Credit card receipts, correspondence with world leaders, and 1000-plus books. Those are just some of the things in Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, a repository of approximately 10,000 of King’s personal items that the college acquired in 2006. To learn more about the collection and what it tells about King, we spoke to Vicki Crawford, PhD, a professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse and the collection’s director for about 15 years. Here’s what she had to say…

Q: What are some of the most interesting items in the collection?

Our students get a really big kick out of looking at his transcript — and seeing that he was not a straight-A student, but an average student in college … I also think some of the rather mundane things are very interesting, like drafts of sermons or just little notes. Those kinds of things are simple, yet, you can see how just drafting a little note on a program might later become the text of a sermon … [You] get a sense of the ordinariness of his life — that he was like you and I. He was an ordinary person in one sense, but on the other hand, he was extraordinary by being so discerning and … being able to produce this oratory and written material that is so prophetic and still speaks to us today.

Q: Which object or document in the collection do you personally find most important or moving?

I’m really drawn to the lecture he gave when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s called “The Quest for Peace and Justice” … [and I find it to be] one of the most moving pieces in the collection because much of what he had to say over 50 years ago is still relevant today. He warns us about what he calls the triple evils: racism, materialism, militarism. He also tells us about the importance of shared humanity … And he speaks about — in that lecture and also in one of his final books — the interconnectedness of human beings. That really resonates with me, particularly given the work I do with young people and students. 

Q: Has anything you’ve learned from the collection surprised you?

That he could enjoy a good Southern meal — and that comes out in some of the correspondence with different people. I go back to him walking among the people, which also comes out in all kinds of correspondence — and yet, at the same time, being a global figure. Initially, I was surprised by his great interest in Africa. He closely followed what was going on in South Africa. On his way to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, he even stopped in London to deliver a speech about apartheid, speaking out against it. But he never got a chance to go because he could not get a visa … There’s a lot of complexity to who he was. King wrote an advice column for Ebony magazine in 1957, so people wrote asking all sorts of things and he would answer them … And he [also] had a radio show. I believe he delivered radio sermons on the first African American-owned radio station here in Atlanta, called WERD. 

Q: You’re currently doing a lot of work to expose teachers and educators to the collection. Why is that?

That’s real, important work considering what we’re facing now in this country with book bans. And with these attempts to constrain the teaching of African American history. [Working with teachers and students] introduces a younger generation to the life and times of King and a period in American history where segregation was legal and the law of the land … I also conduct oral history interviews with people who were there. We’ve got a number of those, including ones with King’s sister [Christine King Farris], Julian Bond, and Vincent Harding, PhD...

[The collection] is a lesson in participatory democracy: understand the vital role you play. We have agency in terms of shaping the world to come, and we must be reminded of that. So, a collection like this — which is full of all sorts of materials, like original sermons, speeches, letters, minutes of meetings, you name it — shows us what people were saying and what they were doing. And in a way, a textbook doesn’t do that.