One artifact was a photo of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, two men who sought freedom for African Americans in their own ways. Another was a large pinback button from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People Campaign.
They were both relics from the life of King that I retrieved from the auction tables. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death today, I’ve gone through the archives and pulled out blog posts based on some of those items, as well as others pertaining to his life.
Here are some of the posts:
Poster of 1964 encounter between King and Malcolm X
No one seemed to want the framed poster of the smiling and jovial Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The auctioneer’s voice lingered on the call-out for bids, but no hands with numbers shot up.
Not even mine. This was a poster by an artist I was unfamiliar with, and besides, I hardly ever buy posters or reprints. It was part of a lot that included a framed photo and postage stamp of Malcolm X. I had just bought a similar framed photo of King and his postage stamp.
The auctioneer looked my way, almost pleading or maybe hoping that I’d take this lot off her hands since I had bought the King photo. And so I did.
The poster was a good likeness of both these lions of the civil rights movement, who in the early years of the 1960s were far apart in their philosophy of how African Americans should repel a government that treated them as inferior. Looking at the poster, signed “Haiyan” and dated 1998, you’d think they were the best of friends.
SCLC’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign button
“This is what you’ve been waiting for,” the auctioneer said directly to me. He was as much a regular at auctions as me – him working as both an auctioneer and a big spender on items he sells in Panama – and he knew my preferences.
He was flipping through a box lot of sheet music featuring African American images that he was about to hold up for bids. This was not the first time he’d called me out on an item for which I had waited – interminably, it seemed – to bid on. The last time it was a book of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
He was right that time but was off the mark this time. I had plenty of sheet music at home, I replied, and this grouping didn’t interest me. The box lot next to it did. On first glance, it was a nothing box of small junk trinkets that most buyers would ignore, but I had found something that was awash in African American history:
A pinback button from the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign conducted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The button bore black-and-white photos of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, leaders of the campaign.
1963 March on Washington record album
I hadn’t seen much on the auction-house website to entice me, but I went to the auction anyway, not expecting to find anything I’d want to take home.
The bidding had gotten started when I arrived, so I decided to check out some tables farther away from the action to make sure I hadn’t missed anything on the website. On a table just beyond me, a bright orange cover illuminated among the other pieces around it. I was instantly drawn to the color, but then I saw what was printed on the cover:
“We Shall Overcome” in bold black letters.
Now, I was definitely intrigued. So I moved closer to the item and saw an old photograph of protest signs, and black and white marchers on the cover. Then I read these words: “Documentary of the March on Washington. Recording Produced by the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership.”
I had hit a jackpot, but I wasn’t the only person who understood the significance of this 78-phonograph album. Someone had already left a bid on it, so I figured it would not be easy to get it at a price I could live with.
‘60s voting poster reminds us of sacrifices
The poster was folded in half, its aged back exposed and giving no hint of what ideas the other side held. It was lying on top of some contact sheets of black and white photos and a John Kennedy election sign.
I opened up the poster and saw the black and white image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his right arm outstretched, a U.S. flag in the foreground intentionally blurred to put the focus on him. The wording on the poster reminded African Americans of the need and responsibility to vote.
The poster looked to be straight from the 1960s, with brown tape marks on its outer edges indicating that it had once been hung. I found another copy on the website of the Library of Congress, which dated it between 1968 and 1980.
The value of a Martin Luther King Jr. signed letter
When I enter an auction house and see documents and papers, I immediately head to them. I love flipping through the old stuff to see what bit of history is embedded in them. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a letter signed by a famous person or an important document hidden between an innocuous stack of discarded papers.
An auctioneer at one of my regular spots has seen me looking through papers so often that he felt obliged to tell me about an auction of ephemera – documents and other papers – that was coming up in a few weeks.
So, I was naturally curious when I read that a rare-documents dealer called Raab Collection in Ardmore, PA, was selling a signed letter from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to a Philadelphia police officer who had been assigned to his security.
In the letter, King minimized concern for his own safety – although he was inundated with death threats both in the North and South – and thanked the officer for considering him important enough to be protected.
The May 21, 1965, typed letter was selling for $10,500.
Martin Luther King Jr. as advice columnist
As we stood in her basement, the woman wanted to show me a photo of her family in an old copy of Ebony magazine underneath some papers. I had seen one Ebony and an early Life magazine on a table, but glancing at the dates I had bypassed them.
Normally, I’d thumb through magazines looking for historically interesting articles, especially Ebony magazines because I was on the hunt for a particular story. It wasn’t a story exactly, but an advice column written by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1957 to 1958.
I had read a Washington Post story last year about the column. And I was immediately intrigued that the man who nonviolently shook a country out of its stubbornness to acknowledge its African American citizenry and ancestry would be right up there giving advice alongside Ann Landers and Dear Abby. (Both, by the way, had begun writing their columns a year or two earlier).
