Interview in Accra on Ghana’s independence

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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’.

2. 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.

3. 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’.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.’

8. 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’.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.