The Lost Speech of Martin Luther King Jr.

A speech originally given in the Memorial Hall at Bethel College (Newton, KS.) on Jan. 21, 1960 was revisited by audio for the first time to a packed auditorium on the National holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (01/18/10). The speech had been thought lost until last year when a recording of the actual event was found almost 50 years later by Alumni, Randy Harmison.

The copyright to the speech is owned by the King Center and a transcript has not yet been made available. Bethel College has been working with the King Center in order to attain a transcript but has not yet concluded the issue. Thanks to Mr. Harmison, another piece of history has been saved for future generations.

Harmison, a native of Newton, KS., now retired in Erie after working as an engineer for IBM for 26 years, has been interested in technology all his life. While working at Graber's Hardware as a teenager, he bought a VM (Voice of Music) reel-to-reel tape recorder and used it to record anything that interested him, from radio broadcasts to live presentations. When Martin Luther King came to Bethel, Harmison, a junior at the college, thought "this would be a good thing to archive," so he recorded it.

Bethel had sent a newsletter to their Alumni concerning a 50^th Anniversary celebration in honor of Dr. King, asking for submissions if anyone had any memorabilia to add. Harmison recalled the speech he had recorded almost 50 years earlier and began a search through a storage barn on his property. The VM recorder he had used was long gone but he did succeed in finding the reel, sealed and intact.

The tape was sent to Sondra Bandy Koontz at Bethel, who consulted with Adam Akers of the audio-visual department and John Thiesen in the Mennonite Library and Archives. They, together, determined that it was a recording of the "Lost Speech" and the only form of the speech in existence.

The tape was sent in June to The Cutting Corporation of Archival Sound Labs in Bethesda, Md., who's specialty is restoring and preserving archival audio materials. In July, the speech has been reformatted to CD and was played in the Krehbiel Auditorium on Monday, Jan. 18, as the opening event in Bethel's 2010 King holiday celebration.

That speech, now known as "A Time to Break Silence" or "Beyond Vietnam" was drafted by Vincent Harding. Harding remembered his friend and colleague Dr. King on his fourth visit to Bethel College by giving the keynote address for Bethel's annual celebration of the national King holiday. The title of Harding's address was "More than nostalgia: Revisiting King in 2010".

The release from Bethel College stated the following;

"On April 4, 1967 - exactly one year before he was assassinated - Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his most controversial speeches to a meeting of Clergy and Laymen Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City, calling the nation to account for what he saw as a misguided and deeply wrong war in Vietnam."

Harding's first trip to Bethel in 1959 was as a "religious life" speaker. He returned in 1984 to deliver the Menno Simons Lectures. In 1993, he was the commencement speaker.

A native of Harlem, Harding graduated from the City College of New York and Columbia University and then served two years in the U.S. Army at Ft. Dix, N.J. While in the Army, Harding began to explore status as a conscientious objector. He moved to Chicago where he earned his M.A. and PhD from the University of Chicago.

Harding joined the pastoral team at Woodlawn Mennonite Church in Chicago where he met and married Rosemarie Freeney, a native of Chicago and graduate of Goshen (Ind.) College who worked as an elementary teacher/social worker.

Harding was a founder and the first director of what is now the King Center in Atlanta. The Hardings served as advisors for the PBS series on the Civil Rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. In 1997, they founded the Gandhi-Hamer-King Center for the Study of Religion and Democratic Renewal (based at Iliff), now called the Veterans of Hope Project. Rosemarie Harding died in 2004.

Harding has authored several books, including There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981; reissued 1993) and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996; reissued 2008).

Vincent Harding's achievements span several decades of Civil Rights activism and a strong devotion to his religious beliefs. He and Dr. King helped to make a difference that should never be forgotten.

Bethel College is a four-year liberal arts college affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. Bethel is known for its academic excellence and was the only Kansas private college to be ranked in Forbes.com's listing of "America's Best Colleges" for 2009 and one of only two Kansas colleges listed in Colleges of Distinction 2008-09.

For more information, see the Bethel Web site.