Project puts MLK’s papers online

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FOR USE AS DESIRED WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY STORIES ** FILE ** Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attends a news conference in Birmingham, Ala. May 9, 1963. (AP Photo/files)

Updated: February 17, 2012 8:22AM

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.

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.

There is a yellowed, handwritten draft of his “New Wine in New Bottles” sermon delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in January 1966. In it, King refers to the Book of Matthew to explain that new ideas work best in new times.

“What’s exciting is we’re not just bringing his story into perspective; we’re offering a really relevant point of view that can impact future generations,” Marano said.

Martin Luther King III, president of the King Center, said the work “is helping to preserve and extend my father’s important message to sustain the momentum of non-violent social change around the world.”

Gannett News Service