Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day: I have a Dream!!
Martin Luther King: Live Speech on Racial Discrimination
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Listen to this rare recording of a 1 hour speech that Dr. King gave on March 24, 1963, the same year of his “I Have a Dream” Speech which he delivered on August 28, 1963. This speech takes a more comprehensive look at the history of African Americans and their journey from slavery to segregation to the civil rights movement. Delivered in the midst of this movement, Dr. King calls for urgency in fighting racial injustice and for nonviolent action in dealing with the moral issues of racism. He surveys the many aspects of the civil rights movement at the time and provides his wisdom on all these aspects. Listen to this excellent speech from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. available from the Forum Network on streaming audio.
Martin Luther King: Live Speech on Racial Discrimination
And now Stanford University’s King Research and Education Institute freely provides streaming audio of over 20 of Dr. King’s most famous speeches and sermons:
Martin Luther King Speeches and Sermons from the King Institute
Here are the speeches you can listen to there:
1954:
28 February 1954 – Rediscovering Lost Values
1955:
5 December 1955 – Address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting
1956:
4 November 1956 – “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”
1957:
7 April 1957 – The Birth of a New Nation, Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
17 May 1957 – “Give Us the Ballot,” Address at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom
17 November 1957 – “Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
1963:
16 April 1963 – “Letter From Birmingham Jail”
23 June 1963 – Speech at the Great March on Detroit
28 August 1963 – I Have a Dream, Address at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
18 September 1963 – Eulogy for the Martyred Children
1964:
10 December 1964 – Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony
1965:
25 March 1965 – Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March
4 July 1965 – “The American Dream”
1966:
5 June 1966 – “Guidelines for a Constructive Church”
1967:
4 April 1967 – Beyond Vietnam
9 April 1967 – “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”
11 June 1967 – “A Knock at Midnight”
16 August 1967 – “Where Do We Go From Here?,” Delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention
27 August 1967 – “Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool”
1968:
4 February 1968 – “The Drum Major Instinct”
3 March 1968 – “Unfulfilled Dreams”
31 March 1968 – “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”
3 April 1968 – I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
And if you’ve not yet listened to these speeches by Martin Luther King that we’ve featured in the past we highly encourage you to do so:
I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Speech
And for our comprehensive collection of audio & video resources about Dr. King check out:
MLK Out Loud Audio & Video Resources
Some of the new free resources we’ve added there this year:
African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle – Stanford course taught by Professor Clayborne Carson who is the author of many books on Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, and the director of the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King Memorial Dedication – C-SPAN’s video coverage of the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the national mall which took place October 16, 2011 and features speeches by Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Dan Rather, and many others.
And also in the past year we added our Martin Luther King, Jr. audio & video author page which features all of the audio & video titles we have that are directly by Martin Luther King including audio of his speeches and writings.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Audio & Video Resources Page
Plenty of great resources to help you celebrate the holiday!
Towering legend, flawed man? King’s image evolving
WASHINGTON (AP) — On the National Mall in Washington,Martin Luther King Jr. is a towering, heroic figure carved in stone. On the Broadway stage, he’s a living, breathing man who chain smokes, sips liquor and occasionally curses.
As Americans honor King’s memory 44 years after he was assassinated, the image of the slain civil rights leader is evolving.
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THE MEMORIAL
The new King memorial, which opened in August in the nation’s capital, celebrates the ideals King espoused. Quotations from his speeches and writings conjure memories of his message, and a 30-foot-tall sculpture depicts King emerging as a “stone of hope” from a “mountain of despair,” a design inspired by a line of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Some gaze upon this figure in silence. Some smile and pull out cell phone cameras. Others chat about how closely the statue resembles King. And some are moved to tears.
“Just all that this man did so that we could do anything and be anything,” said Brandolyn Brown, 26, of Cheraw, S.C., who visited the memorial Saturday with her aunt and cousin.
“I know it took a lot more than him to get to where we are, but he was a big part of the movement.”
Brown’s aunt, Gloria Drake, 60, of Cheraw, S.C., said she remembers King almost as though he was Moses leading his people to the promised land, even when there were so many reasons to doubt things would get better in an era of segregated buses, schools and lunch counters.
