As President George Bush and his challenger, John Kerry, appeal to African American voters in the run-up to the Nov. 2 election, a recently unearthed recording reveals how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. regarded their influence in an earlier presidential contest.
According to a transcript to be released later this month by the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, King maintained that black voters were key to propelling U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy to the White House. "It is pretty conclusive now that the Negro played a decisive role in electing the president of the United States, and maybe for the first time we can see the power of the ballot and what the ballot can do," King said in a speech delivered Dec. 30, 1960, in Chattanooga, Tenn. "Now we must remind Mr. Kennedy that we helped him to get in the White House. We must remind Mr. Kennedy that we are expecting to use the whole weight of his office to remove the ugly weight of segregation from the shoulders of our nation." [more]
The transcript of King's speech is among the documents that the King Papers Project has assembled for possible inclusion in a forthcoming collection of King's sermons, speeches, correspondence and other writings. It will be published by the University of California Press in January 2005