STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
On this Martin Luther King holiday, somebody is going to play you a clip of the "I Have A Dream" speech. It is well worth a listen, but there is a lot more to hear, so our colleagues pulled something else from the archives.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELEANOR FISCHER: Reverend King, were you born here in the South?
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: Yes. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and...
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We found a series of interviews with Eleanor Fischer that started in 1961. She was a reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who later worked for NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FISCHER: And your father is a pastor here. Is that true?
KING: Yes. He pastors the Ebenezer Baptist Church here in Atlanta.
INSKEEP: Now, this series of interviews was packed away for years until our member station WNYC brought them to light again in 2013.
MARTIN: The first conversation took place when King was 32 years old, but he still remembered first becoming aware of racism when he was 5. King asked his mother why the white kids in his Atlanta neighborhood stopped playing with him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KING: She tried to explain the best way she could, for a - to a child just 5 years old, the problems which Negroes confronted in the South as a result of the legacy of slavery and then segregation.
FISCHER: That must be a very difficult job for any mother. I wonder if any mother really can explain this to a child, especially a sensitive child.
KING: Well, it's almost impossible to thoroughly explain it. It seems to me that the only thing that the mother can do, the Negro mother, is to try from the beginning to instill in the child a sense of somebodinss. This was what my mother tried to do. She made it very clear that in spite of these conditions, you are as good as anybody else, and you must not feel that you are not. And this was her way of saying, you should not have an inferiority complex.
FISCHER: Did you develop a sense of inferiority?
KING: I don't think I ever felt a conscious sense of inferiority. I always felt, from the example and the words that my mother had given all along, that I was somebody.
INSKEEP: You hear the gravitas even in his early 30s. Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1961 interview with CBC reporter Eleanor Fischer. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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