Almost 58 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech on poverty and racism, “The Other America,” at Stanford. This month – on King’s actual birthday, Jan. 15 – the Stanford community commemorated the event with a screening and discussion of King’s speech. 

Projected on a 16-foot-wide movie screen constructed on stage in Memorial Church, the black-and-white film made the slain civil rights leader feel present to the roughly 200 students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered in the darkened nave for the early evening event. 

“King’s reflections are apropos as our students wrestle with a very divided time in American life,” said Lerone A. Martin, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford. Martin is also the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, professor of African & African American studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar.

The event was co-sponsored by the King Institute, Institute for Advancing Just Societies, Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, Department of African and African American Studies, and The Northern California Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Foundation.

A picture of two Americas 

The Rev. Sakena Young-Scaggs, senior associate dean for religious and spiritual life at Stanford and pastor of Memorial Church, welcomed attendees. 

“We are grateful this year to have this year's partners and sponsors bring the voice and heart of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King here to Memorial Church,” Young-Scaggs said. “As a child of the modern civil rights movement, for me, it's particularly poignant.” 

In his speech at Stanford, King described “two Americas,” one of which is “overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity.”

“But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America,” King said. “In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

King then took listeners through a history of the struggle for civil rights.

“What I'm trying to get across is that our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the question of racial justice and racial equality,” King said. “But over and over again at the same time, it made certain backward steps. And this has been the persistence of the so-called white backlash.”

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Anthony Chen / Ethography

An enduring message

After the screening, Philip Taubman, ’70, joined Professor Martin on stage for a short discussion about Dr. King’s visit. Taubman, an undergraduate at the time, accompanied King to and from the airport, later documenting their conversations in the Stanford Daily.

Taubman said he was struck by how much of King’s message is applicable today.

“It's kind of stunning to think about it,” Taubman said. “This was almost 60 years ago, and so many of the things that he described – the injustices, the inequalities – remain today.”

Taubman noted that King’s audience in 1967 was predominantly white: “Stanford University in those days was integrated, but barely. There were very few students of color.” 

This observation was echoed by another student from that era, who recalls King’s speech but was not at this year’s event. John Guillory, ’67, was one of a small number of Black students at Stanford at the time.

“I came from Oakland, California,” Guillory said. “I was familiar with what I’ll call the revolutionary language about Black freedom. What was different with Martin Luther King was his expressions. He was from the Deep South, and talking about the Black experience from that perspective was incredible. I’m not sure that a white audience, at least at Stanford, had ever heard that. They were hearing about the Black experience in a way that they would never hear from anybody else.”

An optimistic note

King’s 1967 speech ended on an optimistic note.

“I want to close by saying this afternoon that I still have faith in the future. And I still believe that these problems can be solved. And so I will not join anyone who will say that we still can't develop a coalition of conscience,” King said. “And I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn't stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will surely fail.”

Martin asked Taubman, a former member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, about his hopes for Stanford’s future, given King’s optimistic ending.

“I have always been an optimist about Stanford,” Taubman said. “I think Stanford is an institution born of the West, born of the frontier, and its spirit remains a spirit of the frontier. It's a university that's striving, that's self-improving, that's, as we all know, the source of tremendous innovation.”