Library of Congress Offers to Buy M.L. King Papers for $20 Million
The Library of Congress has tentatively agreed with the family of Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire the civil rights leader’s personal papers for $20 million. The purchase of the 80,000 items, which has to be authorized by Congress, would be the most expensive in the library’s 200-year history.
Officials there have been interested in King’s papers since before his assassination in 1968. The collection is of drafts of speeches, correspondence and other jottings that King made in the last six years of his life. Negotiations became active this summer when Librarian of Congress James Billington reminded Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, of the library’s eagerness to acquire the King documents. Clyburn arranged a meeting in Atlanta with Dexter Scott King, head of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and one of the leader’s four children, and Coretta Scott King, his widow.
“Mr. Billington made his case,” Clyburn said Thursday, “and he said he understood that Sotheby’s auction house had appraised the documents at $30 million. The King family said right then they would make a $10 million gift to the country.” Sotheby’s did a private appraisal of the archive at the request of the King family.
In most cases, papers from such a prominent figure--from presidents to artists--would be given to a university or library. The papers to be acquired by the Library of Congress are now held at the King Center in Atlanta.
This archive is not the only collection of documents regarding King.
Not included in this deal is a collection of King’s papers at Boston University covering the years before 1961. It includes 83,000 papers that King deposited there in 1964 and 1965. That archive was the focus of an eight-year custody battle between Coretta Scott King and the university that ended in 1995. She argued unsuccessfully that her husband gave them to the university for temporary safekeeping, not ownership. Boston University was King’s alma mater; he earned a theology doctorate there.
Scholars also have access to extensive declassified FBI records concerning King at the National Archives.
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