Sr.
historian Jennifer Lemak holds a reel-to-reel audio tape of Martin Luther King
Jr. speaking in 1962 at a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of
Emancipation Proclamation, with other artifacts of the event at the NYS Museum
Wednesday Jan. 15, 2014, in Albany, NY. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)
A reel-to-reel audio tape of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in 1962 at
a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation is
among artifacts at the NYS Museum Wednesday Jan. 15, 2014, in Albany, NY. (John
Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)
Photo courtesy of the NYS Museum: Dignitaries, including Martin Luther
King Jr. , third from left, during the Emancipation Proclamation Dinner on
Sept. 12, 1962 at a New York City hotel. (JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE)
Photo courtesy of the NYS Museum: Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on
Sept. 12, 1962 at a New York City hotel on the 100th anniversary of
Emancipation Proclamation. (JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE)
Albany
An unknown 1962 audio recording of slain civil
rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s 26-minute speech in New York City to celebrate the
centennial of President Abraham Lincoln's
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation — a tape that was undetected for 35 years
in a box at the State Museum following
a 1979 donation — thrilled historians and reinforced the vital role played by
an unpaid college intern.
A typed transcript of the speech and copy of the
program for the event were widely known and stored in the State Archives, but
nobody knew that a recording existed.
The dramatically sonorous voice and measured
cadence on the tape caused a jolt of recognition for intern Daniel Barker,
who had spent hundreds of hours digitizing dozens of mundane recordings of
agricultural activities and weather news from the same collection.
"His voice is so unmistakable," Barker
said of the Eureka moment on Nov. 12, 2013. "There was no way it wasn't
Dr. Martin Luther King on the tape. I said, 'Craig, you better listen
to this.' "
Craig Williams,
curator of history at the State Museum, heard King's voice and a ripple of
excitement ran through the room. After Williams and others researched King's
speech on Sept. 12, 1962 at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan and learned
that this was the only known recording of the event, they knew they had
captured lightning in a bottle.
"It's incredible to be able to put King's
voice to the speech," said Mark Schaming,
State Museum director. "His delivery is very moving and builds to a
powerful conclusion."
King's speech, which covers 14 typewritten pages,
equates Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation — which promised to free all the
slaves within the Confederate states on Jan. 1, 1863 if those states remained
in rebellion against the United States for more than 100 days — with the
Declaration of Independence in its importance to the history of
the republic.
In the speech, King was critical of racial
inequality and he cited an average annual family income for African-Americans
in 1962 of $3,300, compared with $5,800 for white families. He said the country
would remain "weakened in its integrity, confused and confounded in its
direction, by the unresolved race question."
As he built to a soaring peroration, King said,
"I know that dark days still lie ahead. Gigantic mountains of opposition
will still stand before us." King concluded by quoting "an old Negro
slave preacher," and added a disclaimer for the poor grammar: "Lord,
we ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we goin'
to be. But, thank God, we ain't what we wuz."
With a preacher's passion and a singsong delivery
that turned up slightly at the end of each sentence, King's 1962 speech in New
York City was given at the invitation of Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller. It foreshadowed some of the images and phrasing of
King's famous "I Have A Dream"
speech delivered at a historic civil rights march and rally on Aug. 28, 1963 at
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The 1962 dinner was sponsored by the New York State
Civil War Centennial Commission and the audience included
Rockefeller, Cardinal Francis Spellman and
other dignitaries.
The sound quality of the recording is quite good,
except for a one-minute gap in the middle of King's address, when Enoch Squires flipped over a Scotch recording tape
after one side was filled up and he rethreaded the other side into an empty
takeup reel on a boxy reel-to-reel tape recorder he held in his lap.
Squires was a longtime radio reporter at WGY in
Schenectady. He logged 3,000 miles a month to tape his "Schenectady
Traveler" show, a folksy interview program that focused on farming and
rural life. He left WGY in 1961 for a job as a research associate with the
state Civil War
Commission. Following his death in 1979, his widow that year turned
over dozens of boxes of material, including 400 reel-to-reel tapes from
Squires' WGY shows, both raw footage and edited programs.
Most of Squires' interviews were recorded on an
earlier iteration of Scotch recording tape, which could only record on one
side. Double-sided recording tape came in around 1962, when Squires made the King recording.
"If he didn't use the new kind of tape, we
might have only had the start of King's speech," Barker said. "Some
of the earlier reels are in horrible shape and some are covered in mold. We're
just lucky this one was in great shape."
As it was, in order to conserve tape, Squires hit
the stop button just as baseball great Jackie Robinson walked
to the podium to deliver remarks that Squires did not record. Robinson broke
the color barrier in major league baseball and was a first ballot inductee into
the Hall of Fame two months before the dinner.
Barker, of Guilderland, who graduated in December
with a master's degree in information studies from the University at Albany,
has digitized 207 of Squires' tapes, slightly more than half of those donated.
It's a labor-intensive process that involved transferring each from
reel-to-reel to audiocassette to CD, and then burning a digital file.
He finished digitizing about 15 reels each week
during his 12-hour internship that ended in December. He continues to work one
day a week on the Squires project as a volunteer.
The King speech almost didn't take place,
according to Jennifer Lemak,
a curator of history who wrote about the speech in a 2012 State Archives
magazine article.
King was ready to cancel after his advisers
worried the dinner was "too Republican" and they feared that
Rockefeller's presidential ambitions were anathema to President John F. Kennedy,
with whom King was trying to curry favor as he pressed for civil
rights legislation.
When King tried to beg off, Rockefeller opened
his checkbook and promised to make a substantial donation to rebuild torched
African-American churches in Georgia. It was a deal sweetener King
couldn't refuse.
A black-and-white photograph showed King
delivering the speech from behind a lectern perched on the head table, in front
of which the draft preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, written in Lincoln's
hand, were arrayed in simple plastic sleeves. Today, the document is considered
priceless and is encased in a heavy, metal-edged glass display case filled with
inert gas to preserve it. It is put on public display occasionally, but only
under the watch of security guards.
Rockefeller used to carry the priceless,
one-of-a-kind document around the state in 1962 in his briefcase,
Lemak said.
Rockefeller was disappointed after his overtures
to black leaders were rebuffed and they declined to support the work of the
governor's Civil War Commission. He was further dismayed when his proposal and
architect's rendering of an Emancipation Proclamation shrine to display the
historic document in the state Capitol did not gain traction and was
never built.
Meanwhile, Barker, the former intern, is enjoying
his 15 minutes of fame. "Strangers have come up to me in the State Museum
and said, 'Hey, you're the guy who found the tape,' " he said.
"Everybody's made me feel really good about the whole thing."
There is one more item that would make him feel
even better.
Barker, 32, a rock drummer who plays in the bands
Male Patterns and Serriday, is engaged to be married in June to an elementary
school teacher. He's currently unemployed.
"I'm looking for a job in my field," he
said, hopeful that the State Museum might eventually have an opening.
pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl
Listen up
To listen to King's 1962 speech and to learn
about how the audio recording was discovered, go to:
