A rare audio tape of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968 is going up for auction.

The recording was captured nearly 50 years ago by Perry Porter, a minister at Christ Church in Grosse Pointe, where Dr. King had initially been scheduled to speak. The quarter-inch reel of audiotape is the only known original audio of the speech.

"Dating to just three weeks before his assassination in Memphis (April, 1968), this remarkable audio offers a new understanding of Dr. King’s activism in its historical context," said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, the Boston-based firm handling the sale.

The Remarkable Rarities auction from RR Auction will begin on Friday and conclude on Thursday, Oct. 26.

Dr. King’s speech, which he called ‘"The Other America," draws from a more well-known oration given at Stanford a year earlier.

According to the press release, it opened, in part: “I want to discuss the race problem tonight and I want to discuss it very honestly. I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it. And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, ‘The Other America.’”

Amidst his discussion of unemployment and under-employment in the black community, Dr. King’s speech is interrupted by a lady yelling. He replied, “I’ll just wait until our friend can have her say,” after which there is a round of applause.

After some ruckus and chaotic background noise, Dr. King resumed speaking: “Now before I was so rudely interrupted… (applause), and I might say that it was my understanding that we're going to have a question and answer period, and if anybody disagrees with me, you will have the privilege, the opportunity to raise a question if you think I'm a traitor, then you'll have an opportunity to ask me about my traitor-ness and we will give you that opportunity.”

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Later in the speech, addressing the myth that "time heals all wounds," Dr. King references the earlier disruptions: “It may well be that we may have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people who will say bad things in a meeting like this or who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time.”

According to the press release, the reel’s box is erroneously dated “3-26-68” on the side.

The tape is expected to bring more than $10,000, according to a spokesman for the auction firm.

The Grosse Pointe Historical Society has a transcript and audio clip online.

Contact Perry A. Farrell: pafarrell@freepress.com