Martin Luther Jr King

Sotheby's Holdings Inc. will auction manuscripts, papers and the personal library of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. after more than three years of trying to sell the collection privately to an institution. The auction house will offer the King collection in one lot, with a high estimate of $30 million. The sale of the 7,000-item collection is scheduled for June 30 in New York. King's four children are the sellers.

The flophouse bathtub James Earl Ray stood in to fatally shoot Martin Luther King Jr. has been sold on EBay to an online casino for $7,600, the tub's owner said. The Golden Palace Casino had the winning bid, said D'Army Bailey, a Memphis judge, who owned the tub. Bailey said he'd been assured the casino would treat the tub "with sensitivity for its historical significance." Golden Palace has bought numerous historical or noteworthy artifacts for a traveling display.

Claudia Robertson took her grandson to the King Center on Tuesday afternoon to help him understand the sweeping historical significance of the civil rights movement -- and the specific contributions of Coretta Scott King. But a few hours earlier, she and her husband made a more intimate trip to the gravesite of King's iconic husband, bearing flowers as if they were cousins at a country funeral.

It was the deaths of two garbage collectors crushed by a municipal truck that launched the strike that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis. As tornadoes and thunderstorms circled the city, King delivered the speech that became his epitaph. "I may not get there with you," he told the crowd in the Mason Temple as the wind howled, "but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

Every year since the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., his widow, Coretta Scott King, has marked his birthday at the church where he delivered his first and last sermon. But this year, no one at Ebenezer Baptist Church is sure Coretta King -- or any of her four children -- will attend Monday.

George Lucas has donated $1 million toward building a memorial to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall in Washington, backers of the project announced. More than $40 million has been raised for the memorial, with $100 million needed to finish the project, organizers said. Congress authorized the memorial in 1996, and groundbreaking is scheduled for late next year on a 4-acre site near the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech Aug. 28, 1963.

The project to build a National Mall memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. is entering a pivotal phase, organizers said. If it cannot reach $67 million by January, the project will not have enough money to break ground as scheduled in 2006 and to keep to its projected 2008 opening. The King effort took in about $5 million in 2004. Total contributions stand at $35.5 million.

Someone whited out Martin Luther King Jr.'s face on a mural of the slain civil rights leader. Authorities are trying to determine if the election day vandalism is a hate crime or malicious mischief. The vandals left the rest of the mural intact. The mural had been untouched for five years outside the Martin Luther King Center, which served as a polling place and provides after-school programs to about 20 children each day.

When civic and religious leaders unveil a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. here today, they will do what dozens of others have done before them in towns large and small: They will praise King's quest for racial justice and celebrate their city's diversity. But take a closer look and a story of Stockton comes glinting off King's strapping bronze frame. That head twisted slightly to the left with a searching gaze, that's the Rev. Robert Williams.

To listen to him, you might not know that he was a pivotal figure during the 1960s civil rights struggle and a confidant of the late Martin Luther King Jr. You don't hear him volunteering that he was the one who invited King to support striking garbage workers in Memphis, where the civil rights leader was assassinated. You don't hear him divulging that he performed a wedding ceremony for King's convicted assassin, James Earl Ray. It's not that the Rev.