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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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’.

2. 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’.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.’

6. 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.

7. 1960

   Meet the Press

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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 1961

    The Future of Integration

    A June 1961 King address titled ‘The Future of Integration’ preserved in the Pacifica Radio Archives and rebroadcast in Pacifica’s five-hour King special; delivered in the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Rides.

11. 1961

    The American Dream

    King’s fullest early statement of the ‘American dream’ theme, delivered to the graduating class of the nation’s oldest historically Black degree-granting college two weeks after the Freedom Riders’ siege in Montgomery: the dream of ‘all men are created equal’, the world’s ‘inescapable network of mutuality’, the gap between technological and moral progress, and the role of nonviolent protest in closing it.

12. 1961

    Face to Face with John Freeman

    John Freeman’s famously unsparing BBC interview series put King in the chair for a half-hour on his childhood under segregation, the Montgomery boycott, the sit-ins and his understanding of nonviolence and disarmament. It is the most searching personal interview of King’s early career.

13. 1961

    Address to the AFL-CIO Fourth Constitutional Convention

    King’s first address to organized labor’s national convention: he tells the AFL-CIO that ‘our needs are identical with labor’s needs’, attacks discrimination inside unions, warns of the right-to-work South and asks the federation to finance the movement.