The Dimensions of a Complete Life

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 1962

   The Dimensions of a Complete Life

   A January 1962 recording of King’s much-repeated sermon on the three dimensions of a complete life (length, breadth and height — love of self, of others and of God), held by the Pacifica Radio Archives and rebroadcast in its King special.

8. 1962

   A Knock at Midnight

   King’s sermon on Luke 11:5–6, the church as the friend who must answer when the world knocks ‘at midnight’, preached as Abernathy was installed at his new Atlanta pulpit after leaving Montgomery to join King.

9. 1962

   Towards Freedom

   A full hour-long address to a packed Dartmouth hall on the state of race relations in 1962, in which King lays out three ‘attitudes’ toward progress (extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, and the realism he endorses) and makes the case for nonviolent direct action and federal action.

10. 1962

    Interview for Belgian broadcasting

    A four-minute audio excerpt of King answering a European interviewer’s questions on the American racial situation, uploaded as a 1962 Belgian television interview.

11. 1962

    Address to the National Press Club

    A week after choosing jail over a fine in Albany, King became the first African American to address the National Press Club. The 47-minute recording covers federal action, nonviolent direct action, ‘tokenism’ and the ‘American dream’, and the Q&A ranges over Albany, Kennedy’s record, the Nation of Islam and Africa.

12. 1962

    Emancipation Proclamation centennial address

    Rediscovered in the New York State Museum’s collection in 2013 and made public in January 2014, this is the only known recording of King’s address marking the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

13. 1962

    Levels of Love

    A month after leaving Albany, King preached on the ascending levels of love — utilitarian, romantic, maternal, friendship, humanitarian and agape — and told his congregation about a white Albany man whose affection for Black people depended on their ‘staying in his place’.