Someone rolled audio tape during King’s speech that day – November 27, 1962, at Booker T. Washington High.
Advertisement
Jason Mill operator uncovered the recording in the fall of 2013 while directing exploration for his book, Sources if the Fantasy, which thinks about Ruler’s discourses and the verse of Langston Hughes.
That recording has been restored, digitized and was presented to the public this week by the English department of North Carolina State University.
“It is part civil rights address. But there is no substitute for hearing Dr. King at the height of his oratorical prowess”, Jason Miller said.
Months before the civil rights leader gave his famous address at the March on Washington in 1963, he was fine-tuning his message in other venues – including at his old high school in North Carolina. He also said he dreamed of “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” meeting at “the table of brotherhood”.
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he spoke in Washington King changed that to “sit down together at the table of brotherhood”. Several comparisons can be made between the two speeches, but one thing was the same. While researching, he came across a newspaper story about a transcript of the speech in state archives. The earliest record was an NAACP speech called “The Negro and the American Dream”, the subject of which was the distance between the American Dream and the reality experienced by Black Americans.
It “mysteriously appeared” in Braswell Memorial Library in Rocky Mount, where the staff had no equipment to play it. Miller noticed “Please Do Not Erase” penciled on the box.
“It’s a 1.5mm acetate reel-to-reel tape that was sitting there not being played and nobody knew the contents of it”, he said.
Mr Miller said he then drove to Philadelphia to request the held of audio expert, George Blood, who set it as close to its original levels as he could. You can listen to the recording here. “I have a dream tonight”, he said.
Herbert Tillman, who was 17 when the speech was first delivered, said, “Everybody was attentive to what he had to say”.
Advertisement
“The words that he brought to Rocky Mount were words of encouragement that we really needed in Rocky Mount at that time, even though there was so much going on throughout the United States”, Tillman said.
