A mass-meeting speech in Shreveport during SCLC’s 1958 ‘Crusade for Citizenship’ voter-registration drive, recorded by local dentist and SCLC founder C. O. Simpkins, whose home was later bombed. It is one of the few surviving recordings of King working the Deep South church circuit between Montgomery and the sit-ins.

25. 1959

    Farewell statement on All India Radio

    On his last day in India, King recorded a farewell message for All India Radio: since coming to India he was ‘more convinced than ever’ that nonviolent resistance was ‘the most potent weapon available to oppressed people’, and ‘today we no longer have a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence.’

26. 1959

    Palm Sunday sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi

    Fresh from India, King devoted Palm Sunday to Gandhi as a Christ-like figure: his life, the salt march, the fasts, his assassination and the lesson that the world ‘kills’ its Gandhis. The 45-minute sermon survives on the King Estate tapes and is the fullest account of what King took from the pilgrimage.

27. 1960

    Meet the Press

    King’s first Meet the Press, ten weeks into the student sit-in movement.

28. 1960

    Debate with James J. Kilpatrick: ‘Are sit-in strikes justifiable?’

    King’s only televised formal debate with a leading segregationist: an hour-long NBC program in which he and Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick, the intellectual architect of ‘massive resistance’, argued whether the student sit-ins were justifiable.

29. 1960

    The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life

    King’s signature sermon on the length, breadth and height of life (love of self, of others and of God), preached to a white Unitarian congregation near his old seminary, with topical passages on the New Orleans school-desegregation crisis of November 1960 and on poverty he had seen in India.

30. 1961

    The Future of Integration

    A June 1961 King address titled ‘The Future of Integration’ preserved in the Pacifica Radio Archives and rebroadcast in Pacifica’s five-hour King special; delivered in the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Rides.

31. 1961

    The American Dream

    King’s fullest early statement of the ‘American dream’ theme, delivered to the graduating class of the nation’s oldest historically Black degree-granting college two weeks after the Freedom Riders’ siege in Montgomery: the dream of ‘all men are created equal’, the world’s ‘inescapable network of mutuality’, the gap between technological and moral progress, and the role of nonviolent protest in closing it.

32. 1961

    Face to Face with John Freeman

    John Freeman’s famously unsparing BBC interview series put King in the chair for a half-hour on his childhood under segregation, the Montgomery boycott, the sit-ins and his understanding of nonviolence and disarmament. It is the most searching personal interview of King’s early career.

33. 1961

    Address to the AFL-CIO Fourth Constitutional Convention

    King’s first address to organized labor’s national convention: he tells the AFL-CIO that ‘our needs are identical with labor’s needs’, attacks discrimination inside unions, warns of the right-to-work South and asks the federation to finance the movement.

34. 1962

    The Dimensions of a Complete Life

    A January 1962 recording of King’s much-repeated sermon on the three dimensions of a complete life (length, breadth and height — love of self, of others and of God), held by the Pacifica Radio Archives and rebroadcast in its King special.

35. 1962

    A Knock at Midnight

    King’s sermon on Luke 11:5–6, the church as the friend who must answer when the world knocks ‘at midnight’, preached as Abernathy was installed at his new Atlanta pulpit after leaving Montgomery to join King.

36. 1962

    Towards Freedom

    A full hour-long address to a packed Dartmouth hall on the state of race relations in 1962, in which King lays out three ‘attitudes’ toward progress (extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, and the realism he endorses) and makes the case for nonviolent direct action and federal action.

37. 1962

    Interview for Belgian broadcasting

    A four-minute audio excerpt of King answering a European interviewer’s questions on the American racial situation, uploaded as a 1962 Belgian television interview.

38. 1962

    Address to the National Press Club

    A week after choosing jail over a fine in Albany, King became the first African American to address the National Press Club. The 47-minute recording covers federal action, nonviolent direct action, ‘tokenism’ and the ‘American dream’, and the Q&A ranges over Albany, Kennedy’s record, the Nation of Islam and Africa.

