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In a dusty old attic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Stephon Tull was rummaging through dilapidated boxes left there by his father many years before, when he came across an interesting find.

In one of the battered boxes was an audio reel marked, “Dr. King interview, Dec. 21, 1960.”

“I’m a rummager, a packrat,” said Tull. “That piqued my interest.”

Tull acquired a reel-to-reel player and listened to what sounded like his father interviewing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about nonviolence and the civil rights movement.

“I could not believe what I was hearing,” said Tull.

Tull’s father had grown up in Tennessee during the years of racial tension, oppression, and the so-called “Jim Crow” segregation laws.

“He planned on writing a book on how bad things were back in that era,” said Tull, but he never finished it, “He fell ill, and is now in Hospice care.”

Tull’s father’s recorded his conversation with King three years before the civil rights leader delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, four years before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law and eight years before King was assassinated in Memphis, across the state from where Tull’s father lived.

In the interview, King can clearly be heard discussing his definition of nonviolence, and its importance in the civil rights movement.

“I would … say that it is a method which seeks to secure a moral end through moral means,” he said, “and it grows out of the whole concept of love, because if one is truly nonviolent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent.”

King continued, “I am convinced that when the history books are written in future years, historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage,” he said. “It represents struggle on the highest level of dignity and discipline.”

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King in 1957, said the tapes are a reminder of the work King started that is not finished.

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article courtesy of CNN.com

 

 

Martin Luther King Jr. Interview Found In Tennessee Attic  was originally published on praisecleveland.com

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