Ex-Atlanta Mayor Seeks to Buy MLK Papers

Former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was a close aide to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and Mayor Shirley Franklin are working to raise enough money to buy King's personal papers and keep them in the city.

The collection, which includes papers, manuscripts and King's personal library, will be auctioned June 30 at Sotheby's in New York for the King family. Sotheby's expects it to sell for $15 million to $30 million.

"I've been talking to a lot of people," Young said. "There are a number of people trying to find ways to get a group together."

Emory University President Jim Wagner said the school would donate money for the bid and offer to house the documents.

Historians believe it is one of the greatest American archives of the 20th century in private hands and reveals a fuller portrait of King, the Nobel Prize winner who helped dismantle segregation.

The papers span 1946 to 1968, the year King was assassinated. They include 7,000 handwritten items, including his early Alabama sermons and a draft of his "I Have a Dream" speech, which he delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Atlanta is King's birthplace and where his wife, Coretta Scott King, raised their four children after his death. It also is where she founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and where King and his wife are entombed.