In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote the opening address for the first Berlin Jazz Festival, emphasizing the powerful role of the genre in the expression of the sorrows, struggles, and joys of Black Americans. While he was not present at the actual concert, King’s words appeared in the program for the four-day event. Günther Kieser designed both the official poster and the program. Here, Kieser brings King’s image into his annual design for the American Folk Blues Festival, commemorating his recent assassination with a photograph of the reverend in mid-speech. King’s physical position in the uppermost corner of the collage is intentional, partly covering a banjo-playing Jim Crow (a racist caricature common in minstrel theater). This juxtaposition may have been intended to point to the strides Black Americans had made during the civil rights movement or, alternatively, how little had changed in their treatment since the era of enslavement. Kieser’s compositions are often like small theater sets, filled with meaningful details. While the bands listed on clapboard strips at the lower left were notable, they are not the focus. Instead, the composition is dominated by a doll dressed like Harriet Tubman next to photographs of American rural poverty, a print of Abraham Lincoln, and a portion of a document dated 1862, the year Lincoln drafted his Emancipation Proclamation.