Early Martin Luther King Jr. ‘I Have a Dream’ Recording Found

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington in 1963.

Before he delivered this amazing speech in Washington he fine-tuned his civil rights message before a much smaller audience in a North Carolina gym.

"It's not so much the message of a man," the Rev. William Barber, said Tuesday. "It's the message of a movement, which is why he kept delivering it.

Miller discovered the recording while researching "Origins of the Dream," his book exploring similarities between King's speeches and the poetry of Langston Hughes.

He learned through a newspaper story about a transcript of the speech in state archives. If there's a transcript, then there must be a recording, he thought.

He sent emails and made calls until he eventually heard back in the fall of 2013 from the Braswell Public Library in Rocky Mount, where staff said a box with the recording had mysteriously appeared on a desk one day. Handwriting on the box described it as a recording of King's speech, and said "please do not erase."

For more on this find click here.

Sources: NYdailynews.com