Dear Diary,
In our collection development training we learned about the controversy surrounding the sale of Betty Shabazz' letters after her death. So this seemed of great importance:
June 9, 2006
King Archives Will Be Sold at Auction
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA, June 8 — After years of trying to sell the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s archives to a library or university, the King family will instead put them up for auction on June 30, Sotheby's announced Thursday.
The sale, expected to bring $15 million to $30 million, will take place exactly five months after the death of Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow, who was keenly interested in finding an institutional home for the papers.
The buyer will determine the future accessibility of the papers. Many were housed for years in the archives of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, but the papers considered the most interesting by scholars, including a trove of handwritten sermons, were found in Mrs. King's basement and have not been widely studied.
"I'm really on tenterhooks about it," said Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume biography of Dr. King. "Because it'll wind up in a library or it'll wind up dispersed."
David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's, said the papers would be sold as a single lot to help ensure that they find a public home. "It really is a challenge to the institutions of America to muster up and buy it," he said.
Mrs. King had tried in vain to sell the papers, first to the Library of Congress for $20 million, then to a variety of other institutions, Mr. Redden said. The Library of Congress sale fell through when questions were raised by lawmakers about the price. The papers were appraised at $30 million by Sotheby's in the late 1990's.
They include 7,000 items in Dr. King's own hand, including a draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an annotated copy of "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and a program from the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on which Dr. King scribbled notes for a speech about John F. Kennedy's assassination.
A blue spiral notebook contains a statement read to an Atlanta judge about why Dr. King chose to stay in jail after his arrest during a sit-in, and a note to the women arrested with him praising them for their faith in nonviolent methods, according to a news release from Sotheby's.
Also among the papers are letters and telegrams from presidents and civil rights leaders, an exam "blue book" from Morehouse College containing what is described as Dr. King's earliest surviving theological writing, and a collection of books with his handwritten scribbles and critiques.
The handwritten sermons and a collection of index cards reveal a less familiar side of Dr. King, that of clergyman and pastor to a flock, said Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
"What we can see from those kinds of materials is the way in which his religious identity shaped his identity as a civil rights leader," Dr. Carson said.
There is also a collection of ephemera, including flight coupons, receipts, and even, Mr. Redden said, the deposit slip for the check from the Nobel Foundation.
Mr. Redden said he had been through much of the collection with Mrs. King before her death, and that she had only to glance at a document to recall the circumstances of its creation.
Archivists and historians agreed that the collection was highly coveted. But some said the price was far out of reach.
"I would be stunned if they could command that sort of price, and I would be even more stunned if they command that from a library," said Brian Schottlaender, president of the Association of Research Libraries. But, he added: "How do you value the Martin Luther King papers? Good Lord, he was such a significant figure."
Kathleen E. Bethel, the African-American studies librarian at Northwestern University, agreed that Dr. King was a giant, even compared with other civil rights movement leaders. But she said that only the oldest and wealthiest institutions might hope to buy the papers, and that there was no obvious "angel" who might step forward to donate the money. "No one comes to mind," she said.
Mr. Redden countered that the papers were worth far more than $15 million, the low end of the expected range. For comparison, he said, some 450 pages of manuscripts by James Joyce were sold two years ago to an Irish library for more than $11 million.
The papers are owned by the King estate, not the King Center, a struggling nonprofit organization founded by Mrs. King that has received federal money over the years to catalog the papers and to make them available to scholars. The King Center houses the papers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King helped found.
Another group of about 83,000 documents — a third of Dr. King's personal letters and manuscripts — were donated to Boston University by Dr. King in 1964. Mrs. King tried unsuccessfully to get them back.
None of the four King children responded to requests for comment on the sale. Since the death of their mother, they have also explored the idea of selling the King Center to the National Park Service, which administers the historic district that includes the center, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the birth home of Dr. King.