39. 1962

    Emancipation Proclamation centennial address

    Rediscovered in the New York State Museum’s collection in 2013 and made public in January 2014, this is the only known recording of King’s address marking the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

40. 1962

    Levels of Love

    A month after leaving Albany, King preached on the ascending levels of love — utilitarian, romantic, maternal, friendship, humanitarian and agape — and told his congregation about a white Albany man whose affection for Black people depended on their ‘staying in his place’.

41. 1962

    Can a Christian Be a Communist?

    A lecture-like sermon arguing that Christianity and communism are ‘fundamentally opposed’ on atheism, ethics and the state, while insisting that communism exposes the church’s failures on economic justice and segregation; it became ‘How Should a Christian View Communism?’ in ‘Strength to Love’.

42. 1963

    Address at the Detroit Walk to Freedom

    King’s closing address to the Walk to Freedom, a march of roughly 125,000 people down Woodward Avenue organized with Rev. C.L. Franklin.

43. 1963

    Meet the Press, three days before the March on Washington

    King and Roy Wilkins defended the forthcoming March on Washington against predictions of violence and argued that the movement should keep pressing rather than pause for the civil rights bill then before Congress. It was King’s second of five Meet the Press appearances.

44. 1963

    I Have a Dream

    The closing address of the March on Washington, delivered to roughly 250,000 people and carried live on television. Its improvised ‘I have a dream’ peroration became the most famous passage of twentieth-century American oratory and anchored public support for the civil rights bill.

45. 1963

    The March

    The U.S. Information Agency’s 1964 documentary follows marchers preparing for and traveling to Washington and culminates in extended footage of King’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial.

46. 1963

    Social Justice and the Emerging New Age

    A 48-minute lecture-and-Q&A appearance at Western Michigan University less than four months after the March on Washington.

47. 1964

    The American Dream (Drew University convocation)

    A version of King’s ‘American Dream’ lecture delivered to more than 5,000 people at Drew University a month after he was named Time’s Man of the Year, preserved by the university archives. A student reporter wrote that King ‘is unimposing, seems quite ordinary, but, when he speaks, people listen’.

48. 1964

    Oral history interview for the Kennedy Library

    King’s recorded oral history about his relationship with President Kennedy, taped for the Kennedy Library’s oral history program a few months after the assassination. He discusses the 1960 campaign phone call to Coretta, the administration’s handling of Birmingham, and the civil rights bill.

49. 1964

    Face the Nation, during the Senate filibuster of the civil rights bill

    King’s first Face the Nation appearance, aired while the Senate filibuster against the Civil Rights Act was in its seventh week. He fielded questions on the bill, on demonstrations planned for the summer, and on the movement’s direction after Birmingham and Washington.

50. 1964

    London address on segregation and apartheid

    A speech given in London three days before King received the Nobel Peace Prize, linking the American struggle to apartheid South Africa and calling for an international boycott. The tape surfaced in the Pacifica Radio Archives and was broadcast by Democracy Now! in January 2015.

51. 1964

    Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

    At 35, King became the youngest Nobel Peace laureate to that date. His acceptance speech, filmed by NRK, accepts the prize ‘on behalf of a civil rights movement’ and declares ‘I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war’.

52. 1964

    The Quest for Peace and Justice

    King’s formal Nobel Lecture, delivered the day after the award ceremony, identifies three interrelated problems – racial injustice, poverty and war – and argues that nonviolence is the answer to all three.

53. 1965

    Facing the Challenge of a New Age (Michigan State University)

    King addressed nearly 4,000 students and community members at the event that launched MSU’s Student Education Program (later STEP), a tutoring program in the South. He set out three challenges: building world brotherhood, eliminating notions of racial superiority, and ending segregation.

54. 1965

    Selma protests newsreel footage

    Newsreel compilations and a CBS field interview from the Selma campaign, covering the 9 March ‘Turnaround Tuesday’ march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the 21-25 March Selma-to-Montgomery march. Useful for seeing King on the road between the set-piece speeches.

55. 1965

    How Long? Not Long (Our God Is Marching On)

    King’s address to roughly 25,000 people at the end of the five-day, 54-mile march from Selma, delivered on the Capitol steps while Governor Wallace watched from inside. Its refrain ‘How long?

