Remarks of civil rights leader among several found in New School archives

In the spring of 1964, The New School played host to one of the most impressive speaker series in its history. A university-sponsored lecture series brought out hundreds to The New School Auditorium on West 12th Street — now Tishman Auditorium — to hear 15 of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the era.

For the price of tuition — $40 for non-degree students — students could attend the two-credit class and hear some of the movement’s titans lecture and answer questions. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. opened the series on February 6, a little more than five months after his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, and only four days before the Civil Rights Act passed the House of Representatives. King was followed in the series by notables who included NAACP head Roy Wilkins; actor and activist Ossie Davis; socialist Bayard Rustin; Robert Weaver, the first black U.S. cabinet secretary; and James Farmer, co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, as well as nine other scholars, organizers and activists.

But in time the talks — collectively known as The American Race Crisis Lecture Series — were forgotten, and the reel-to-reel recordings made of the seminars were locked away in an archive, their existence recorded in inventories but long since lost to history. After nearly half a century, a small collection of the tapes has surfaced, the result of a year-long effort by students, faculty and archivists.

A few of the tapes, including a portion of King’s address on February 6, have been digitized. The tapes, which Professor David Levering Lewis, one of the foremost scholars of African American history, calls “a really felicitous find,” provide the only known record of a seminal moment in both the history of the civil rights movement and the history of The New School.

****

When New School for Social Research doctoral candidate Chris Crews started to do research for a presentation on the politics of desegregation in New York City in the 1960’s, he found a press release from The New School’s communication and external affairs office — the kind most students look over and discard. A photograph caught Crews’s eye, a speaker at the podium in the university’s distinctive Tishman Auditorium.

“That sure as hell looks like Dr. King,” Crews remembers thinking.

It was the start of a year-long effort involving individuals and resources from across the school. In late summer of 2011, Carmen Hendershott, a university librarian, located old copies of the New School Bulletin, an alumni newsletter, confirming King’s appearance at the school.

But traces of the talks had seemingly vanished.

A search for materials relating to the seminar ensued. Last fall, the prize emerged: in a section of Fogelman library’s archives, a box of reel-to-reel tapes — one labeled with the the phrase “MLK Part 2.”

But with the tapes found, there was no money in the library’s budget to attempt to recover or digitize the tapes. Only after Crews, the treasurer of the University Student Senate, secured $800 from that body last September, three and a half tapes were sent offsite for analog-to-digital conversion.

Nearly a year after Crews first saw the picture of King at the podium, the effort and time invested in locating and recovering the tapes has borne fruit. Three and a half of the lectures have been recovered, and are now available in high-quality audio online, thanks to the efforts of the Kellen Design Archives.

They include the entirety of the speech given by Roy Wilkins, then the recently-named executive director of the NAACP; Melvin Tumin, a white Princeton sociologist who spent much of his academic career studying race relations; and Charles Abrams, an urbanist who founded the New York City Housing Authority and who spoke at The New School about the issue of housing discrimination.

Among the tapes restored is half of King’s address. The recovered recording contains an excerpt of the Q&A session that followed King’s opening address, in which the civil rights leader candidly addresses the Black Muslim movement of Malcolm X, Lyndon Johnson’s intentions regarding the Civil Rights Act, and the perceived slowdown in the Civil Rights movement that followed the 1963 March on Washington.

The King Center in Atlanta told The New School Free Press that it could not find a transcript of the address, nor any record of it taking place. The digitized tape is perhaps the only surviving evidence of King’s speech that night.

****

NYU Professor David Levering Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian who authored the first academic biography of King in 1970, called the trove of tapes “really quite a find,” especially the King tape, which, “because of the timing of the questions he’s responding to, has a more distinctive importance to it.”

The American Race Crisis Lecture Series was held over several months of dramatic change in the direction of the civil rights movement. As such, the New School tapes have considerable value as historical documents — and the King tape, in particular, has a “distinctive importance,” said Lewis.

King gave his lecture just four days before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House of Representatives, and spoke about Malcolm X a little more than a month before the Black Muslim leader went on his Hajj.

“He responds in a rather tactful and balanced way to the issue of the Black Muslim movement, and its just on the eve of Malcolm X’s visit to Mecca,” Lewis said. “It provides a kind of before and after perspective.”

But Lewis puts King’s remarks in the context of a much more significant change happening in the movement.

“We’re approaching the great divide that historians are wont to describe. We’re coming to the end of denouement, the lunch counter desegregation era, where the formal structure of apartheid is going to be demolished,” Lewis said. “And for the most part the drama had been regional, located in the former confederacy. And after the voting rights act of 1965, the drama moves north and west, and at that point the issues become more complex.”

In the tape, the moderator is heard to ask King if he considered “preferential treatment of the Negro… a solution in any way to the race problem.”

King gave a lengthy defense of what is now called affirmative action, invoking a conversation he had with then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the efforts of the Indian state to ameliorate the suffering of the Untouchables, the lowest members of the Indian caste system.

Lewis said the question catches King – and the movement – in a moment of transformation.

“When the demands turn from seating at lunch counters and towards economic empowerment, that sort of thing, [the movement] is going to be less supported by people across the nation,” he said. “We know that King is moving in the direction that will and does in fact radicalize a vast portion of the Civil Rights movement.”

****

But the other speakers are also caught at a particular moment in time.

Wilkins spoke days before the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board, and exhaustively addressed the pace of school desegregation in his speech, turning to attack the then-Republican Presidential Frontrunner Barry Goldwater.

Of particular interest is his accounting of W.E.B. DuBois’ forced departure from the NAACP, after DuBois drifted leftward in the early years of the Cold War. Lewis, whose two-volume biography of DuBois won two Pulitzers, said Wilkins’s answer records his difficult balancing act as head of the Civil Rights movements’ largest organization.

Wilkins was “the mouthpiece of a very cautious institution,” said Lewis. He was “certainly unfriendly to the left, and that’s an understatement. But it was a situational thing rather than a personal thing,” Lewis added, an accommodation necessary to maintain the NAACP’s veneer of respectability and moderation.

Abrams addressed contemporary political battles over California and New York City’s housing desegregation plan.

The New School’s Kellen Design Archives — the best-funded and equipped branch of the school’s decentralized archive system — have hosted the tapes, along with transcripts, for scholars and the public to peruse on their website. The tapes are a reminder that much of the schools’ vaunted history remains waiting to be rediscovered. New School faculty, archivists, and students hope that the remaining tapes from the lecture series will yet be discovered in the archives — including the remainder of King’s remarks. But they also acknowledge the grim reality: the resources are not available to hunt for them — at least not yet.

TEST

TEST