Overcoming an Inferiority Complex

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.’

2. 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’.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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’.

11. 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’.

12. 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.

13. 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.