Give Us the Ballot

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.’

5. 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’.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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’.