200,000 Martin Luther King Papers Go Online

What bet­ter way to cel­e­brate the birth­day of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.? Today, the King Cen­ter has made avail­able online 200,000 papers belong­ing to the civ­il rights leader — the first step to bring­ing more than one mil­lion doc­u­ments to the web. The doc­u­ments give you a good glimpse of Dr. King’s role as a schol­ar, father, pas­tor and cat­a­lyst for change. And, among the papers, you will find “speech­es, telegrams, scrib­bled notes, patient admo­ni­tions and urgent pleas.” Notable doc­u­ments worth vis­it­ing include King’s 1964 Nobel Prize Accep­tance Lec­ture, his Eulo­gy for the Four Girls Mur­dered in Birm­ing­ham (1963), a draft of his world-chang­ing “I Have a Dream” speech, and much more.

Under­writ­ten by JPMor­gan Chase, the archive lets you nav­i­gate through doc­u­ments by theme and by type of doc­u­ment. Or you can sim­ply use a ded­i­cat­ed search engine. Once you find a doc­u­ment of inter­est, you can zoom into the con­tent. But, I am not see­ing a way to scroll up and down the enlarged pages — some­thing that seri­ous­ly lim­its your abil­i­ty to read any giv­en text. If I’m miss­ing some­thing please let me know in the com­ments below …

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MLK’s Soar­ing “I Have a Dream” Speech, 1963

MLK’s Haunt­ing “I’ve Been to the Moun­tain­top” Speech, 1968