The History Librarian

Taylor Branch addresses the MLK sale in today’s AJC and, Ralph Luker notes, David Garrow has a piece in today’s Newsday (The Hidden Price of Hawking History) that reiterates much of what he has said before (actually, it looks like a verbatim re-publication of his LA Times piece of June 30), especially concerning the larger problem of people profiting off family manuscripts at the expense of the public.

UPDATE (7/6): Since yesterday’s post was so short, I thought I’d add to it a piece in today’s Fulton County Daily Report, Scholars: Rescue forgotten MLK papers, that discusses in more detail some of the access issues and particularly issues about the condition of the King Center archives. [link from Ralph Luker/Cliopatria]

Another day, another MLK story. This one is kind of weird, so I would have waited for Ralph Luker to address it, but apparently his computer is down. So here’s the deal: op-ed piece in the AJC today called King’s Papers Tell the Truth, written by Willy Siegel Leventhal, a former field staff member of the SCLC during MLK’s leadership of that organization. In this op-ed piece, Leventhal mentions that “Garrow’s recent criticism of the sale of the King papers is a reasonable gateway into a more serious discussion. Garrow claims that the King papers are not worth $32 million to the Atlanta community. Given that a Klimt portrait recently sold for $135 million [...], it is a wonder that the press even takes Garrow seriously.” Then, Mr. Leventhal criticizes David Garrow [and also Taylor Branch] for having written about MLK and relying heavily on FBI files for evidence, noting that Harris Wofford (former U.S. Senator for Pa. and former Civil Rights advisor to JFK) has found Garrow’s scholarship lacking because of his over-reliance on FBI files. Mr. Leventhal further notes:

Few reviewers have fact-checked the Garrow or Branch use of the FBI counterintelligence files — even after it had been acknowledged that certain FBI surveillance tapes had been spliced to alter the content and context and reports were rewritten to give Hoover what he wanted.

This seems like a fairly obvious, if intellectually suspect, rhetorical trick – Wofford’s criticism of Garrow’s scholarship has very little to do with Garrow’s criticism of the King papers auction. As we have seen, Garrow is concerned with access and the family’s penchant for hiding the very papers that Leventhal indicates will “tell the truth;” he is also concerned with the way that the King family has cherrypicked items from a larger archive (thus compromising the integrity of the archive), the deteriorating state of the King papers currently residing in the King Center, and the questionable legality of selling items from a collection for which the government had paid the King family to ensure public access. Instead of addressing the issues at hand, Mr. Leventhal has chosen instead to make ad hominem attacks on Mr. Garrow and his scholarship. Whether or not Garrow and Branch have written good books on King is irrelevant (though, quite frankly, part of the reason that they relied on FBI files was apparently because the King family wouldn’t give them access to the MLK papers), and Mr. Leventhal should be ashamed of his spurious attacks on them both.

[I'll just continue to update this post with new content rather than create new posts.  July update: I'll make new posts from now on.  I've added a new MLK Auction category to aid in finding these]
Some of you may have been following the story about the auction of Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers at Sotheby’s that was cancelled (link to Sotheby’s notice) because a coalition of Atlanta parties arranged to purchase it. I’ve been following the story pretty closely for various reasons and it has been fun hearing a lot of the speculative gossip that doesn’t always make it into the papers (the latest bit being that the papers, after being exhibited in a few places around Atlanta, will end up in the Robert Woodruff Library).

Anyway, for those wishing to read more, here are a list of links (I apologize in advance as much of what is out there is in newspapers that reserve their online content for subscribers; some of this can be got around by going to your nearest library):

the Sotheby’s catalog of the sale is still available online as a fairly large PDF (though those who have read it tell me the introductory material is not that great; however, the images of the items are worth it)

