The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled falling to his knees and weeping during his visit to a divided Jerusalem in 1959.

“It was on a beautiful afternoon a few weeks ago that we journeyed from our hotel in Beirut, Lebanon, to the airport to take a plane for Jerusalem,” King recalled during an Easter Sunday sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., where King was a young pastor. The sermon, delivered on March 29, 1959, was titled “A Walk Through the Holy Land.”

The sermon provides a rare firsthand glimpse into King’s early thoughts on conflicts in the Middle East. King offered unfiltered insight into his perspective on the region. In later years, he took care to speak with great caution on the subject of Arab-Israeli relations.

The sermon took place in the church where King had started leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott four years earlier. Two years earlier, King’s parsonage home in Montgomery had been bombed.

From the pulpit, King recalled that after about two hours of flying, passengers were told to fasten their seat belts. “We were beginning to descend, the descent for the airport in Jerusalem,” King said.

Then he paused.

“Now, I must say that when you say ‘landing in Jerusalem,’ you must qualify what you are saying and tell what part of Jerusalem,” King recalled. “That is because ... that ancient holy city has been divided and split up and partitioned. And before you can enter one side of the city, it must be clear that you will not enter the other, because one side is Jerusalem, Israel, the other side is Jerusalem, Jordan.”

At the time of King’s sermon, Jerusalem was a divided city. West Jerusalem had become part of Israel following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, while East Jerusalem was controlled by Jordan until Israel captured it in the 1967 war. Tensions were high.

“This was a strange feeling to go to the ancient city of God and see the tragedies of man’s hate and his evil, which causes him to fight and live in conflict,” King said.

After landing in East Jerusalem, he and his wife, civil rights leader Coretta Scott King, checked into a YMCA hotel.

The next morning, King recounted, they rose early, with plans to travel to Hebron, Bethlehem, Samaria, and on to Jericho, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River.

In Jerusalem, a guide took them to the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane and continued though narrow streets, eventually following the 14 Stations of the Cross, along the path taken by Jesus on his way to crucifixion.

“This is the way of sorrow,” King said, adding, “It is a walk that does something to the soul because you know that as you walk there you’re walking the way of sorrow that Christ walked.”

The journey shifted his emotional core. “This was a great world-shaking, transfiguring experience,” King said.

Over the next few years, King seemed to grow more careful when he spoke about the Middle East, measuring his words. Many scholars say King’s stance on the Israel-Palestinian conflict was complicated by a fine line he walked, aware of the public criticism he’d face if he appeared to take sides.

Documents, recordings, speeches and interviews show a civil rights leader, dedicated to a campaign of nonviolence, wrestling with what to say publicly about the enduring conflict in the Middle East. In public statements, King seemed to try to maintain focus on the raging war in Vietnam.

On May 15, 1967, King announced an upcoming trip to the Middle East. Less than a month later, Israel launched the 1967 war against Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

On June 18, in an interview with ABC, King was asked whether Israel should “give back the land she has taken in conflict without certain guarantees, such as security.”

King replied carefully: “Well, I think these guarantees should all be worked out by the United Nations. I would hope that all of the nations, and particularly the Soviet Union and the United States, and I would say France and Great Britain, these four powers can really determine how that situation is going. I think the Israelis will have to have access to the Gulf of Aqaba. I mean the very survival of Israel may well depend on access to not only the Suez Canal, but the Gulf and the Strait of Tiran. These things are very important. But I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.”

The following month, on a call with advisers that was recorded on an FBI wiretap, King expressed concern about his planned trip to Israel. “I’d run into the situation where I’m damned if I say this and I’m damned if I say that no matter what I’d say, and I’ve already faced enough criticism,” he said, adding, “I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt.”

On Sept. 22, King wrote to an official at El Al, the Israeli airline, canceling his trip. “It is with the deepest regret that I cancel my proposed pilgrimage to the Holy Land for this year, but the constant turmoil in the Middle East makes it extremely difficult to conduct a religious pilgrimage free of both political overtones and the fear of danger to the participants,” King wrote. “Actually, I am aware that the danger is almost nonexistent, but to the ordinary citizen who seldom goes abroad, the daily headlines of border clashes and propaganda statements produces a fear of danger which is insurmountable on the American scene.”

The following year, on April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.