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Harry Belafonte has announced plans to auction off an original handwritten outline for Martin Luther King Jr.'s first speech condemning the Vietnam War.
Sotheby's will offer the document for sale Thursday along with two others: the scribbled notes for a speech King planned to deliver in Memphis, Tenn., three days after he was assassinated and a letter of condolence from President Lyndon B. Johnson to King's widow.
The Memphis notes, found in King's pocket after he was gunned down April 4, 1968, on the balcony of a Memphis motel, were given by Coretta Scott King to the late Stan Levison, a close friend who then gave them to Belafonte. He says he's decided to sale the documents because in his words, I am at the end of my life - I will be 82 shortly - and there are a lot of causes I believe in for which resources are not available, and there is a need to redistribute those resources."
The auction house put the overall pre-sale estimate for the three documents at $750,000 to $1.13 million, with the Vietnam speech valued at $500,000 to $800,000.
