A Christmas Sermon on Peace

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 86 recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. →

1. 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.

2. 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’.

3. 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.

4. 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’.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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’.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 1968

    Address to the Memphis sanitation strikers (‘All Labor Has Dignity’)

    To a crowd of some 15,000 at Mason Temple, King told the striking sanitation workers that ‘all labor has dignity’, called for a general work stoppage in Memphis, and promised to return to lead a march – a commitment that brought him back on 28 March and 3 April.

12. 1968

    Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

    Preached to a packed Episcopal cathedral four days before his death, the sermon reworks the Oberlin ‘Rip Van Winkle’ address into a defense of the Poor People’s Campaign, calls Vietnam ‘one of the most unjust wars’, and declares ‘we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’.

13. 1968

    Interview on the Memphis situation

    A 1.3-minute recorded interview from King’s last day in Memphis, catalogued by the King Papers Project, in which he addresses the sanitation strike and the planned second march. His flight from Atlanta that morning had been delayed by a bomb threat.