An audio tape recently surfaced of a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave on Jan. 21, 1960, at Bethel College in Kansas. No previously known tape or transcript of this speech was known to exist. Below are just a few excerpts from it... My prayer is that I won't just pause to remember MLK Jr. today, but that I will pause to pray and commit to working toward reconciliation with my African-American neighbor.
One of the tragedies of the South at this moment is that we are seeking to live in monologue rather than dialogue. We just aren’t talking with each other. Men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they are separated from each other, and they don’t know each other and they don’t know each other because they can’t communicate with each other. …
We must face the shameful and tragic fact in America that on Sunday morning when we stand to sing, at 11 [o’clock], “in Christ there is no East or West,” we stand in the most segregated hour of Christian America. We must face the tragic fact that the most segregated school of the week is the Sunday school. Thank God we’re beginning now to shake the lethargy from our eyes and our souls and we’re coming to see that if we’re to be followers of Jesus Christ and the great ethical insights of the prophets of old, that we must take a stand, because this issue at bottom is a moral issue. There is something in the New Testament reminding us that we are made in the image of God … we are all one in Christ Jesus. And these things running the gamut of the Gospel must one day cause Christians everywhere to take a stand against the evils of segregation and discrimination. …
The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship, but we must never use second-class methods to gain them. Our aim must never be to defeat or to humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. And by following through with this method of nonviolence and this way of love, I believe that we can assist in bringing the third period to its fulfillment. …
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