Atlanta Library Prepares to House King Papers
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and other civic, education and business leaders struck a deal with King's family in June to buy the collection of the civil rights leader's writings and keep it in Atlanta just before it was to be auctioned off.
Morehouse, King's alma mater, will eventually own the papers and will control access to them even while they are housed at the Woodruff Library.
Archivists at Woodruff have cleared space in their climate-controlled vault and stocked up on gray acid-free archival boxes to hold the works. When the collection arrives, the archivists will spend hours painstakingly cataloging each of the estimated 7,000 notes, speeches and documents in a special intake process.
"We're ready," said Woodruff's head archivist Karen Jefferson, who dons a blue lab coat when she's at work. "We are so excited to have a part in preserving this history."
While some of the papers will be exhibited at the Atlanta History Center this fall, the collection will continue to be housed at Woodruff until a proper civil rights museum can be built, said Phillip Howard, Morehouse College's vice president for institutional advancement. No timetable has been set.
"We want the public to have access and to be able to study them," Howard said.
The Woodruff staff includes two archivists, two curators and two technical assistants trained in working with special collections. They expect to work closely with a special archivist that Morehouse will appoint later this week to oversee the massive collection.
The papers document King's life from 1946 until his death in 1968 and include early drafts of the "I Have A Dream" speech and his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," as well as nearly 100 handwritten sermons.
While the King collection might be the most expensive ever housed at Woodruff, its archivists are used to handling important documents with care. The library --- built in 1982 with a donation from philanthropist Robert Winship Woodruff, the long-time Coca-Cola leader --- is home to artifacts that range from postcards sent by Malcolm X to books autographed by Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. In all, the archival staff is charged with the cataloging and care of more than a million historical documents. The library has an annual budget of $7.2 million and is governed by its own board.
The library's chief executive officer, Loretta Parham, said plans were already in the works for an expansion of the facility before the acquisition of the King papers.
William Gray Potter, head librarian at the University of Georgia, said Woodruff is "very qualified" to house the papers.
"They have a good place to store them and trained archivists," Potter said. "It's a very good situation."
He cited their Halon fire protective service, which uses gas instead of water to douse any accidental blaze and protects documents from water damage. That system is more advanced than the one at UGA, which serves triple the number of students, he said.
Jefferson, the lead archivist at Woodruff, was inducted as a fellow in the Society of American Archivists in 2004, the highest honor in the field. She said she has received offers of help from other experts around the state and country.
Potter said librarians and others who are committed to preserving documents are not a competitive lot. "There are not a lot of turf battles," he said. "We want to make sure collections are cared for and stored properly."
But the scholars who want to use the documents for research are concerned about gaining access to the documents.
Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Parting the Waters" about the King years, is concerned that too many restrictions may be put on the papers' use. He fears that the secrecy surrounding terms of the sale means that the King family could still impose terms limiting scholars' access, despite assurances from the family that they will not.
Ralph E. Luker, an Atlanta historian who co-edited the first two volumes of "The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.," said he has "professional confidence" in Woodruff but worries about what will happen if Morehouse moves the documents somewhere else.
Luker has publicly complained about lack of access to Morehouse's collection of the papers of the college's former president, Benjamin E. Mays. "They do not have a good track record," Luker said.
Morehouse's Howard said the concerns are premature. Howard said the Mays papers Luker has complained about are still being processed by Morehouse's in-house archivist, Herman "Skip" Mason Jr., and will be made public this fall.
As for access to the King papers, Howard said, Morehouse is currently forming a national advisory committee of scholars like Clayborne Carson, editor of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, and Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard researcher, to help set up guidelines on how to manage and control the materials.
Claude Sitton, who covered the civil rights era for The New York Times, didn't question Woodruff's preparations. Sitton, who now lives in Oxford, Ga., said he had heard good things about the Atlanta University Center's archives.
But he said it's unfortunate that King's papers are being split up into multiple locations. He said he has a more fundamental question about housing the documents.
"The papers of a figure as important as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the history of this nation should be in Washington at the Smithsonian," he said.