The Three Evils of Society

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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’.

6. 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.

7. 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’.

8. 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.

9. 1967

   Acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate at Newcastle University

   King flew to Newcastle for less than 24 hours to accept an honorary Doctor of Civil Law and gave an unscripted address naming ‘three urgent and indeed great problems’ – racism, poverty and war – and urging Britain to pass stronger anti-discrimination law.

10. 1967

    A Christmas Sermon on Peace

    King’s last Christmas sermon, in which he returns to the 1963 dream – ‘I still have a dream’ – after confessing that ‘not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare’, and argues that the means must be as pure as the ends. The CBC carried it live as the closing Massey Lecture.

11. 1968

    The Drum Major Instinct

    Adapted from a 1952 homily by J. Wallace Hamilton, the sermon treats the desire to be first as a ‘drum major instinct’ and ends with King imagining his own funeral, asking to be remembered not for the Nobel Prize but as ‘a drum major for justice’.

12. 1968

    Unfulfilled Dreams

    A 22-minute sermon on King David, who was not allowed to build the temple, in which King reflects on lives that end with their work unfinished – ‘it’s well that it was within thine heart’ – and on his own shortcomings.

13. 1968

    The Other America (Grosse Pointe)

    A late version of ‘The Other America’ delivered to a capacity crowd of about 2,700 in a wealthy, nearly all-white Detroit suburb, with roughly 200 right-wing Breakthrough pickets outside.