A Knock at Midnight

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 1967

   Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam

   The sermon version of King’s anti-war position, preached to his own congregation four weeks after Riverside and answering the criticism that followed. The Motown-affiliated Black Forum label released it posthumously as an LP that won the 1971 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording.

5. 1967

   NBC News interview with Sander Vanocur

   A long, reflective color-film interview in which King tells Vanocur that the dream of 1963 has ‘in some ways turned into a nightmare’, calls the movement’s old optimism ‘a little superficial’ and says the new phase – ‘genuine equality’ – will be harder and costlier than ending legal segregation.

6. 1967

   America’s Chief Moral Dilemma

   King’s address to Atlanta’s Hungry Club, the Black civic forum at the Butler Street YMCA, defending his Vietnam stand to a home-town audience and laying out poverty, racism and war as the nation’s ‘chief moral dilemma’. The King Center holds the recording, from which a 17-page audio transcript was made.

7. 1967

   A Knock at Midnight

   A 38-minute version of one of King’s oldest sermons, on Luke 11’s friend who knocks at midnight, applied in 1967 to the Vietnam War, the riots and a church that has ‘often been an echo rather than a voice’. Creed Records issued it on LP in 1970, and it is one of the sermons the King Institute lists with audio.

8. 1967

   The Merv Griffin Show

   A rare entertainment-television interview in which Griffin asks King about the Vietnam War, riots, Black Power and his own fear of death. King is relaxed and conversational, explaining nonviolence to a general audience.

9. 1967

   Meet the Press on Vietnam, the riots and 1968

   King’s fifth and final Meet the Press, dominated by his opposition to the Vietnam War, with questions on the Newark and Detroit uprisings of July 1967 and on whether he would back a peace candidate in 1968.

10. 1967

    Where Do We Go From Here?

    King’s annual report to SCLC, taking its title from his new book, in which he calls for a guaranteed annual income, questions ‘the whole society’ and ‘who owns the oil’, answers Black Power, and closes with ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’.

11. 1967

    Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool

    A 24-minute sermon on the rich fool of Luke 12 that contains King’s most personal recorded testimony: his account of the January 1956 ‘kitchen’ experience in Montgomery, when, after a midnight threatening call, he heard an inner voice telling him to stand up for justice.

12. 1967

    The Three Evils of Society

    King’s keynote to the National Conference for New Politics, a convention of anti-war and New Left groups, naming racism, poverty and war as the ‘triple evils’ and warning that ‘a nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them’.

13. 1967

    Conscience for Change (the Massey Lectures)

    Five radio lectures recorded for the CBC’s Massey Lectures series in November-December 1967 and broadcast on CBC Radio; published as ‘Conscience for Change’ (1967) and, after his death, as ‘The Trumpet of Conscience’ (1968) with a foreword by Coretta Scott King.