60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Wake Forest

On October 11, 1962, more than ten months before delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium in Wait Chapel and spoke to a crowd of 2,200.

This was not the first time a black person had spoken on the Wake Forest campus, but it was the first time a black man had been invited to speak after the College had officially integrated in August 1962.

King ended the speech at Wake Forest with the same passage that the world heard in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, calling for “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” to join hands while singing the Negro spiritual ending with “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”

Sixty years later, the public can experience this moment in Wake Forest University’s history. An audio recording and transcript of King’s speech are available by request from the digital archives at Z. Smith Reynolds library.

Read more about the discovery of the recording in this 2011 Wake Forest News story, “New audio, transcript of MLK speech.”