If you go
What: Remembrance of Martin Luther King's Nov. 29, 1964, speech at the University of Dayton Fieldhouse.
Where: UD Kennedy Union, room 310.
When: 2 p.m. Dec. 2.
Cost: Free and open to the public.
To listen to King’s speech, visit: http://udayton.com/BXi.
A half-century ago today at the University of Dayton Fieldhouse, Martin Luther King Jr. opened his remarks with a joke.
With a nod to the treacherous roads between Dayton and Cincinnati on the snowy evening of Nov. 29. 1964, King told an audience of some 6,200: “I would rather be Martin Luther King late than the late Martin Luther King.”
Fifty years later, UD is remembering that speech with a series of events, beginning next week and continuing in January.
Herbert Woodward Martin, a UD professor emeritus, will read from a transcript of a recording of King’s speech — the only known such tape, found in his garage nearly six years ago — at Kennedy Union Dec. 2.
Filmmaker David Schock was helping Martin go through a garage full of boxed materials for possible inclusion in a 2009 documentary, “Jump Back, Honey,” on Martin’s performances bringing Dayton poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar to life.
The documentary was Schock’s chronological survey of Martin’s career as a poet and performance artist, a career which “took off” in the 1970s.
“I told Herb, ‘I need everything and then some,’” Schock recalled in an interview this week. “’I need everything you’ve done and recorded.’”
Martin, now 81, handed him a “huge box of tapes.” Schock took the box to his Grand Haven, Mich., home and, as he put it, “started listening.”
Among the reel-to-reel tapes, Schock discovered a familiar voice that was definitely not Martin’s. He knew the voice but couldn’t immediately place it. Facing a deadline to complete his documentary, he set the recording aside.
A ‘precious’ discovery
Later, Schock revisited the 50-minute tape — and he realized he was hearing King.
“It dawned heavily (on me) that what we had here was something that was perhaps precious,” Schock said.
Martin had “no idea” that he had a tape of a King speech gathering dust in his garage, he said.
“I thought that’s strange and unusual,” Martin said. “And then I thought: ‘I don’t know how that came to me.’”
Martin said he was in the habit at one time of “dump-diving,” and guessed that he picked the tape out of trash, perhaps from discarded items in Miriam Hall in the 1980s. He acknowledged having a habit of “wandering the halls” and picking up reel-to-reel tapes someone else may have thrown out, thinking he could use the tape for later recording.
“It was by happenstance, I suppose,” he said. “I picked it up out of somebody else’s trash and preserved it.”
“Herb was absolutely astounded, confounded, joyful,” Schock said.
Schock gave the tape back to Martin, who gave it to UD for its archives, thinking it would complete a trilogy of recordings of speeches at UD, addresses by congressman and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young and King’s wife, Coretta Scott King.
“If researchers decided to come (to UD), they would have all three things (recordings) at their fingertips,” Martin said.
Familiar message and cadence
Martin, who still lives in Washington Twp., retired from UD in 2002.
The message on the tape is as compelling today as it was 50 years ago, Schock said. While the recording was made with a microphone in the audience — so the quality is not top-notch — the message is clear.
“You hear certainly the familiar phrases; you hear the familiar cadences,” he said.
“It’s a remarkable speech,” Martin said. “It goes through many of the stresses and tribulations that African-Americans or black people have suffered through. Of course, he lands on Bull Connor.”
Martin, born in Birmingham, Ala., knew well of Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner in that city, a man who became a symbol of Civil Rights-era brutality.
King had received the Nobel Peace Prize some six weeks before the UD address. According to a 1999account of the speech in an UD employee newsletter, while King held forth on”scriptural ideas of love,” outside members of the “National States Rights Party” marched in protest, shouting, “”Communist King, go home,” and “Go home, Martin Luther Coon.”
In a story published the day after the speech, the Dayton Daily News quoted an NSRP official saying, “Martin Luther King is not a man of God. He preaches integration.”
The official told the newspaper integration conflicted with the teaching of the Bible, and “cited the first chapter of Genesis as proof.”
To this day, Schock doesn’t know who made the recording. But on the tape, he hears a distinctive background noise that he thinks is a camera. Somewhere out there, a film of the speech may exist, he believes. He calls it “a mystery.”
In any case, Schock agreed that the tape’s discovery is an example of history being pieced together in an unexpected way.
“That’s generally how things come to me, in an unusual way,” said Schock, whose documentary work typically focuses on unsolved homicides.
He is pleased he had a role in unearthing the little-known address. “I am profoundly grateful.”
Said Martin: “It was only because of David that we realized what we had.”
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