Paul’s Letter to American Christians

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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’.

5. 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.

6. 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’.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.’

11. 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’.

12. 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.

13. 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.