Early Recording of MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech Discovered

An English professor discovered an early recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s famous “I Have a Dream” speech made in a North Carolina high school auditorium several months before he delivered it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Jason Miller unearthed the recording in the fall of 2013 while conducting research for his book, Origins if the Dream, which compares King’s speeches and the poetry of Langston Hughes. The professor played the speech publicly for the first time at North Carolina State University on Tuesday.

“It is part civil rights address. It is part mass meeting. And it has the spirit of a sermon,” Miller told the crowd. “And I never before heard Dr King combine all those genres into one particular moment.”

King deliver the prototype speech on November 27, 1962 at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, N.C. — a full nine months before he addresses hundreds of thousands of people in the nation’s capital. Three of the people who were in attendance at the former were there on Tuesday to listen to it again, including Herbert Tillman, who was 17 at the time.

[h/t Associated Press]
[Image via screengrab]

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