Some Things We Must Do

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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’.

6. 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’.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 1959

   Farewell statement on All India Radio

   On his last day in India, King recorded a farewell message for All India Radio: since coming to India he was ‘more convinced than ever’ that nonviolent resistance was ‘the most potent weapon available to oppressed people’, and ‘today we no longer have a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence.’

10. 1959

    Palm Sunday sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi

    Fresh from India, King devoted Palm Sunday to Gandhi as a Christ-like figure: his life, the salt march, the fasts, his assassination and the lesson that the world ‘kills’ its Gandhis. The 45-minute sermon survives on the King Estate tapes and is the fullest account of what King took from the pilgrimage.

11. 1960

    Meet the Press

    King’s first Meet the Press, ten weeks into the student sit-in movement.

12. 1960

    Debate with James J. Kilpatrick: ‘Are sit-in strikes justifiable?’

    King’s only televised formal debate with a leading segregationist: an hour-long NBC program in which he and Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick, the intellectual architect of ‘massive resistance’, argued whether the student sit-ins were justifiable.

13. 1960

    The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life

    King’s signature sermon on the length, breadth and height of life (love of self, of others and of God), preached to a white Unitarian congregation near his old seminary, with topical passages on the New Orleans school-desegregation crisis of November 1960 and on poverty he had seen in India.