It seemed so ordinary for a man of his stature. But I was curious about what people asked of him and what he had to say.
King conquers fear and death in “Mountaintop”
The hotel room was vintage 1960s with its black rotary phone, flat hard bed and dime-store pictures on the wall. It was the setting for a Broadway play about the last night in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, TN.
I went to New York this week with several friends to see actors Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett perform superbly in a two-person one-act play without intermission. It didn’t need an intermission, because they were riveting. I don’t think any of us who filled most of the seats at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater wanted to be interrupted with a short bathroom break.
Several times when I looked over the audience, their eyes were glued to the actors on the stage as if they were watching a movie and didn’t want to miss anything.
The play – called “The Mountaintop” – doesn’t officially open until Oct. 13, so we saw a preview. It is a play about a man confronting his death, his fears and his legacy.
Anna Julia Cooper’s call for freedom on your US passport
Some friends and I will be taking a Mediterranean cruise later this year, so I had to make sure my passport was up to date. While flipping through it, I was reminded of a comment from a stamp collector I met during a “First-Day-of-Issue” dedication ceremony last year for the Richard Allen stamp.
Betty D. Sessions started collecting stamps 30 years ago and attends first-day ceremonies around the country. She mentioned a commemorative postage stamp featuring educator Anna Julia Cooper that was released in Washington, DC, in 2009.
“Look at your passport, page 25, you’ll see her words,” Sessions told me. And so I did.
There on page 26 and 27 was a quote by Cooper, along with images of the Statue of Liberty and a close-up of the stone tablet she holds in her hand with the date July 4, 1776, in roman numerals.
Hers was not the only quote. Each page of the passport bore one from names I was more familiar with, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Whereabouts of historical busts at 1st black shopping center
I came across the artist James M. Washington Jr. by chance.
I was searching for artwork by Philadelphia ceramicist Frances Serber among 1970s photographs of public art compiled by the Fairmount Park Art Association. That’s when I saw the first photo of a stone carving by Washington. It was a bust of African American astronomer and scientist Benjamin Banneker.
Curious, I flipped over the photo to see if there was any more information on the back, and there was. The bust was made by Washington and had been located in the Progress Plaza Shopping Center in Philadelphia. I was very familiar with the shopping center and the man who was instrumental in its founding, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, pastor of Zion Baptist Church, civil rights activist and apartheid slayer. But I never knew that the center had once been the site of granite busts of African American heroes.
There were six sculptures – Banneker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner.
I finally went to see the “Selma” movie, but I didn’t know what to expect. My friends had indicated that it moved slowly, and in my mind, that meant plodding. So I settled back in the darkened theater with a handful of people to catch a glimpse of one violent episode in American history.
The movie began very serenely, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preparing himself to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Then I watched as five little black girls chatted innocently about hair styles as they descended stairs, and for a fleeting moment I wondered if they were depicting the girls from the Birmingham church bombing. Then BOOM came a blast so loud and so violent that even as I anticipated it, it startled me and made me jump. The resulting image of bodies of the little girls lying among the rubbish was heartbreaking.
The artist who drew Time magazine’s 1957 MLK cover
The face of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loomed large on the cover of the Feb, 18, 1957, issue of Time magazine. It was a young strong face of the man who’d need all the strength he could muster for the immense task still awaiting him.
The magazine was one of two copies of the weekly Time tucked under several other disparate publications in a lot at auction recently. The other was a 1961 magazine with a cover drawing of Jacqueline Kennedy in her trademark white pearls, looking more businesswoman than First Lady.
King was mentioned in a four-page article titled “The South: Attack on the Conscience” in the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott that had ended successfully in 1956. The story was a profile of the “scholarly 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister … who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation’s most remarkable leaders of men.”
King, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, had spearheaded the campaign to desegregate the city buses.
Prints and stamps of famous African Americans
I know very little about stamps, and when they come up for auction I usually look the other way. Collecting them seems so complicated and insular. Those folks have a language, culture and knowledge base that’s hard to decipher.
I do have a few stamps, though, that I picked up at auction as part of someone else’s collection. They were Post-Office-issued single stamps and first-day covers of noted African Americans.
Recently when a group of African American prints with postmarked stamps came up for auction, I obviously had to check them out. The lot consisted of 12 prints drawn by Philadelphia artist Cal Massey, with a copyright year of 1971 and produced by the American Negro Commemorative Society.
The sepia-tone drawings were of Benjamin Banneker, Harriet Tubman, Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, William C. Handy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 369th Infantry Regiment/Hell Fighters, Paul Cuffe, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Matthew Alexander Henson.
