The American Dream

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 1965

   How Long? Not Long (Our God Is Marching On)

   King’s address to roughly 25,000 people at the end of the five-day, 54-mile march from Selma, delivered on the Capitol steps while Governor Wallace watched from inside. Its refrain ‘How long?

3. 1965

   Meet the Press, three days after Montgomery

   King defended the Selma-to-Montgomery march and the proposed economic boycott of Alabama, and responded to former President Truman’s remark that the march was ‘silly’. The King Institute notes the unusual format: King in San Francisco, the questioners in Washington.

4. 1965

   Sermon at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

   A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral on the Sunday after the Selma-to-Montgomery march, released from the cathedral’s own archive. It is one of the few surviving recordings of King preaching in a non-Baptist, predominantly white congregation during the Selma campaign.

5. 1965

   Address at UCLA

   A refined version of King’s spring 1965 stump speech, delivered to a UCLA audience and recorded by the university; archivist Derek Bolin found the tape in a hidden cabinet in 2014.

6. 1965

   Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

   King’s commencement address to 483 Oberlin graduates, built on the Rip Van Winkle parable he would reuse at the National Cathedral in March 1968. The Oberlin College Archives hold a 40-minute audio tape, cataloged by the Stanford King Papers Project.

7. 1965

   The American Dream

   A Fourth of July sermon at his home church on the gap between the Declaration of Independence’s promise and American practice, listed among the King Institute’s core audio sermons.

8. 1966

   Guidelines for a Constructive Church

   A 24-minute Ebenezer sermon on the church’s duty to ‘preach the acceptable year of the Lord’, taking in school integration, the Civil Rights Act and the Social Gospel; it is among the sermons the King Institute lists with audio.

9. 1966

   Meet the Press 90-minute special with the civil rights leadership

   An expanded Meet the Press that put King on the same panel as Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick at the height of the ‘Black Power’ controversy, two months after the Meredith March. The exchange exposed the split between the integrationist and Black Power wings of the movement in front of a national audience.

10. 1967

    Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

    King’s first full-dress denunciation of the Vietnam War, drafted with Vincent Harding, calling the US government ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’ and linking the war to poverty at home.

11. 1967

    The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life

    King’s signature sermon on the length, breadth and height of life – self-regard, concern for others and relationship with God – in a 41-minute Chicago version recorded five days after ‘Beyond Vietnam’. He had preached the same sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on 6 December 1964 and at Ebenezer in 1960 and 1967.

12. 1967

    The Other America

    The best-known filmed version of King’s ‘Other America’ speech, delivered at Stanford ten days after ‘Beyond Vietnam’. He describes two Americas divided by wealth, explains riots as ‘the language of the unheard’ while rejecting violence, and ties the Vietnam War to the collapse of the War on Poverty.

13. 1967

    Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam

    King’s address to the largest anti-war demonstration to that date, estimated at 125,000 or more, after marching from Central Park with Harry Belafonte, Benjamin Spock and Stokely Carmichael. The speech repeated the Riverside argument in rally form and called for a halt to the bombing.