Martin Luther King papers go online
There is the handwritten draft, complete with cross-outs, of Martin Luther King’s acceptance speech for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. There are notes about the ending of King’s iconic I Have a Dream speech. And there are charming letters he received from children.
These and other King papers — 200,000 documents in all — will be available online for the first time today, as the nation marks Martin Luther King Day.
The King Center Imaging Project, financed and overseen by JPMorgan Chase, offers free public access to the papers at thekingcenter.org.
The project came about after Martin Luther King III contacted Chase about preserving the documents, said Chase’s Ali Marano, project facilitator. AT&T Business Solutions and EMC also contributed.
For the past nine months, 300 Chase staff members, college students and veterans hired by the company, and 100 volunteers from around the world have sorted through boxes of personal papers, documents and handwritten notes. They have taken digital images of each one, indexed them and stored them in acid-free containers with bar codes.
The papers, which had been stored at the King Center in Atlanta, include scraps of paper on which King expanded on his April 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham jail,” an open response to criticism from clergy that he was an outside agitator.