56. 1965

    Meet the Press, three days after Montgomery

    King defended the Selma-to-Montgomery march and the proposed economic boycott of Alabama, and responded to former President Truman’s remark that the march was ‘silly’. The King Institute notes the unusual format: King in San Francisco, the questioners in Washington.

57. 1965

    Sermon at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

    A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral on the Sunday after the Selma-to-Montgomery march, released from the cathedral’s own archive. It is one of the few surviving recordings of King preaching in a non-Baptist, predominantly white congregation during the Selma campaign.

58. 1965

    Address at UCLA

    A refined version of King’s spring 1965 stump speech, delivered to a UCLA audience and recorded by the university; archivist Derek Bolin found the tape in a hidden cabinet in 2014.

59. 1965

    Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

    King’s commencement address to 483 Oberlin graduates, built on the Rip Van Winkle parable he would reuse at the National Cathedral in March 1968. The Oberlin College Archives hold a 40-minute audio tape, cataloged by the Stanford King Papers Project.

60. 1965

    The American Dream

    A Fourth of July sermon at his home church on the gap between the Declaration of Independence’s promise and American practice, listed among the King Institute’s core audio sermons.

61. 1966

    Guidelines for a Constructive Church

    A 24-minute Ebenezer sermon on the church’s duty to ‘preach the acceptable year of the Lord’, taking in school integration, the Civil Rights Act and the Social Gospel; it is among the sermons the King Institute lists with audio.

62. 1966

    Meet the Press 90-minute special with the civil rights leadership

    An expanded Meet the Press that put King on the same panel as Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick at the height of the ‘Black Power’ controversy, two months after the Meredith March. The exchange exposed the split between the integrationist and Black Power wings of the movement in front of a national audience.

63. 1967

    Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

    King’s first full-dress denunciation of the Vietnam War, drafted with Vincent Harding, calling the US government ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’ and linking the war to poverty at home.

64. 1967

    The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life

    King’s signature sermon on the length, breadth and height of life – self-regard, concern for others and relationship with God – in a 41-minute Chicago version recorded five days after ‘Beyond Vietnam’. He had preached the same sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on 6 December 1964 and at Ebenezer in 1960 and 1967.

65. 1967

    The Other America

    The best-known filmed version of King’s ‘Other America’ speech, delivered at Stanford ten days after ‘Beyond Vietnam’. He describes two Americas divided by wealth, explains riots as ‘the language of the unheard’ while rejecting violence, and ties the Vietnam War to the collapse of the War on Poverty.

66. 1967

    Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam

    King’s address to the largest anti-war demonstration to that date, estimated at 125,000 or more, after marching from Central Park with Harry Belafonte, Benjamin Spock and Stokely Carmichael. The speech repeated the Riverside argument in rally form and called for a halt to the bombing.

67. 1967

    Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam

    The sermon version of King’s anti-war position, preached to his own congregation four weeks after Riverside and answering the criticism that followed. The Motown-affiliated Black Forum label released it posthumously as an LP that won the 1971 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording.

68. 1967

    NBC News interview with Sander Vanocur

    A long, reflective color-film interview in which King tells Vanocur that the dream of 1963 has ‘in some ways turned into a nightmare’, calls the movement’s old optimism ‘a little superficial’ and says the new phase – ‘genuine equality’ – will be harder and costlier than ending legal segregation.

69. 1967

    America’s Chief Moral Dilemma

    King’s address to Atlanta’s Hungry Club, the Black civic forum at the Butler Street YMCA, defending his Vietnam stand to a home-town audience and laying out poverty, racism and war as the nation’s ‘chief moral dilemma’. The King Center holds the recording, from which a 17-page audio transcript was made.

70. 1967

    A Knock at Midnight

    A 38-minute version of one of King’s oldest sermons, on Luke 11’s friend who knocks at midnight, applied in 1967 to the Vietnam War, the riots and a church that has ‘often been an echo rather than a voice’. Creed Records issued it on LP in 1970, and it is one of the sermons the King Institute lists with audio.

71. 1967

    The Merv Griffin Show

    A rare entertainment-television interview in which Griffin asks King about the Vietnam War, riots, Black Power and his own fear of death. King is relaxed and conversational, explaining nonviolence to a general audience.

