Today, the King Center unveiled the King Center Imaging Project, which offers thousands of documents from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other figures from the civil rights movement. According to the site, "There are nearly a million documents associated with the life of Martin Luther King Jr. These pages will present a more dynamic view than is often seen of Dr. King’s life and times. The documents reveal the scholar, the father, and the pastor. Through these papers we see the United States of America at one of its most vulnerable, most honest and perhaps most human moments in history."
"Speeches, telegrams, scribbled notes, patient admonitions and urgent pleas" from King, who was born on January 15, 1929 and killed on April 4, 1968, are among the documents in the collection. Here's a search for documents related to "New York", and here's a draft of a statement King made in response to an article in the New York Herald Tribune about communism and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:
WNYC remembered when King was honored by NYC and received the Medallion of Honor from Mayor Robert Wagner on December 12, 1964. Wagner said, "It is not the American Negroes who must prove their right to full equality, it is all Americans who must prove that they are equal to the responsibilities of a free society... Dr. King, with this historic symbol of our city goes the abiding admiration of all our citizens for you, for the movement you champion and for the ideals of brotherhood and peace which you so nobly advance."
Tonight, there's a free event at Symphony Space, Artists Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., starting at 6:30 p.m.
