Staff at the University of California-Los Angeles have discovered the recording of a 1965 speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the university announced this weekend.
The recording has been long forgotten, the university said, until an archivist noticed recently that King had been listed as a campus speaker on April 27, 1965. The archivist then searched through the university’s storage rooms until he came across the recording in a cabinet that had been blocked from view in subsequent years.
King gave the speech at UCLA about a month after the civil rights march in Selma, as King and other civil rights leaders were pushing for the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
UCLA experts characterized his remarks as the “stump speech” that King was giving during the campaign.
“When people are walking the streets hungry and they have no jobs, and they see life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, they become bitter,” King said, though he ended with hope: “Yes, we shall overcome, and I have faith in the future because I know somehow that, although the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice.”
The full recording is below.
As a 19 year old sophomore at UCLA I heard this speech and volunteered to go south in Dr.King’s SCOPE project, which I believe was first announced here. The speech was not the fiery church sermon that we’ve heard often from King, with it’s rising cadences and amen choruses, rather this was an intellectual explanation of the necessity of taking action, and the powerful force of agape. It stirred my mind and soul as much as anything I heard in college and set a course for my young life.
This will give you added reason to celebrate MLK today—while laughing up your sleeve at the moronic Dinesh D’Felon.
As Dr. King said-----the urgent question is this, “What are you doing for others?”
D’Felon isn’t doing anything for others—except affording us an opportunity laugh at him yet again.
A great American then, now and forever.
We cannot be too grateful for archivists and librarians!
Well, at least there might be one speech of MLK’s that Steven Spielberg doesn’t own the film copyrights to…or does he, now that this one has been ‘unearthed’ too? I think we can expect the descendants to lay claim to this one as well fairly soon.