Editorials

LOS ANGELES — A collection of writings attributed to Malcolm X has surfaced under mysterious circumstances and is scheduled for auction, despite protests from the late civil rights leader’s relatives, who claim ownership of the items. 

The potentially invaluable trove contains hundreds of photographs and documents spanning two decades, including handwritten speeches, a Quran Malcolm X owned, and four journals he kept during travels to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, the year before he was assassinated. 

The documents are “phenomenally valuable material,” said David Garrow, a civil rights historian at Emory University. “Compared to everything else that exists in terms of original Malcolm documents, the scope of this collection is maybe 25 times as great.” 

The journals, kept in small, spiral notebooks, are of particular importance because they cover the period when Malcolm X broke from the Nation of Islam and renounced racial separatism. 

“This is a major kind of transformative period in his life,” said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “The trips to Mecca and to Africa were major factors in his rethinking many of his previous perspectives on issues of race, religion, of politics, of virtually everything.” 

Many believe the documents are authentic, but question the circumstances of their appearance. Catherine Williamson, director of fine books and manuscripts at Butterfields, said she could not reveal the owner, but noted it was not a family member. She said the documents were acquired by the owner at an auction held by a self-storage center. 

Joseph Fleming, an attorney who represents several of Malcolm X’s six daughters and the estate of his wife, Betty Shabazz, said he traced the sale of the documents to a Florida storage center, and is seeking to void the sale.  

He also intends to seek an injunction in California to prevent the March 20 auction by Butterfields and eBay, which owns Butterfields. 

Fleming said family members believed the documents and photographs were in their possession, and only learned otherwise when they got word of the auction. He said he has discovered how the documents ended up in the Florida storage center, but declined to give specifics or say where they were previously stored, citing the pending legal action. 

He said he planned to file court papers in Florida and California as early as Monday. 

“This is their property,” he said. “When you lose a father and a mother the way they’ve lost their father and mother, you cling to those things that represent the legacy of your family.” 

Shabazz died in 1997 of burns sustained in a fire set by her grandson. 

The materials have been separated into 21 lots, and Garrow and others said they were concerned the documents could be divided and purchased by private collectors who might not make them available to researchers. 

In response to those concerns, Butterfields said Thursday it will also offer the documents as a single unit. 

“It would be a travesty if it were in fact auctioned off piece by piece and scattered to the four corners of the world,” Dodson said. “Once documents of this kind are in private hands you don’t even know where they are (and) for scholars to access them becomes a virtual impossibility.” 

Williamson said scholars’ concerns are unfounded. “I think that’s almost like a paranoid fear that if it’s sold to a private collector it will never surface again,” she said. 

Williamson said she initially divided the documents into separate groups because she believed it would make them more affordable, allowing more groups to participate in the auction. 

“If you put something out there with a really huge price tag there might just be a handful of people who can participate,” she said. “It was always my intention to market this collection to scholars and institutions.” 

Dodson said the Schomburg Center, one of the New York Public Library’s research libraries, is trying to raise funds to purchase all of the documents. 

Dodson and Garrow said many scholars support that effort. 

“I don’t think anybody in the scholarly community would want to see a bidding war that would simply result in unjust enrichment of whoever is selling these things,” Garrow said. “Everybody in the scholarly community would be happiest if the entire set of documents were to go to the Schomburg Center.” 

The materials were previewed for the media Thursday at Butterfields in Los Angeles, and will be available for public viewing there this weekend. They will be previewed at Butterfields in San Francisco next weekend, then are scheduled to be auctioned in San Francisco and on the Internet. 

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Eds: Minority Affairs Writer Deborah Kong contributed to this report.