Mary Scanlon of Phoenix was shopping at a Goodwill store and found a box of old reel-to-reel tapes that had been donated to the store by the late Phoenix civil rights leader Lincoln Ragsdale. Scanlon brought the tapes to Arizona State University where it was discovered that one of the reels included a recording of speech made at Arizona State University in 1964 by Martin Luther King Jr. The speech was given one month before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no other known recording of the speech.
The speech entitled, “Religious Witness for Human Dignity,” is now available online. It may be accessed here.