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria has taken quite an interest in the whole story: his first post links to a New York Sun article that raises questions about copyright and access; his second discusses possible legal problems with selling parts of the collection in the first place; on June 24th, Dr. Luker links to an AJC (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) article noting that the sale is off; on June 27th comes his fourth post wherein he links to, among other things, his op-ed piece in the June 27 AJC and to another, very interesting New York Sun piece; his latest post (from today) focuses on the unresolved access issues surrounding the King papers [here I probably should offer some explanation: the feeling in the scholarly community is that the King family is not friendly to researchers and that they are interested in their father's legacy only insofar as they can cash in on it; they are also unpopular for their mismanagement of the King Center which was supposed to be an archive of the Civil Rights Movement]

one of Dr. Luker’s colleagues at Cliopatria, Greg James Robinson, asks whether or not this cache of papers is actually important, touching on the question of whether or not the originals need to be consulted and reporting that much of this material is already in the hands of the King Papers Project at Stanford, which is headed by Clayborne Carson, who himself has made interesting comments about the sale:

In subsequent volumes of The Papers, we will publish the texts of other documents that will be auctioned. In the meantime, photocopies of many of these documents concerning King’s public role as the civil rights leader are available to researchers at the King Center’s archive. My colleagues and I were, of course, granted access to the originals when this was necessary for our work, and our volumes of The Papers will, in turn, provide researchers with facsimiles as well as transcripts of the most significant of these documents.

Thus, whatever the final disposition of the physical documents in the King collection at Sotheby’s, the historical information they contain will be available to future generations. Moreover, the King family has stipulated in the auction terms that the collection will remain intact and that its long-term preservation will be assured.

be sure to read the comments to Dr. Robinson’s post as he and Dr. Luker discuss access issues in more detail

Metroblogging Atlanta weighs in with “the mayor who saved mlk, jr’s papers“

National Public Radio has a few segments about the auction; the latest, “Morehouse College to Get MLK Collection,” has links to all of the earlier reports

for those who want to see a larger collection of articles (and be updated), I’ve got an RSS feed for a Yahoo! News Search (“mlk auction“); you can also look through what comes up with a Technorati search

Update (6/29): Article on fair use and the King collection in this morning’s AJC; see my post on one of the GSU Library blogs for more info.

Update (6/30): Ralph Luker lays out the case again for what is amiss with the sale of King’s papers:

Framing and hanging King’s manuscript notes on its walls, Sotheby’s described them as “works of art.” Mayors Franklin and Young apparently drank the auctioneer’s kool-aid and dream of their potential for display. Are your dissertation and lecture notes works of art? Can’t you just see some poor doctoral candidate schlepping from one museum’s “work of art” to another and hurriedly keying notes into her laptop?

He also links to an op-ed piece in today’s LA Times by David Garrow, who raises the issues that everyone should be talking about:

King Center archivists, working under federal grants obtained by Mrs. King in the 1970s and ’80s, organized the center’s documents and sequestered the valuable holographic items in a secure vault. According to the terms of those grants, Mrs. King’s private materials were supposed to join them as part of a widely accessible, permanent scholarly archive. But instead the King heirs decided to partner with Sotheby’s and auction the most valuable papers to the highest bidder. (The grants also may preclude the documents’ sale, but there is no sign that the federal agencies in question will pursue the matter.)

At this point, what’s most important is the fate of the hundreds of boxes of civil rights papers that remain at the King Center. They may not contain valuable autographs, but that does not make them any less historically significant. The richest single collection among those left behind is the papers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the 1960s’ major protest groups. King’s office files, and those of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he led, are still at the center, which is understaffed and in poor repair. It is imperative that Franklin use her influence to reunite these documents with the ones purchased through Sotheby’s.

Dr. Luker seconds the importance of the papers currently at the King Center and wonders why no one seems to remember that Atlanta already has a great number of King’s papers and also something that could be a civil rights museum:

King’s admirers once built a building, the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, to house the documents in its archive. They were to be the “cornerstone” in the country’s leading archive of the civil rights era. The bulk of the city’s King manuscripts continue to be there, in a building that the King Estate has allowed to deteriorate and wants to sell to the National Park Service. Several years ago, the Park Service estimated that it would take $11 million to restore the King Center to acceptable building standards. Meanwhile the roof leaks on the world’s largest collection of civil rights movement documents.