Cityscape
Best Reason to Look Before You Leap: The King Papers Sale
Staff Pick
The way politicians and the media congratulated each other when the city stepped in to pay $32 million for the papers of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., you’d have thunk someone had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. As details of the sale leaked out, however, the question arose whether Atlanta was snookered. The King family, for example, retained a lot of control over how the papers can be used and who’ll get access to them. And the deal requires that the papers be stored at Morehouse College, which currently lacks facilities to preserve the papers. Historians are aghast. King’s two leading biographers wrote columns for the AJC raising questions about the agreement. We’re not qualified to judge whether it was a good deal, but surely the city could have been more prudent in hammering out the details.
