Morehouse takes possession of King Papers

Several years ago, when the personal writings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were shipped from Coretta Scott King's basement to Sotheby's auction house in New York City, few suspected that they would ultimately end up only a few miles from where they started.

And where they belong, said Walter E. Massey, the president of King's alma mater, Morehouse College, now the official steward of one of the most important collections of writings in America.

"I feel very proud this happened while I was president, especially since I knew this was going to be my last year," said Massey, who is retiring at the end of this academic year. "This means a great deal to us. The papers being at Morehouse reinforces the college's reputation and visibility in audiences that already know about the college."

Monday, Massey and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin will officially announce the arrival of the $32 million collection and discuss plans on how the papers will be stored and displayed, as well as how they will be made available to scholars.

Fittingly, the meeting will be on the campus at the King Chapel and in the shadow of a statue of King, the college's most famous graduate.

Although Massey is retiring, Monday's announcements will mark the beginning of a new chapter at Morehouse and for the city. Morehouse automatically becomes a leading destination for King scholars. And, although plans are still on paper, the King papers could serve as a foundation for a proposed civil rights museum in Atlanta.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy at Morehouse College is second only to that of his mentor, the man who put the school on the map, Benjamin E. Mays.

"But Martin Luther King goes beyond the college. His shadow covers the way we see the world," said Massey. "Having said all of that, over the last decade, the full knowledge of Dr. King has been fully expressed here. "

Phillip Howard, Morehouse College's vice president for institutional advancement, said the 7,000 pages of documents arrived in boxes on an unmarked truck about three weeks ago.

As simple as that last step was, the road back to Atlanta was a difficult one for the papers. For more than three years the papers were housed at Sotheby's in New York. In the fall of 2003, the auction house announced it would sell the papers and hoped to attract a single institution to buy them. Although the papers had been appraised at $30 million, Sotheby's was looking to sell them for at least $20 million.

When no buyer surfaced, and shortly after the death of Coretta Scott King early this year, Sotheby's announced the papers would be auctioned off June 30 for about $30 million.

"Two weeks before the auction was to take place, we had been contacted by an anonymous donor who had expressed interest in helping Morehouse get the papers at auction," Massey said.

But days before the papers were to be sold at auction, a group led by Franklin purchased them through the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and tapped Morehouse to oversee them.

Ownership of the papers will remain with a subsidiary of the nonprofit until the Franklin group raises the $32 million needed to pay back the SunTrust Banks loan that made the purchase possible.

More than half of the money to repay the loan has been raised.

The papers are now being stored at the Robert W. Woodruff Library on the Atlanta University Center campus. Veteran archivist Brenda S. Banks, the former deputy director of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, has been named the chief archivist over the collection. An internal committee of library and Morehouse staff has been put together to oversee archival management of the collection.

The papers contain thousands of pages of King's handwritten text — from his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to a draft of his "I Have a Dream" speech during the 1963 march on Washington. The civil rights leader was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

The Morehouse collection, along with a collection of more than 80,000 pages of King's writings at Boston University, and a cache of papers still at the King Center represent the bulk of all of King's important writings.

Massey said a public display of the Morehouse papers will open at the Atlanta History Center on Jan. 15, on what would have been King's 78th birthday.

But Howard said the timetable for getting the papers prepared for public use — at least for scholars — will take a while longer.

"Imagine if you had 20 years of your personal papers in your basement. It would take you a while to get those together," Howard said. "Mrs. King did a good job of keeping all of this stuff, but the collection has to be put into shape. It has to be catalogued and inspected to make available for scholars."

Massey acknowledged that Morehouse is still learning how to care for the papers and initially did not have the expertise or facilities of some of the other institutions that were interested in obtaining the collection.

"But even the institutions that did not get the papers are happy that they ended up at Morehouse and have volunteered to help us," Massey said.

Massey said initial concerns that the papers would not be made available to scholars were premature and baffling.

"There is a King papers scholars' community that has made that a big topic of discussion," Massey said. "We realize that there has been controversy surrounding that, but the papers will be available. It is as simple as that."

In order to facilitate that process, Massey has put together a national advisory committee that includes Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Stanford's Clayborne Carson and Emory University's Rudolph Byrd. The committee will come up with recommendations on how the papers are to be accessed.

For his part, Massey said he will spend most of his last year as Morehouse's president helping Franklin raise money to repay the SunTrust Loan and raising money to maintain the collection on campus.

He said several foundations have already expressed interest in providing support for the "millions, not just hundreds of thousands," that Morehouse will need to maintain the collection, Massey said.

"This is a major responsibility," Massey said. "The eyes of the nation and the world are on us. But I couldn't be more proud. How many college presidents, in their last year, have the opportunity to end their tenure working on something like this?"