Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Link of the Week: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, our first "Link of the Week" is to Dr. King's Papers Project at Stanford University.

"The King Papers Project is a major research effort to assemble and disseminate historical information concerning Martin Luther King, Jr. and the social movements in which he participated.

Initiated by the Atlanta-based The King Center, the King Papers Project is one of only a few large-scale research ventures focusing on an African American. In 1985 the King Center's founder and president Coretta Scott King invited Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson to become the Project's director and senior editor. As a result of Dr. Carson's selection, the Project became a cooperative venture of Stanford University, the King Center, and the King Estate.

The King Papers Project's principal mission is to publish a definitive fourteen-volume edition of King's most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writings, and unpublished manuscripts. The published volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., have already influenced scholarship and become essential reference works. Building upon this research foundation, the Project also engages in other related educational activities. Using multimedia and computer technology to reach diverse audiences, it has greatly increased the documentary information about King's ideas and achievements that is available to popular as well as scholarly audiences."

Among the resources at the website are a short biography of Dr. King, a King Encyclopedia, a few Audio Files, and an Inventory of Papers that usually either links to the material, or identifies where it is published or housed.

Want the text to his most famous "I Have a Dream" speech? Yes, you can link to that here.

This is a very worthwhile resource for King studies, and for documents in the history of the civil rights movement.

One additional note: Sawyer Library does own the ongoing book series that represents the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well.

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