Newly discovered audio recording of MLK speech from 1962 found in New York State archives

Discovery of unknown Martin Luther King recording thrills historians

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)

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.' "

HEAR THE RECORDING

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:

http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/virtual/exhibits/mlk/

New video, well, an old film of Ray released

Once again the anniversary of Dr. King's death has come and gone with little notice paid to it at all.

And I must admit I've been too busy with JFK's murder to find the time to devote to Dr. King's death as well.  However, I noticed one item that the Huffington Post had.  New Footage of Martin Luther King Jr. Assassin Released.  

Why the Huffington Post did not call Dr. King, "Dr." King I don't know.  Why leave off the "Dr." part?

And, of course, it's not Dr. King's real assassin.  It's a film of James Earl Ray.  The video links below are slow to load.

Almost exactly 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, (NBC video link) new video footage has surfaced of his killer, James Earl Ray.

The Shelby County, Tenn., Register's office released the newly restored footage this week, posting several videos to its website chronicling certain aspects of the assassin's arrest and trial. The most dramatic of the videos shows (AOL video link) Ray receiving his Miranda rights on an airplane shortly after his arrest in London in June, 1968.

"You have the right to remain silent," an officer can be heard dictating to Ray above the loud hum of the airplane's engines.

Ray (ABC News blog with some good photos)  shot King in the head on April 4, 1968, while the civil rights leader was standing on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. Ray then fled north from Memphis, ( CBC news blog, an excellent site, A+ )  across the Canadian border to Toronto, where he assumed a false identity and evaded detection for several weeks. He was ultimately arrested across the Atlantic, in London's Heathrow Airport, two months after the assassination. It was on the flight back to the United States, following his extradition, that the footage of Ray hearing his rights was recorded.

Shelby County has uploaded a number of ( This is interesting stuff ) additional videos from the Ray trial to its website, totaling several hours of previously unseen court procedure. The footage was the first of its kind for the county. ( I'll be watching this stuff this weekend. )

According to a statement released by Shelby County:

In 1968, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office purchased a Sony Videocorder and Video Camera for the purposes of documenting the extradition, incarceration, and proceedings as related to James Earl Ray for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is believed that the personnel using the equipment were learning how to operate this technology as they recorded. As a result, the footage is not always as clear as we are accustomed to seeing today. Additional lighting is not used on most of the recordings. Audio portions are not always clear. There are inconsistencies in the video and audio tracks throughout the converted footage.

Ray pleaded guilty to the murder of Dr. King in 1969, receiving a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison. He ( CNN obit link ) died in 1997 at the age of 70, a decade before he was (BBC on this date something happened site )  eligible for parole.

Commercial Appeal reaches settlement with DOJ and FBI over Wither records

Settlement to unveil photos, records documenting Ernest Withers' work as FBI informant

A legal settlement finalized Monday is expected to unearth photographs and records documenting the late Ernest Withers’ secret work as an FBI informant in Memphis during the civil rights era.

The agreement between the FBI and The Commercial Appeal allows the newspaper to access portions of 70 investigative files in which Withers participated as an informant.

Those 70 cases, ranging from the FBI’s investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while in Memphis in 1968 as well as examinations of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the black power and peace movements here, represent a fraction of the celebrated photographer’s work for the FBI between 1958 and 1976.

As part of the settlement, the FBI released a statement reporting that agents were authorized to pay Withers $20,088 between 1958 and 1976 but could not confirm how much he actually received.

That’s a signficant sum for the notoriously tightfisted FBI which paid its informants sparingly — the vast majority got nothing. Though the FBI’s Memphis field office had scores of informants reporting on “racial” matters and civil unrest here in 1968, records show only five of those informants were paid. Much of Withers’ pay is believed to have come after 1967.

The settlement also requires the FBI to pay $186,000 in attorney fees and legal costs the newspaper accumulated since filing suit in 2010. In turn, the newspaper agreed to drop its lawsuit, which it did Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The settlement, believed to be the first of its kind involving a civil rights era informant, is expected to provide a rare look inside the FBI’s domestic intelligence operation that kept a close eye on black America in search of Communist and militant influences.

