“The birth of a new age. The birth of a new age.”
You’re listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Addressing the National Negro Funeral Directors Association in August of 1956. You’re on the Sound Beat.
“Carlton Stevens was an engineer and not an audio engineer but as we understand it a metallurgical engineer. He kind of took it upon himself to say, to recognize, that this is going to be a speech worth recording.”
Daniel Sarmiento is Curator, 20th century to present, at the Special Collections Research Center at the Syracuse University Libraries.
“He enlisted a local artist Sterling Hykes to design the jacket, but also his wife, Beatrice Stephens and a local librarian Carriebell Cook to write the biography on the jacket..just an interesting story about how the record itself came into existence.”
“Wherever there is the emergence of the new there is the tragic recalcitrance of the old. So what we experience today the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new age is being born. And an old age is passing away.”
Hear more episodes featuring “The Birth of a New Age” this week at soundbeat.org.
Sound beat is produced at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.