NORTH NEWTON, KAN. – On April 4, 1967 – exactly one year before he was assassinated – Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his most controversial speeches to a meeting of Clergy and Laymen Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City, calling the nation to account for what he saw as a misguided and deeply wrong war in Vietnam.

Because of the 50th anniversary of the King speech, planning for the 2010 King holiday celebration has been going on for some time. When a note went out in Bethel’s alumni e-newsletter asking if anyone had memorabilia from the 1960 speech, it jogged 1961 Bethel graduate Randy Harmison’s memory.

Harmison, a Newton native now retired in Erie after 26 years working as an engineer for IBM, has been interested in technology all his life. As a teenage employee of Graber’s Hardware, he bought a VM (Voice of Music) reel-to-reel tape recorder and used it to record whatever interested him, from radio broadcasts to live presentations. When Martin Luther King came to Bethel, Harmison, then a junior at the college, thought “this would be a good thing to archive,” so he recorded it.

When he received the note from Bethel almost 50 years later, Harmison remembered the recording. He knew he had not taped over it or thrown it away, but wasn’t sure where to find it. However, some rummaging in a storage barn on his property produced the tape, “sealed and intact.” His old VM recorder was long gone, so he couldn’t play the tape to make sure it was what the label said.

Harmison sent the tape to Sondra Bandy Koontz at Bethel, who consulted with Adam Akers in the audio-visual department and John Thiesen in the Mennonite Library and Archives. They determined that it was, in fact, a recording of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Bethel College on Jan. 21, 1960 – the only copy in any form known to exist of that speech.

In June, the tape went to The Cutting Corporation of Archival Sound Labs in Bethesda, Md., which specializes in restoring and preserving archival audio materials. By July, the contents had been transferred to CD. The speech will be played in Krehbiel Auditorium at 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 18, as the opening event in Bethel’s 2010 King holiday celebration.

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