Series

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Community Readings

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2024, members of the university community and broader public joined the Marty Center and Divinity School to take turns reading aloud some of King's most significant and illuminating texts ten minutes at a time. These included:

• I Have a Dream (Washington, D.C., August 1963)
• Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (Oslo, Norway, December 1964)
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, Alabama, December 1955)
• Letter from a Birmingham Jail (Birmingham, Alabama, August 1963)
• Our God is Marching On (Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965)
• The Three Evils of Society (Chicago, Illinois, 1967)
• Paul's Letter to American Christians (Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 4, 1956)
• Speech to Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas, 1966)
• Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence (Riverside Church, New York City, April 1967)
• The Other America (Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, April 1967)
• Where Do We Go from Here? (Atlanta, Georgia, August 1967)
• I've Been to the Mountain Top (Memphis, Tennessee, April 1968)

Listen to the sequential narrations here in a variety of campus and community voices, including those of Rev. Marshall Hatch, Sr., and former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun. Some texts repeat.

Featured Image: Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking against the Vietnam War, St. Paul Campus, University of Minnesota. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society/Creative Commons.