Address to the first MIA mass meeting

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

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’.