Found After Decades, a Forgotten Tape of King ‘Thinking on His Feet’

George Tames/The New York Times The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963.

There are hundreds of thousands of carefully preserved manuscripts and recordings that chronicle every speech, interview and public appearance made by one of America’s greatest orators, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At least one of his appearances, however, seems to have slipped through the cracks of time, only to be discovered nearly 50 years later in the archives of the New School.

And it still seems as relevant today as it was back then.

“I think America, somehow, must face her moment of atonement.” Dr. King said, in response to a question about “preferential treatment” for African-Americans. “Not just atonement for atonement’s sake, but we must face the fact that we’re going to pay for it somehow. If we don’t do it, we’re going to pay for it with the welfare rolls, we’re going to pay for it in many other ways.”

On Feb. 6, 1964, Dr. King delivered a speech at the New School, inaugurating a series of lectures called “The American Race Crisis.” While no audio record of the speech has been found, the school has recovered an audiotape containing 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that had followed. Experts dedicated to the study of Dr. King said they had never heard of the speech or the follow-up discussion before.

“I was dazzled,” said Steve Klein, director of communications at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. “Dr. King made a lot of preparation for all his speeches, but what’s particularly interesting about this Q. and A. is he’s thinking on his feet.”

Like many such finds, the discovery of the long-lost audiotape happened by chance. Two years ago, Chris Crews, a graduate student in politics, noticed that a photo of Dr. King standing at a podium in the New School’s Tishman auditorium was included in an e-mail from the school about coming events. Intrigued, Mr. Crews started digging. It took about six months, but with the help of a school librarian, a tape labeled “Crisis King PT 2’’ was discovered in a box at the New School. (Presumably there was a “Crisis King PT 1,” and the hunt for that continues.)

In his remarks at the New School, Dr. King spoke about a conversation he had with Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India at the time. He compared the lot of African-Americans in the United States to the untouchables in India, a community that was treated as inferior and ostracized, and made a moral and economic argument in favor of affirmative action.

“It is a part of the social consciousness of our great democracy,” Dr. King said. “We have many things that we do; if we deprive somebody of something, we do give something special to make up for that deprivation.”

Dr. King’s appearance occurred days before the landmark Civil Rights bill passed in the House of Representatives and less than five months after he delivered what is perhaps his most famous speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. With the 50th anniversary of that speech approaching, some civil rights leaders say the gains that have been made by blacks are threatened by recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative education in higher education and on the Voting Rights Act.

Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, said the audiotape of Dr. King’s remarks at the New School was “an incredible find because our image of Dr. King and the civil rights movement is seen only through the lens of the great moments of the movement.” He added, “What this demonstrates is how he was engaged in the day-to-day struggles and conversations and thinking about policies that are still living with us today.”

Miles Kohrman, a graduate of the New School who still spends most of his days at the school’s archive, has unearthed nine additional reel-to-reel tapes from the Race Crisis series.

“This is an incredible lineup of civil rights activists that totally disappeared off the face of the map,” Mr. Kohrman, 22, said. The series included lectures by Charles Abrams, founder of the New York City Housing Authority; Roy Wilkins, the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and Melvin Tumin, a Princeton sociologist who specialized in race relations.

Since the discovery of the Race Crisis series, the school has slowly made a more conscientious effort to preserve its past.

“There had never been a sustained attempt to really get a handle on all the material, or make it widely known and accessible,” said Wendy Scheir, director of the New School archives and special collections last year.

Pointing to thousands of newspaper clippings that had been kept in crumbling and poorly organized scrapbooks, Ms. Scheir added, “You would open them up and find this mountain of flakes on your feet.”

Mr. Kohrman is busy organizing an exhibition for the Race Crisis series that will take place in February, marking its 50th anniversary. One feature will be an audio stand where visitors can listen to the timeless voice of Dr. King.

“It will bring America to that great day, when all of us will have a sort of moral balance,’’ Dr. King tells his New School audience at one point, “where everybody can know that we can sit on or under our own vine and fig tree and not be afraid, knowing that we do live in a country where equality of opportunity is a reality.”