ATLANTA
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 78th birthday in January will feature a gift to the city: the first public viewing of more than 10,000 of his documents, notes and other personal items.
Pieces of the King Collection — from a term paper he wrote as a student at Atlanta’s Morehouse College to a draft of his “I Have A Dream” speech — will be on display at the Atlanta History Center.
This summer, Mayor Shirley Franklin led the effort to acquire the papers from the New York offices of Sotheby’s auction house, which had planned a public sale.
“The Martin Luther King Jr. Collection is home,” a beaming Franklin said Monday.
The collection includes handwritten versions of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the 1963 March on Washington, and his acceptance speech for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.
After years in the basement of the King family home, the documents, books and other items in the collection were moved to Sotheby’s nearly a decade ago. The auction house tried to sell the collection, but previous negotiations fell through. So Sotheby’s put the collection back on the market after King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, died in February.
