NYT: Words That Shaped a Vision of Equality: King's Papers

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Words That Shaped a Vision of Equality: King's Papers
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: June 29, 2006


(Sotheby's)
Marked important by Dr. King: A telegram from the White House inviting him to attend the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

....They are in college exam booklets, on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria, on mimeographed handouts, on files of alphabetized index cards titled Abelard, Agape, Agnosticism and America. And they are sometimes reused, evolving from a quickly penned phrase on the back of a typescript — "Today the whirlwinds of revolt are shaking our nation" — into something more resonant: "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

Such are the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., found in his sermons, letters, speeches and notes. And seeing so many of them together — displayed over 20,000 square feet at Sotheby's in New York — makes it possible to come in intimate contact with an extraordinary mind that shaped the civil rights movement and gave new texture to the American dream. These writings — selected from a 7,000-page cache of Dr. King's papers — create a chronicle of his life from 1946 until his assassination in 1968.

I don't know of another exhibition that has had this kind of serious, unsentimental, documentary force. It is not a museum show designed to tell a story or make a point. It is a collection of personal papers that were originally going to be auctioned tomorrow for what Sotheby's estimated would be $15 million to $30 million.

Then, last week, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Dr. King's alma mater, acquired the collection for an undisclosed sum. The auction was canceled....Elizabeth Muller, who worked on the collection for Sotheby's, said the project took nine years, and involved combing the house of Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, for scraps of paper, finding, most notably, Dr. King's "sermon box" with nearly 100 sermons in his hand, most from the 1950's. Each took about 15 hours to prepare; they provide the intellectual and rhetorical repertory — a set of ideas, phrases and allusions — that shaped his civil rights vision. The sermons have a remarkable sobriety, a kind of realistic skepticism, about human character....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/arts/29king.html?hp&ex=1151553600&en=db7d78435d1c8549&ei=5094&partner=homepage