Essay 1950

From The New York Times…

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Another Dr. King Auction, and His Heirs Are Unhappy

By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA — Less than a year after a dramatic eleventh-hour deal by a coalition of civic leaders saved a large trove of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers and personal items from the auction block, a new cache of his documents has surfaced for sale to the highest bidder.

The owner of an Atlanta auction house, Paul Brown, said he was given the papers by an elderly Maryland woman who wished to remain anonymous. Mr. Brown said the woman told him she had accepted a large file folder of Dr. King’s letters, speeches and other writings to settle a debt she was owed by a radio station in Atlanta, where she once lived.

Mr. Brown said his auction house, Gallery 63, planned to put them up for bid on April 15.

Dr. King’s heirs say the papers belong to his estate, and they want the auction stopped.

“You can’t auction off what’s not yours,” Isaac Newton Farris, Dr. King’s nephew and the chief executive of the King Center in Atlanta, said Tuesday. “There could potentially be something improper or illegal about to happen.”

Mr. Farris said lawyers for the family were working to learn the woman’s identity so they could contact her to find out more about how she got the papers. He said that unless the woman had some sort of written transfer of ownership signed by Dr. King, the papers belonged to his family.

“The matter was only recently brought to the attention of the estate, which is looking into it and will proceed accordingly,” said Joe Beck, an intellectual-property lawyer in Atlanta representing the King family.

Last June, in a deal brokered by Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, the King family sold a collection of some 10,000 of Dr. King’s papers and personal items to a coalition of civic leaders for $32 million. A description of the papers on the gallery’s Web site, www.gallery63.net, says there are about 25 previously unknown documents, dated from July through September 1964, including speeches, position papers and interview requests. The papers’ existence was reported Tuesday in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Brown said that the documents had not been authenticated but that he had no doubt they were genuine.

“I’ve read every word,” he said. “It’s humbling to have them in your hands.”

While Mr. Brown said the market would determine the documents’ value, he guessed they would sell for as much as $300,000. He plans to display them starting on Monday.

Mr. Brown said his client, who is now in her 80s, was given the folder of Dr. King’s papers along with vinyl records and equipment from WERD, the first black-owned radio station in the United States.

“The station needed a few bucks to pay a bill or something,” Mr. Brown said. “She and her husband were friends with the station owners and loaned them some money.”

Mr. Brown said the woman’s husband worked as an engineer for WERD, which shared a building with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group started by Dr. King. WERD was sold to white owners in 1968.