“This is a big win for the cause of open records and for civil rights in America for that matter,” said Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal. “After two years, hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs, and many hours of reporting The Commercial Appeal has prevailed in its effort to get a more detailed picture of the extent of the spying and informing done in Memphis during Dr. King’s life and up until the time of his death.

“This settlement and the documents and records that will be released as a result of it, clearly will help Americans better understand the complicated role the FBI played in the Civil Rights era.”

Attorneys representing the Department of Justice did not respond Monday to an email seeking comment.

The compromise allows the FBI to protect the integrity of its informant program by not opening sensitive portions of Withers’ informant file. Under the agreement, the National Archives and Records Administration will release Withers-related records from investigative case files and not from Withers’ informant file, which the FBI retains. The FBI maintains that releasing details on an informant, even a dead one, can chill its ability to recruit new informants who enter confidentiality agreements and expect their work to remain secret.

Withers died in 2007 at age 85.

“The agreement between The Commercial Appeal and the FBI is unprecedented and creative,” said Charles D. Tobin, the First Amendment lawyer with the Holland & Knight law firm in Washington, who represented the CA. “While the FBI will keep the confidential informant documents to itself as a distinct file, the release of the same documents through NARA will give the public wide swaths of information about what the government was up to with Withers.”

The arrangement means sensitive documents such as specific pay records and any instructions Withers received from agents to spy on activists will remain sealed.

The newspaper sued the FBI in November 2010 seeking Withers’ informant file following a series of investigative reports it published revealing elements of his work with the agency. The newspaper found that Withers had operated under a code number, ME 338-R, to help the FBI monitor the 1968 sanitation workers strike as well as the Invaders, a militant, black power group.

The FBI initially refused to confirm or deny that Withers had been an informant, but federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia ruled in 2012 that the bureau inadvertently identified Withers as an informant in records and ordered officials to release non-exempt materials from Withers’ file.

The FBI responded by releasing hundreds of pages from Withers’ so-called “170 file,” an archaic designation for an “extremist informant,” or one reporting on groups and individuals with extremist views. Many of those records involved newspaper clippings the FBI kept on Withers and his family through the 1960s.

The records released last summer include some recruitment papers, too. They indicate agents first attempted to recruit Withers in 1958. Those papers indicate Withers operated as a “confidential source” through much of the 60s and that he began operating under a code number, ME 338-R, around 1968 as the sanitation strike broke out and the local civil rights movement took on a previously unseen militant tone. A designation such as ME 338-R is typically assigned to informants who are paid, work frequently and are controlled by agents with assignments.

Despite the release, the FBI signaled last fall that it would continue to fight the newspaper’s efforts to open Withers’ full file. Then in September, at Jackson’s urging, the parties agreed to enter mediation to attempt to settle the suit. That resulted in Monday’s deal.

Under the deal, the newspaper will select 70 case files from a confidential list. NARA will release portions of those files relating to Withers on a rolling basis over the next two years.

The Harold Weisberg Archive has many items on the MLK case.  One of which is his unpublished manuscript "Whoring for History."  However, it's difficult to find as it's not really listed under that title.
If you look under the folder "Weisberg Manuscript and Books," you will see Posner (MLK).  That is the book, "Whoring for History," a response to Gerald Posner's BS book.   

Martin Hay's review of Wexler - Hancock book

My friend Martin Hay has written an excellent review of the God awful [deleted] that is the Wexler - Hancock book.  It's here.   

Update on the bathtub

A reader sent me some info on the original bathtub that according to the official story James Earl Ray stood in when he fired the fatal shot that killed Dr. King.  It was bought by a judge, D'Army Bailey.  Bailey is the founder of The National Civil Rights Museum. Bailey bought it in 1983 when the former rooming house was being renovated. Bailey then sold it on Ebay in 2006.  The winning bid came from an online casino, "Golden Palace." (They sound like a Chinese restaurant.)  There is a short article about that here.  They have a photo of the tub which shows the sloping angle at the rear of the tub.

