A lost recording of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech in Charleston, South Carolina, is up for auction.
The speech, on July 30, 1967, was recorded less than a year before his assassination. In the recording, King discusses the injustices of wealth distribution and white supremacy. The tape and the Sony recorder used in the recording will be auctioned off together on September 19 at the Historic Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York City.
Below are soundbites from the transcription:
1. So we suffer from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The problem is, my friends, that we have learned to fly the air like birds and we have learned to swim the seas like fish and yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like brothers and sisters.
2. Racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame. So wherever we live in America, you have to face the fact honestly that racial discrimination is present. So don’t get complacent; certainly we’ve made some strides. We’ve made some progress here and there, but it hasn’t been enough; it hasn’t been fast enough, and although we’ve come a long, long way, we still have a long, long way to go.
3. In 1863, the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery through the emancipation proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, but the Negro was never given any land to make that freedom meaningful. And you know, it’s something like having a man in jail for years and then you suddenly discover that this man is innocent and go to him and say, now you are free. You don’t give him any bus fare to get to town, no money to buy clothes, no money to get something to eat. This is what happened to the black man in this country.
4. I can’t limit my concern to the middle class. I can’t limit my concern to this particular situation where a Negro comes and says “I’m the first this.” I, I, I’m just tired of the first Negro. I want some seconds and thirds and fourths.
5. The civil rights movement has to address itself, and the nation has to do it. You see, we are such a rich nation, an affluent nation, we often don’t see the poor. There are some – you see, most white people can’t see the poor because they live in the suburbs. And then they get in town in big cities on these expressways. They don’t know nothing about Watts. They don’t know nothing about Hough in Cleveland or the West Side or the South Side of Chicago or Harlem. They’ve never seen it, and they allow the poor to become invisible – and a lot of Negros, you know, who have somehow sailed or floated out of the backwaters or the muddy waters, and they’ve kind been able to ease out into the fresh, flowing waters of the mainstream; they’ve forgotten the stench of the backwater.
6. I can hear a voice saying: “That wasn’t enough. I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and you clothed me not. I needed shelter and you didn’t give it to me. I needed a drink of water and in a world that’s three-fourths water, you made me pay a water bill.”
