King’s Papers Will Be Housed at Morehouse College

An auction planned for this week of approximately 10,000 manuscripts and books belonging to Martin Luther King Jr. has been canceled. A group of people “representing the interests of Atlanta,” which was assembled by the city’s mayor Shirley Franklin, will pay the King family $32 million to keep the papers in the city. The collection will be housed at Morehouse College, the historically black college for men in Atlanta where King earned his bachelor’s degree.

The collection includes drafts of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the acceptance speech he gave when accepting the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. There are more than 7,000 handwritten documents in the collection.

Morehouse College will display some of the material for public viewing and the entire collection will be available for scholarly research.

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