72. 1967

    Meet the Press on Vietnam, the riots and 1968

    King’s fifth and final Meet the Press, dominated by his opposition to the Vietnam War, with questions on the Newark and Detroit uprisings of July 1967 and on whether he would back a peace candidate in 1968.

73. 1967

    Where Do We Go From Here?

    King’s annual report to SCLC, taking its title from his new book, in which he calls for a guaranteed annual income, questions ‘the whole society’ and ‘who owns the oil’, answers Black Power, and closes with ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’.

74. 1967

    Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool

    A 24-minute sermon on the rich fool of Luke 12 that contains King’s most personal recorded testimony: his account of the January 1956 ‘kitchen’ experience in Montgomery, when, after a midnight threatening call, he heard an inner voice telling him to stand up for justice.

75. 1967

    The Three Evils of Society

    King’s keynote to the National Conference for New Politics, a convention of anti-war and New Left groups, naming racism, poverty and war as the ‘triple evils’ and warning that ‘a nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them’.

76. 1967

    Conscience for Change (the Massey Lectures)

    Five radio lectures recorded for the CBC’s Massey Lectures series in November-December 1967 and broadcast on CBC Radio; published as ‘Conscience for Change’ (1967) and, after his death, as ‘The Trumpet of Conscience’ (1968) with a foreword by Coretta Scott King.

77. 1967

    Acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate at Newcastle University

    King flew to Newcastle for less than 24 hours to accept an honorary Doctor of Civil Law and gave an unscripted address naming ‘three urgent and indeed great problems’ – racism, poverty and war – and urging Britain to pass stronger anti-discrimination law.

78. 1967

    A Christmas Sermon on Peace

    King’s last Christmas sermon, in which he returns to the 1963 dream – ‘I still have a dream’ – after confessing that ‘not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare’, and argues that the means must be as pure as the ends. The CBC carried it live as the closing Massey Lecture.

79. 1968

    The Drum Major Instinct

    Adapted from a 1952 homily by J. Wallace Hamilton, the sermon treats the desire to be first as a ‘drum major instinct’ and ends with King imagining his own funeral, asking to be remembered not for the Nobel Prize but as ‘a drum major for justice’.

80. 1968

    Unfulfilled Dreams

    A 22-minute sermon on King David, who was not allowed to build the temple, in which King reflects on lives that end with their work unfinished – ‘it’s well that it was within thine heart’ – and on his own shortcomings.

81. 1968

    The Other America (Grosse Pointe)

    A late version of ‘The Other America’ delivered to a capacity crowd of about 2,700 in a wealthy, nearly all-white Detroit suburb, with roughly 200 right-wing Breakthrough pickets outside.

82. 1968

    Address to the Memphis sanitation strikers (‘All Labor Has Dignity’)

    To a crowd of some 15,000 at Mason Temple, King told the striking sanitation workers that ‘all labor has dignity’, called for a general work stoppage in Memphis, and promised to return to lead a march – a commitment that brought him back on 28 March and 3 April.

83. 1968

    Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

    Preached to a packed Episcopal cathedral four days before his death, the sermon reworks the Oberlin ‘Rip Van Winkle’ address into a defense of the Poor People’s Campaign, calls Vietnam ‘one of the most unjust wars’, and declares ‘we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’.

84. 1968

    Interview on the Memphis situation

    A 1.3-minute recorded interview from King’s last day in Memphis, catalogued by the King Papers Project, in which he addresses the sanitation strike and the planned second march. His flight from Atlanta that morning had been delayed by a bomb threat.

85. 1968

    I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

    Speaking extemporaneously in a thunderstorm to about 2,000 striking sanitation workers and supporters, King recounted the movement from Birmingham to Memphis, called for a boycott of Memphis businesses, and closed with the prophetic ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop... I may not get there with you’.

86. 1968

    Funeral procession from Ebenezer to Morehouse

    An amateur colour film of the funeral procession on 9 April 1968, showing the mule-drawn farm wagon carrying King’s coffin and the tens of thousands who walked the three miles from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College.