Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — On April 4, 1967 — exactly one year before he was assassinated — Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City.

In the speech, King called the nation to account for the war in Vietnam. Vincent Harding, a former Mennonite service worker, drafted that speech. Harding will remember King, his friend and colleague, when he makes his third visit to Bethel College, this time for Bethel’s celebration of the national King holiday Jan. 18.

Harding first came to Bethel in 1984 to deliver the Menno Simons Lectures. In 1993 he was the commencement speaker. His presence at Bethel in 2010 will mark the 50-year anniversary of a speech King himself made in Memorial Hall, Jan. 21, 1960.

Along with Harding’s presentation in Memorial Hall at 7 p.m., Bethel’s King Day celebration will highlight the recent discovery of a recording of King’s 1960 speech.

When a note went out in Beth­el’s alumni e-newsletter asking if anyone had memorabilia from the 1960 speech, it jogged the memory of Randy Harmison, a 1961 Bethel graduate from Erie. As a teenager Harmison bought a reel-to-reel tape re­cord­er, which he used to record King’s speech. Fifty years later, he found the tape in a storage barn. Adam Akers in Bethel’s audio-visual department and John Thiesen in the Mennonite Library and Archives determined it was, in fact, a recording of King speaking at Bethel on Jan. 21, 1960 — the only copy known to exist.

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

From 2 to 4 p.m., also in Kreh­biel Auditorium, there will be a panel discussion with Bethel alumni who attended the speech or participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march in support of voting rights in 1965, or in the exchange program with Spelman College in Atlanta in the early ’60s. At 4 p.m. there will be a dedication ceremony for a plaque in Memorial Hall commemorating the 1960 speech.

The evening program will be emceed by Sammie Simmons of Newton and feature the Newton Community Children’s Choir and Harding’s keynote address.

Harding, a native of Harlem, N.Y., served two years in the U.S. Army, during which time he began to explore conscientious objector status. Later he served on the pastoral team at Woodlawn Mennonite Church in Chicago. In 1960 he moved with his wife, Rosemarie, to Atlanta, where they served with Mennonite Central Committee as representatives to the Southern Freedom Movement. Just around the corner from the King family, they opened Mennonite House, a home for Mennonite volunteers and a gathering place for the Southern Freedom Movement.

Harding is a professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He was a founder and the first director of what is now the King Center in Atlanta. Rosemarie Harding died in 2004.