Atlanta and the Death of Civil Rights Scholarship

by Cliopatria

Ralph E. Luker co-edited the first two volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and is currently editing The Papers of Vernon Johns. He blogs at Cliopatria.

Atlanta continues to struggle to understand what it has done in retrieving the Martin Luther King manuscripts from Sotheby's auction. The terms of the agreement between the King Estate and the city's private lenders are secret, but David Garrow,"Civil Rights Era for Sale," Los Angeles Times, 30 June, points to some obvious problems.

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.

When the $32 million loan to purchase the King holograph documents from the King Estate is paid off, they and the 1000 book library retrieved from Sotheby's will be owned by King's alma mater, Morehouse College, and at least temporarily housed in the Atlanta University Center's Robert W. Woodruff Library. There, at least, qualified archivists will manage the collection in a facility that is yet underfunded and understaffed. Still, on the one hand, Morehouse President Walter Massey talks of a future possibility in which the College will erect its own archive to feature King's manuscripts as a showcase of college pride. For 20 years, however, the College has held 40 boxes of Benjamin Mays manuscripts under lock and key, denying access even to its own faculty member, Walter Fluker, who edits the Howard Thurman Papers. Clayborne Carson, editor of The Martin Luther King Papers, Benjamin Mays biographers, Vernon Burton and Randal Jelks, and I have all been denied access to the Mays papers. It doesn't bode well for Morehouse's stewardship of the King documents.

On the other hand, with tourist traffic foremost in mind, Atlanta's Mayor Shirley Franklin and former Mayor Andrew Young talk about building a new $100 million civil rights museum downtown, in which the King documents would be the" cornerstone." 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? If, like Evan Roberts and Caleb McDaniel, the hapless doctoral candidate tries to use a digital camera instead of a laptop, I'd guess the Estate-police will seize it, kick her out of the museum, and subsequently indicate a willingness to sell her camera back to her.

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S J - 7/7/2006

Ralph,
Thank you, yet again, for another interesting post.

-Sam
P.S. The links to Evan Roberts' and Caleb McDaniel's posts were especially interesting.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/6/2006

Mr. Thomas, When you speak of the "awful conditions in American black ghettoes" and are prepared to condemn the slum landlords, the inadequate schools, employment discrimination, the gun culture, and drug lords who and which create those conditions, we'll have something to discuss. If I thought that you actually supported the real accomplishments of the civil rights movement, I'd be more inclined to discuss them. Until then, you haven't a clue about who Andrew Young is and where one might legitimately criticize his record.

Frederick Thomas - 7/6/2006

Do you actually agree with this mess, and all of the estate greed politics that are behind it?

Do you support the awful conditions in American black ghettos?

If so to either, then your statement about not agreeing is an understatement, and I withraw my commendation to you for publicizing it.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/6/2006

I want to disassociate myself from this comment by Frederick Thomas, with whom I've rarely, if ever, agreed. Mr. Thomas is carelessly or, worse, deliberately inaccurate in some of what he says here. His attempt to link the sale of the King Papers in a chain of "shake down" operations by major African American figures speaks to his own racial problem.

Frederick Thomas - 7/6/2006

So, we see another aspect of Dr. King's civil rights efforts turned into a rotten shakedown by his family, demonsrrating how utterly corrupt his followers have become.

Jesse Jackson systematically shakes down businesses, Budweiser and Toyota for example, for "contributions," to avoid "boycotts." Al Sharpton tries to get everyone to forget his failed Towana Brawley shakedown, so he can move on to greater crimes, Kweisei M'fume and Andrew Young become rich by yelling "racism, racism" and an entire industry of former followers of Dr. King behaves daily like the gang of craven crooks they have become.

The actual situation of ghetto blacks has meantime deteriorated until they can be considered little more than ghetto bound, drugged-out, short-lived, crime threatened vote slaves of the left.

It would have been better for these lost souls if there had been no civil rights movement. They would have had their families, their work ethic, their health, their sobriety, a decent life expectancy, the presence of their fathers, optimism, and a higher standard of living, all of which were denied them under the hellish "Great Society," designed by social engineering leftists. They have been turned into mental infants.

I think that Atlanta, the foundations, and universities do ill to underwrite this gaggle of shakedown artists. Mr. Luker has done a service by reporting this mess fairly straight. It is a subject which needs airing if it is ever to be corrected.

John H. Lederer - 7/5/2006

I don't know the volume of documents, but 32 million seems excessive.

Just document scanning (no OCR, no metadata beyond a simple numeric id, no indexing etc.) of 8-1/2x11 runs in the neighborhood of $50,000 for 250,000 pages from a service bureau.

The addition of metadata such as indexes, etc. can up the costs a lot, but then the physical documents presumably don't have the metadata at this point.

At least in businesses, imaging of old files has become quite common, with many firms finding it cheaper than renting storage space in a warehouse somewhere.

Add in at least primitive metadata, storage, and serving it all over the web, and my off hand WAG would that we are talking a less than $500,000 project with monthly costs of perhaps $1500.

For scholars, of course, the economy would be sunstatial since they would no longer need to travel (or relocate for an extended period of study).

I have a somewhat different slant on the advanatges of availability than that of the researcher. I have been very impressed by the impact that availability of original material has in teaching.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/4/2006

I suspect that you'd have a lot of trouble raising $32 million to pay for public access to electronic documents. If, in fact, public money was used to digitize the documents in the first place, wouldn't there be some legal claim that there ought be no charge for access in any case?

John H. Lederer - 7/4/2006

On marginalia-- any image process will preserve the marginalia. It really is simply a matter of electronic storage capacity and bandwidth.

See, e.g. :

http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/lahun/ucarchivelahun/uc32036.gif
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/education/modules/gutenberg/invention/marginalia/

My neighbor up the road is a cardiologist who delivers diagnoses at 2:00 in the morning by having high resolution images sent over the internet to his home. It takes a hile for the full high resolution image to be received--but it is much faster for the patient than his heading in to the hospital.

Wouldn't the money more usefully be spent to eliminate the fees Stanford plans to charge?

The populist in me asserts that though it might be important for researchers to be able to handle the opriginals, it is more important that the public have free, easy, and convenient access -- over the web.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/4/2006

John, You may have missed this discussion. The point there is that many of the documents are being digitized at federal expense at Stanford, but they can be accessed only on a fee basis. Beyond that, there are certain kinds of documents that just don't digitize readily. How do you either digitize or publish in print, for that matter, the marginalia in King's 1000 book library? Yet, that marginalia may be among the best surviving evidence of King's thinking -- especially as he responds to the thought of others.

John H. Lederer - 7/4/2006

It seems to me the very large sums of money proposed to be spent to put the papers in this edifice or that would be misspent.

Why not a much smaller amount of money to digitize them and make them available on the web to anyone?

Shouldn't this be the routine treatment of historical documents?

Alonzo Hamby - 7/3/2006

Ralph and Oscar,

Ralph, thanks for an illuminating piece. When I read of the sale, I thought (a) Morehouse was the place for the King papers to be, and (b) Did Morehouse have the facilities and staff to handle them? You've confirmed my worst fears.

Oscar, I think the only significance here is a study in personal irresponsibility that I would be hard-pressed to match anywhere in the annals of American history.

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/30/2006

Ralph

Thanks for your continuing attention to this.

One thought: although some of the problems that you have noted are long-standing, is this also another symptom of the shift from the ideal of knowledge as a shared public resource with only limited status as a commodity to the ideal of knowledge as simply a commodity?