Recording of MLK’s first ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in NC discovered

Before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in front of a massive crowd in Washington DC in 1963, a small group in a high school gymnasium in North Carolina got to hear a preview. Miller played it in public for the first time Tuesday at North Carolina State University. It is part mass meeting. Miller said King was inspired by Hughes’s “I Dream a World” and “A Dream Deferred”, using ideas of integration and transformation in his speeches. “Hearing Dr. King say these words, it was literally the kind of thing we talk about with hair standing up on your arms and chills going down your spine”, he said.

King used the phrase “I have a dream” eight times in his speech to the 2,000 people gathered at Booker T. Washington High School.

He also referred to ‘the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners, ‘ saying he dreamed they would ‘meet at the table of brotherhood’.

But when Omokunde saw the Lincoln Memorial address on TV nine months later, it rang very familiar to him.

State president of the NAACP, Rev. William Barber said on Tuesday: “It’s not so much the message of a man…”

Miller came across the reel-to-reel tape in a town library while conducting research for his book on how King drew inspiration from the poetry of Langston Hughes, Associated Press reports.

The full recording of the speech will be made available online in November.

He sent emails and made calls until he eventually heard back in the fall of 2013 from the Braswell Public Library in Rocky Mount, where staff said a box with the recording had mysteriously appeared on a desk one day.

The box containing the tape had Martin Luther King’s name followed by, “Please do not erase”.

Before listening to the recording, Miller confirmed that the 1.5-millimeter acetate reel-to-reel tape could be played safely.

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. Miller said Blood “wrote the book” for the Library of Congress on how to digitize old materials.

Washington: “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” – one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”.

I still have a dream.

Before Dr. Martin Luther King’s words echoed throughout Lincoln Memorial, he raised goose bumps inside a segregated school gym in North Carolina.

“I don’t know what you might have heard”, she said, offering what must be the world’s most stunning understatement.