MLK's 1957 Trip to Ghana, and the Sermon That Coined "Free at Last"

In February 1957, Kwame Nkrumah, soon to become independent Ghana’s first prime minister, invited Martin Luther King Jr. to attend the ceremonies marking the Gold Coast’s transition to nationhood. King and his wife Coretta arrived in Accra on March 4. At a reception there he crossed paths with US Vice President Richard Nixon, sent by the Eisenhower administration to represent Washington at the handover, an encounter between the two men years before their more famous political rivalry. King fell ill for several days during the visit but recovered in time for the ceremony itself.

At midnight on March 6, 1957, King stood in the crowd as Nkrumah addressed the nation for the first time as its leader, declaring, in King’s own recollection of the moment, “We are no longer a British colony, we are a free, sovereign people.” King wept. “Before I knew it, I started weeping,” he said afterward. “I was crying for joy.” He and Coretta also met privately with Nkrumah and with the Anglican anti-apartheid activist Michael Scott during their week in Ghana before leaving Accra on March 12, traveling on through Nigeria, Rome, Paris, and London before finally returning to the United States on March 26.

A month later, on April 7, 1957, King brought the experience directly into the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in a sermon titled “The Birth of a New Nation.” He described Ghana’s independence as a template for the movement he was leading at home: “This was the birth of a new nation. This was the breaking aloose from Egypt,” he told the congregation, casting Nkrumah’s independence struggle and the Montgomery bus boycott as expressions of the same demand, that “the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it.” It was in this sermon, describing what he had witnessed in Accra, that King first spoke publicly the words “Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I’m free at last,” the same refrain he would make famous six years later at the close of “I Have a Dream” during the 1963 March on Washington. The phrase that closes one of the most quoted speeches in American history had its first public airing not in Washington, but in a sermon about an African nation’s independence.