Oral history interview for the Kennedy Library

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 1963

   Address at the Detroit Walk to Freedom

   King’s closing address to the Walk to Freedom, a march of roughly 125,000 people down Woodward Avenue organized with Rev. C.L. Franklin.

2. 1963

   Meet the Press, three days before the March on Washington

   King and Roy Wilkins defended the forthcoming March on Washington against predictions of violence and argued that the movement should keep pressing rather than pause for the civil rights bill then before Congress. It was King’s second of five Meet the Press appearances.

3. 1963

   I Have a Dream

   The closing address of the March on Washington, delivered to roughly 250,000 people and carried live on television. Its improvised ‘I have a dream’ peroration became the most famous passage of twentieth-century American oratory and anchored public support for the civil rights bill.

4. 1963

   The March

   The U.S. Information Agency’s 1964 documentary follows marchers preparing for and traveling to Washington and culminates in extended footage of King’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial.

5. 1963

   Social Justice and the Emerging New Age

   A 48-minute lecture-and-Q&A appearance at Western Michigan University less than four months after the March on Washington.

6. 1964

   The American Dream (Drew University convocation)

   A version of King’s ‘American Dream’ lecture delivered to more than 5,000 people at Drew University a month after he was named Time’s Man of the Year, preserved by the university archives. A student reporter wrote that King ‘is unimposing, seems quite ordinary, but, when he speaks, people listen’.

7. 1964

   Oral history interview for the Kennedy Library

   King’s recorded oral history about his relationship with President Kennedy, taped for the Kennedy Library’s oral history program a few months after the assassination. He discusses the 1960 campaign phone call to Coretta, the administration’s handling of Birmingham, and the civil rights bill.

8. 1964

   Face the Nation, during the Senate filibuster of the civil rights bill

   King’s first Face the Nation appearance, aired while the Senate filibuster against the Civil Rights Act was in its seventh week. He fielded questions on the bill, on demonstrations planned for the summer, and on the movement’s direction after Birmingham and Washington.

9. 1964

   London address on segregation and apartheid

   A speech given in London three days before King received the Nobel Peace Prize, linking the American struggle to apartheid South Africa and calling for an international boycott. The tape surfaced in the Pacifica Radio Archives and was broadcast by Democracy Now! in January 2015.

10. 1964

    Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

    At 35, King became the youngest Nobel Peace laureate to that date. His acceptance speech, filmed by NRK, accepts the prize ‘on behalf of a civil rights movement’ and declares ‘I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war’.

11. 1964

    The Quest for Peace and Justice

    King’s formal Nobel Lecture, delivered the day after the award ceremony, identifies three interrelated problems – racial injustice, poverty and war – and argues that nonviolence is the answer to all three.

12. 1965

    Facing the Challenge of a New Age (Michigan State University)

    King addressed nearly 4,000 students and community members at the event that launched MSU’s Student Education Program (later STEP), a tutoring program in the South. He set out three challenges: building world brotherhood, eliminating notions of racial superiority, and ending segregation.

13. 1965

    Selma protests newsreel footage

    Newsreel compilations and a CBS field interview from the Selma campaign, covering the 9 March ‘Turnaround Tuesday’ march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the 21-25 March Selma-to-Montgomery march. Useful for seeing King on the road between the set-piece speeches.