Six months shy of his final day on earth, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at St. Joe’s about a gritty, waking reality for Black Americans: economic injustice.
King, who had been invited to campus by students as part of a university lecture series, spoke to a packed Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse (now Hagan Arena) Oct. 26, 1967. King was assassinated April 4, 1968.
Two cassette recordings of King’s speech are located in the St. Joe’s Archives Collection in the Drexel Library. The Archives has since converted the speech to CD-ROM and, more recently, MP3, but it can only be listened to in the library, per an agreement with King’s estate, according to Rachel Fager, head of resources management for Drexel Library.
A transcript of the speech, which was made a few years after King delivered the speech, also may only be viewed in the Archives.
To a crowd of over 1,500 students, faculty, staff and community members, King acknowledged hard-fought victories achieved in fighting segregation. But that was only part of his message.
“We have come a long, long way, but we still have a long, long way to go,” King cautioned the audience.
The second half of that journey, King said, was confronting the “spiritual and psychological violence” faced by Black Americans whose children attended segregated schools that were overcrowded and inadequate and who were forced to live in “substandard housing conditions.”
“Most of them do not have wall-to-wall carpet, but in so many instances, it’s wall-to-wall rats and roaches,” King said. “And this is the daily life of millions of the Black men and women, boys and girls of our nation.”
Among the central points in King’s speech was the idea that Black Americans were able to simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when they didn’t even have boots. King dispensed with this as a “cruel jest.”
King, critical of the Vietnam War, advocated instead for federal spending on programs that could help lift all people out of poverty, not just Black Americans.
“We can make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, yes, the resources in America,” King said.
During the Q&A following the speech, Gérard Férère, Ph.D., then a faculty member in the modern language department, asked if he could give King a copy of his testimony before Congress in favor of the Fair Housing Act of 1967. Originally from Haiti, Férère told King he had been trying for seven months to purchase a home for his family near the university and then elsewhere in Montgomery County.
“I wanted to give you an actual example right here in the room of the tragic situation of somebody who has the money and who has the education, not only the education, but the education to teach their children,” Férère told King. “So, it happened that this faculty member of St. Joseph’s College seems to be good enough to teach their children but not good enough to live next to them.”
