On this Martin Luther King Day, library archivists and others are delighted that a missing tape of King speaking in 1964 in New York City has surfaced. It was for some time stashed in the basement of a college library in Amherst, Massachusetts.
LISTEN: Audio of rebroadcast of Feb. 6, 1964, speech
Audio of the speech, now digitized, was found last fall by Amherst College special collections archivist Mariah Leavitt. She was sorting through some boxes and came across a reel with the label “Martin Luther King, President, Southern Leadership Conference, Summer of Our Discontent.”
“I looked at it and I was like, I bet tons of people have this, but i’ll just check,” Leavitt recalled.
After a quick online search, Leavitt realized it could be the missing recording from a speech King gave on February 6, 1964, at the New School for Social Research in New York.
The school only had a recording of King’s question and answer session. Leavitt says, before she called the school, she needed to make sure the audio was for real.
“We didn’t want to start getting everybody all worked up before we knew that the reel really held the speech on it, and that it was going to be usable,” Leavitt says. “So as soon as it came back from digitization, I did call them right up…They were very excited.”
King, like other great orators, was a recycler of speeches and librarians say he was likely working out the text for a book.
In this version, King makes the call for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
“1964 should be there year of creative response from the White community and the political power structure of our nation,” King said. “And if this bill does not pass, the already ugly sore of racial injustice on the body politic may suddenly turn malignant, and our nation may be inflicted with an incurable cancer that will totally destroy our political and moral health.”
The U.S. House passed its version four days later.