Residents of New York state are not even allowed to access the Goldenpalace.com's website.  So, that's a BIG CLUE as to how reputable they are. 

MSNBC had an article on this.  However, the photo accompanying their story shows a bathtub which is clearly NOT the original tub.  This bathtub was photographed in 2002, after the Civil Rights Museum bought the rooming house property and turned that room into an exhibit.  This bathtub is still there.  

The caption for this photo reads:

The bathtub from which James Earl Ray shot the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 

seen in its location in September 2002, as part of the expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.

This tub cannot be in Judge D'Army Bailey's private hands and in the museum exhibit at the same time.

    

The Wexler - Hancock book, It gets worse

Well, we already know this book is total BS based on a totally false premise. Wexler finds the notion of a conspiracy in the MLK assassination personally distasteful to him so he serves up something more palatable, to him.  It's a valentine to G. Robert Blakey's back-up story to still have a lone assassin, James Earl Ray, do it, but, if you need more, we'll introduce you to a KKK group, The White Knights of Mississippi and say they were really behind it. Wexler's false premise is that The White Knights of Mississippi are behind nearly every racial incident and killing throughout the South, throughout the entire Civil Rights era in hopes that their target Dr. King will come to town in response and lead a march or something, and then they can blow his head off.  This is THE FALSE PREMISE of the book and Wexler and Hancock try to feed it, and support it, and nurture it on every page in hopes that you'll swallow this shit. 

How bad is this book?  Chapter 1, in a subsection; all these chapters have several subsections, big bold type setting off a section; there is one ironically called, "Manufacturing a Pretext."  

I couldn’t make that up if I tried.  

In this subsection there is some basic information telling you that Dr. King went to Missisippi after the attempted murder of James Meredith in 1966, and then it tells you who James Meredith is. "...the man who had desegregated the University of Mississippi by being the first black student to apply to and attend the school on 1962 and who in 1966 was leading his March Against Fear to encourage Blacks to register to vote despite racial intimidation."

Okay, so this information on Meredith is basic historical information that could come from many various sources, school textbooks, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, even Google.  

What's the source they choose?  What is the one, and only source they use to back that up?

Michelle Malkin!  Michelle - RIGHT-WING-NUTCASE Malkin!

Michelle Malkin, "Remembering an American Insurrection" Townhall, September 27, 2002.

Why do they choose her? Well, let’s read it and see.   