“It was really just hostile,” she said. “… And then we had a man that comes to tell us things are going to be better.”
“Don’t be mad, don’t be angry,” she recalled King’s message. “Just come together in peace.”
They said King’s lasting legacy is the reality of equality and now having a black president. Drake said President Barack Obama reminds her of King with his “calmness” even in the face of anger.
Christine Redman, 37, visited the memorial with her husband, James Redman, 40, and their young son and daughter. She said they also feel a personal connection to King.
“We’re a mixed family, and we know that without a lot of the trials that he went through to help end segregation and help the races to become one, we would not be able to have the freedoms to love who we want to love and be accepted in the world,” she said.
Her son, 8-year-old Tyler, echoed his mom: “And be who we want to be.”
The family tries to celebrate King’s birthday by finding a way to serve others, they said. They were thinking about volunteering at a food pantry or donating toys for needy kids.
When he thinks of King, James Redman said he thinks of hope. Still, he said, King’s legacy is lost on many.
“Dr. King was about love and about cooperation and compromise and working together,” he said. “We don’t see a whole lot of that in our leaders. We don’t see a whole lot of it in our citizenry.”
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THE STAGE
On Broadway, theatergoers are seeing a different version of King — one that is more man than legend.
The realism was refreshing for Donya Fairfax, who marveled after leaving a matinee of “The Mountaintop” that she had never really thought of King cursing, as actor Samuel L. Jackson does while portraying King in the play.
“He was human and not someone who was above fault,” said the 48-year-old, visiting from Los Angeles. “He cursed. He did things that people do behind closed doors. He was regular.”
For some, such a portrayal would seem to chip away at King’s memory. But for Natalie Pertz, who at 20 has come to know King only through the gauzy view of history, it seemed a precious reminder that it is not beyond the reach of the ordinary and the flawed to effect change.
“It’s important for people our age to see that he wasn’t this saint-like figure,” she said. “It’s making you see that just because you’re not perfect, it doesn’t mean you can’t do good.”
For M.E. Ward, seeing an in-the-flesh incarnation of King brought her back more than 40 years, to when she watched his soaring speeches on the television. No matter how human he seemed on stage, she said, he still carried a godly gift.
“Still charismatic, still an orator, and an individual who was able to move people through his speech,” she said, adding that King enlightened the world with a message “to be peaceful, to be patient, to be non-violent.”
No matter how distant his presence is now, that legacy is still very relevant, she said, in what she called “a world of turmoil and violence, constant violence.”
Do people idealize him too much?
“They don’t do it enough!” said 64-year-old Elisabeth Carr, who cried through most of the play, feeling some of the pain she felt when the civil rights leader died. “The younger generation, they don’t know anymore. … They don’t understand what they went through.”
After traveling more than five hours with three friends — all of them African-American — to see Saturday’s matinee, Mariko Tapper Taylor said seeing King in all his flaws did nothing to diminish his legacy.
“It’s better to remember him as human,” she said. “Who’s flawless? It just shows that there’s another side of him.”
For her, the holiday remains very personal, Taylor said.
One of her friends, Dr. Donnita Scott, chimed in:
“If it wasn’t for him we probably wouldn’t be doctors,” she said, nodding at the group, which includes two ER physicians and a psychiatrist.
Dr. Jan Thomas agreed:
“We’re standing on that mountaintop.”
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Gross reported from New York.
http://news.yahoo.com/towering-legend-flawed-man-kings-image-evolving-154454543.html
Martin Luther King
It is a testament to the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. that nearly every major city in the U.S. has a street or school named after him. It is a measure of how sorely his achievements are misunderstood that most of them are located in black neighborhoods.
Three decades after King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., he is still regarded mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality. That assessment, while accurate, is far too restrictive. For all King did to free blacks from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from the burden of America’s centuries-old hypocrisy about race. It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the U.S. can claim to be the leader of the “free world” without inviting smirks of disdain and disbelief. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched beside him failed, vast regions of the U.S. would have remained morally indistinguishable from South Africa under apartheid, with terrible consequences for America’s standing among nations. How could America have convincingly inveighed against the Iron Curtain while an equally oppressive Cotton Curtain remained draped across the South?
Even after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954, what the world now calls human-rights offenses were both law and custom in much of America. Before King and his movement, a tired and thoroughly respectable Negro seamstress like Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply because she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus so a white man could sit down. A six-year-old black girl like Ruby Bridges could be hectored and spit on by a white New Orleans mob simply because she wanted to go to the same school as white children. A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Even highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they chose. In some rural enclaves in the South, they were even compelled to get off the sidewalk and stand in the street if a Caucasian walked by.
The movement that King led swept all that away. Its victory was so complete that even though those outrages took place within the living memory of the baby boomers, they seem like ancient history. And though this revolution was the product of two centuries of agitation by thousands upon thousands of courageous men and women, King was its culmination. It is impossible to think of the movement unfolding as it did without him at its helm. He was, as the cliche has it, the right man at the right time.
To begin with, King was a preacher who spoke in biblical cadences ideally suited to leading a stride toward freedom that found its inspiration in the Old Testament story of the Israelites and the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ. Being a minister not only put King in touch with the spirit of the black masses but also gave him a base within the black church, then and now the strongest and most independent of black institutions.
Moreover, King was a man of extraordinary physical courage whose belief in nonviolence never swerved. From the time he assumed leadership of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955 to his murder 13 years later, he faced hundreds of death threats. His home in Montgomery was bombed, with his wife and young children inside. He was hounded by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which bugged his telephone and hotel rooms, circulated salacious gossip about him and even tried to force him into committing suicide after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. As King told the story, the defining moment of his life came during the early days of the bus boycott. A threatening telephone call at midnight alarmed him: “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.” Shaken, King went to the kitchen to pray. “I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.'”
In recent years, however, King’s most quoted line–“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”–has been put to uses he would never have endorsed. It has become the slogan for opponents of affirmative action like California’s Ward Connerly, who insist, incredibly, that had King lived he would have been marching alongside them. Connerly even chose King’s birthday last year to announce the creation of his nationwide crusade against “racial preferences.”
Such would-be kidnappers of King’s legacy have chosen a highly selective interpretation of his message. They have filtered out his radicalism and sense of urgency. That most famous speech was studded with demands. “We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” King admonished. “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'” These were not the words of a cardboard saint advocating a Hallmark card-style version of brotherhood. They were the stinging phrases of a prophet, a man demanding justice not just in the hereafter, but in the here and now.
TIME national correspondent Jack E. White has covered civil rights issues for 30 years
What If King Had Lived?
By Philip E. Tetlock
Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn., triggered riots in inner cities across the country and assured his place as a martyr for the civil rights movement. But what might have happened, both to King and to the movement he led, had he not chosen to walk out on the motel balcony that night and lived to march again? Such questions are hard to answer, but they are not unanswerable. History, after all, is about not only what happened but also what, for a few small turns of events, might have happened. Indeed, what didn’t happen serves to underline the significance of what did. Such ruminations are the purview of counterfactual history, the examination of alternative outcomes based on plausible historical scenarios. To help distinguish frivolous flights of imagination from penetrating insights, counterfactual historians employ two standards:
THE MINIMAL-REWRITE RULE
A good counterfactual exercise tampers with as little of actual history as possible but still manages to get a big bang from what is changed. For example, as a foot soldier, Corporal Hitler had close brushes with death in World War I. Had this still unknown soldier been killed in action (with bullets whizzing all around him, it was a highly plausible possibility), humanity might have escaped World War II.
THE SO-WHAT TEST
An effective counterfactual scenario should checkmate critics who argue that things would have worked out the same way anyway (e.g., if Hitler had perished in the muddy trenches, some other fanatic would have taken his place. Maybe, but most historians see Hitler as an extremist, even for a Nazi–and one with a lot of charisma to boot). Counterfactualists tend to support the Great Man Theory of history.
Most of us normally do not think of small causes determining huge outcomes, such as millions dying because of a tiny but timely intervention. But maybe that just shows we are not thinking about our shared past in the right way. What-if thought experiments awaken us to the impact of chance and choice in history. There are endless games one can play with counterfactual history, but here are three deadly serious scenarios, each centered on a small event that turned out to have massive effects.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988163,00.html#ixzz1jh2JwK8h
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