An English professor found a new recording of Martin Luther King's speech "I Have A Dream" at the Hunt Library in North Carolina. The North Carolina State University played the recording in public for the first time on Tuesday. The memorable speech was recorded at Rocky Mount High School on Nov. 27, 1962 when King first delivered it, then immortalized it a year after on Aug. 28, 1963 in Washington DC.
The professor, Jason Miller, author of "Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric," found the recording while doing a research about King and his technique of using Langston Hughes poetry through his speeches, ABC News reported.
The box containing the tape had MLK's name followed by, "Please do not erase."
"I thought that was the most understated," said Miller after discovering the contents of the tape. "Hearing those words was absolutely remarkable."
Miller then brought the 1.5-millimeter tape to an audio expert, George Blood, in Philadelphia to have it digitized as close to the original recording as possible, according to the Associated Press.
There were three people present during the unveiling on Tuesday who were also there during the original speech in 1962. MLK's words were very fluid, said Tolokum Omokunde, FOX News reported.
Herbert Tillman, who was 17 when the speech was first delivered, said, "Everybody was attentive to what he had to say. And the words that he brought to Rocky Mount were words of encouragement that we really needed in Rocky Mount at that time."
State president of the NAACP, Rev. William Barber said on Tuesday: "It's not so much the message of a man... It's the message of a movement, which is why he kept delivering it. It proves once again that the 'I have a dream' portion was not a good climax to a speech for mere applause, but an enduring call to hopeful resistance and a nonviolent challenge to injustice."