Forty years ago this month, a lone black man named James Meredith faced off against an angry mob of thousands of white segregationists on the campus of the University of Mississippi. After a violent clash that left two people dead, 48 American soldiers injured, and 30 U.S. Marshals with gunshot wounds, a dignified Meredith sat in the registrar's office with stunned college officials and signed the forms that led to the historic integration of a fiercely resistant Ole Miss. The incident, dubbed the Battle of Oxford, is mostly ignored in public school history texts. But as author and documentarian William Doyle describes it, the showdown was "the biggest domestic military crisis of the twentieth century" and a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Doyle's gripping and meticulously researched book, "An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962," recounts Meredith's brave stand against Mississippi's Democrat governor Ross Barnett, the state police, the Ku Klux Klan, students and bloodthirsty rabble-rousers who took up guns, clubs, bricks and bottles in their bid to prevent a fellow American citizen from getting a college education. On Meredith's first day of class, the stinging smell of tear gas filled the air. Some 30,000 federal troops had been sent to quell the uprising against Meredith's presence. "I was more frightened at Mississippi than I was at Pearl Harbor or any other time during the war," one U.S. Marshal told Doyle. Meredith himself never showed fear. He walked past blood-stained hallways, endured hate-filled taunts from his fellow students and sat down unflappably for his first lecture: "The Beginnings of English Colonization." On August 18, 1963, at a graduation ceremony with 16 federal marshals monitoring the crowd, Meredith received a bachelor of arts degree in political science. Three years later, while on a one-man march from Memphis to Jackson to promote voting rights, a sniper opened fire on Meredith with an automatic 16-gauge shotgun. He sustained wounds to his head, back, shoulders and legs; at least 80 pellets remain lodged in his body. Later, he outraged many of his former colleagues by opposing government-imposed affirmative action, welfare and busing and joining the staff of conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms. Meredith, now 69 and a resident of Jackson, Miss., is a fascinating, renegade hero. Grandson of a slave and son of a property-owning farmer, he was among the first black soldiers to join the racially integrated U.S. armed forces. After serving in Japan, he enrolled at all-black Jackson State College against a backdrop of horrific lynchings across the Deep South. Meredith resolved to do what he could to break the reign of white supremacy: Confront the beast head on by enrolling at the segregated university that he had dreamed of attending since he was a little boy. To the chagrin of those who romanticize the Kennedys and the Democrats as the unassailable and stalwart champions of civil rights, author Doyle reveals how brothers John and Bobby botched the handling of the crisis at Ole Miss. JFK preferred to wash his hands of the whole "God-damn mess" that the civil rights issue had become to his White House. RFK, then his brother's attorney general, led negotiations with Gov. Barnett that collapsed at the last minute and led to what he later called the worst night of his life. Doyle reports that the Kennedys, more concerned with public relations than sacred principles of equality, secretly ordered black soldiers pulled from the front lines of the battle and forcibly resegregated. Some 4,000 black troops were assigned to garbage details and kitchen patrol in order not to offend white rioters. It was a disgraceful maneuver, made all the more so, one black military policeman told Doyle, "when you consider what the hell we were sent down there for -- the integration of a racially discriminatory institution. Based on more than 500 eyewitness interviews, hours of White House tapes, and some 9,000 pages of files from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Doyle's "American Resurrection" is an invaluable retelling of forgotten history -- a passionate tribute to one man who walked the talk of equality, and a shameful indictment of the cowards and villains who stood in the way.

Well, Malkin wants to plug a book on Meredith.  Why does she give a damn about Meredith? Because he later becomes a Conservative, even worked for Senator Jesse Helms..  The book “An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford Mississippi 1962,” is supposed to be about Meredith’s struggle to get into Ol' Miss.  But it’s not.  It’s a right-wing hatchet job on the Kennedys.  The book's author, William Doyle, thinks the Kennedys “botched,” this crises and wanted nothing to do with the whole “God damn mess,” of Civil Rights.  Doyle blames RFK for the breakdown in negotiations with Mississippi’s Governor Bartlett.  Doyle also criticizes JFK for removing Blacks from being in the National Guard troop sent in response to the crisis.

Well, that was actually rather a smart thing to do becasue it would only have escalated a situation he’s trying to diffuse. To send in an a National Guard troop with Blacks on that front line would be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.  

Malkin gets so happy that Doyle is using this episode of the Civil Rights movement to attack the Kennedys that she gets the title wrong, “American Ressurection.” This piece of crap book which now sells on amazon for less than a dollar was reviewed by Publisher's Weekley, and I quote:

[Doyle's] indiscriminate accumulation of detail (the governor's wife wore pearl-frame glasses; the average height of the 503rd Military Police Battalion is 5'10") mars the book. The sketches of Civil War battles (provided by way of analogy to the Mississippi crisis) and of assorted local, state and federal troop movements fail to cohere. Some of Doyle's facts that World War II paratroopers served in "Normandy, Holland, Belgium, Sicily, Italy and North Africa"; references to JFK's "overlapping extramarital affairs and fleeting sexual experiences"; the price tag on Meredith's graduation suit ($85) bring neither depth nor diversion to this unimaginative text.

So, why do Wexler and Hancock use this Malkin article?  Good question.  Do they share Malkin’s views? Malkin does not mention The White Knights of Mississippi but the KKK does appear in her article.  That's apparently good enough.