I lived in Atlanta in the ealry 1970s. Memories of Dr. King were still, of course, very fresh. I can't remember the man's name -- alas, I remember him in part because of his appearance (he had some congenital disorder that made him shorter than ordinary, and ramrod-straight). The man in question was one of the few white employees of SCLC. His job included editing audio tapes of speeches and sermons given by Dr. King, many of them in smalltown black churches across the South, and few of them well known to a general audience. In those days, there was a weekly radio show produced by SCLC, and Dr. King's sermons etc. was an important part of it.
I used to have friendly, but let us say spirited, discussions of religion with my friend the audiotape editor. He had been raised in rural Georgia in a hardcore fundie family, and did not have much patience with anything having to do with religion generally, and Protestant Christianity in particular. (More)
I was raised "up Nawth" (I am half Southern, and not sufficiently ashamed of it for some in these parts) with a much lighter hand, religiously speaking, and while I do not qualify as a fundie, and indeed am more high church, most conventional Christians would recognize my not-quite-toeing the line beliefs as placing me "within the fold."
Anyway, we used to hang out and drink beer, and my friend would play these tapes for me. Militant atheist though he was, and although he had heard all of these tapes before and was a white guy whose relationship to black church preachin' (content and style, both) was necessarily different than that of black believers in the churches where Martin spoke, he -- and I -- invariably got weepy when we heard those sermons, and the spirited response from the congregation.
Indeed, he allowed that such little doubt that he entertained concerning his atheism, and his general contempt for anything found within fifty yards of a church, was completely due to Dr. King.
Mainstream, prepackaged tgributes to Dr. King seldom have much to say about his career after the March on Washington and Selma. Integrating lunch counters was fine, even getting the vote for African-Americans in the South was OK (what the hell, now the blacks can be disenfranchised with SOFTWARE, no need to lynch them!) but TV passes over Martin's denunciation of the Vietnam war, and his increasingly radical positions on economic justice and the potentially dynamite advocacy of (gasp) uniting the struggles of poor blacks with those of other poor people -- well, that rates only a few hasty, embarrassed sentences.
If the truth be told, Martin sometimes directed that tape recorders be turned off when he gave his most radical talks to supporters. Even what he said "on the record," however, was stuff too incendiary for the 1960s (that'w why they whacked him, and if you think it was some lone cracker acting alone, why you probably believe the World Trade Center collapsed due to fires caused by jet fuel and that Lee Oswald killed JFK!)
Churchill's command of the language was unmatched, and they assure me that the Fuehrer moved millions with his ranting, even though I halfway understand German, 'dolf don't do it for me, rhetorically speaking.
But the virility, power and passion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was something I wish they coulda bottled, and given to his spiritual and political heirs. I'd pay a bunch just for a few drops of it. The man rates an A for content, but the potency of the delivery -- the voice, the strength, the cadence -- took Dr. King clean off the charts.
I wish that sermons and talks Dr. King gave AFTER 1965, or some compilation selected from things pertinent to our present-day struggles, were in wider circulation (if, indeed, they exist).