March 8, 2002
Malcolm X Family Fights Auction of Papers
By EMILY EAKIN
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| Butterfields Auction House |
| A copy of the Koran said to contain notes by Malcolm X is part of a collection of documents that, if authenticated, hold great historical value. |
A cache of personal writings attributed to Malcolm X has turned up for auction in San Francisco and on eBay, infuriating members of his family who are trying to stop the sale and alarming scholars who worry that the material could disappear into private hands.
The documents, of incalculable historical value if authentic, are to be sold on March 20 in an auction to be held simultaneously at the San Francisco offices of Butterfields, an auction house owned by eBay, and on the Internet. They include a vast trove of letters, photographs, diaries, handwritten drafts of speeches and Malcolm X's personal Koran. Altogether, the materials amount to hundreds of pages and cover two decades of Malcolm X's life, until shortly before his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York on Feb. 21, 1965. The archive is expected to bring in a total of between $300,000 and $500,000.
Scholars who have read descriptions of the documents online say the archive, if genuine, is an astonishing find: more extensive than any other collection of Malcolm X's papers currently in the public domain, it also contains more personal material than many suspected existed. Although they haven't inspected the documents in person, they say they recognize Malcolm X's distinctive handwriting. Rodnell P. Collins, a nephew of Malcolm X, said he had looked at the auction catalog online and recognized most of the material. "I have seen the items in my uncle's hands and after his death," Mr. Collins said.
"The quantity of this is simply mind-boggling, said David Garrow, a civil rights historian at Emory University. "There are so few truly personal Malcolm documents in public archives that this apparent collection swamps the total corpus of all other materials several times over."
Abdul Alkalimat, director of Africana Studies at Toledo University in Ohio, agreed. "This collection is far and above the mother lode," he said.
In particular, scholars say, four spiral-bound notebooks, described in the auction catalog as journals kept by Malcolm X during two pilgrimages to Africa in 1964, could shed valuable new light on his tumultuous final year, when he broke with the Nation of Islam, renounced racial separatism, endorsed the possibility of a brotherhood between blacks and whites and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity to promote political justice for blacks of all faiths.
"This is likely to force the rewriting of all the books," said Mr. Alkalimat, who learned of the auction after his sister stumbled on information about it while surfing eBay two weeks ago. "At least on the whole question of what happened during the last year of his life," he added.
Joseph Fleming, a lawyer who represents several of Malcolm X's six daughters as well as the estate of his wife, Betty Shabazz, who died in 1997, said the family was appalled on "seeing their father's legacy up for auction." Notified by Butterfields of the sale, Mr. Fleming said he was pursuing a legal injunction in California to prevent it from taking place. His actions suggested there was little doubt that the documents are genuine.
With the documents about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, the family and scholars fear they may now never have a chance to examine them. Many research institutions can't afford to go head to head with wealthy Internet bidders, they say, and the fact that the material is being offered in 21 separate lots rather than as a single unit means it is bound to be widely dispersed and difficult to track. Reports of the scholars' concerns first appeared in The Library Journal Academic Newswire, a biweekly e-mail newsletter, last month.
Catherine Williamson, director of fine books and manuscripts at Butterfields, dismissed the scholars' objections as unfounded. "I deal every day with libraries and private collectors," she said. "I don't see a big gulf between the two. Every major institution in the country was founded on a collection put together by a private collector, and every responsible collector makes their material available to scholars." Nevertheless, she said, Butterfields was strongly considering adding an option to allow potential buyers to bid on the entire collection to avoid its dispersal.
There remains the mystery of where this apparent windfall comes from. The owner's identity and how he or she came by the documents is a secret. Levi Morgan, director of public relations at Butterfields, said that the owner was not a member of Malcolm X's family, but did confirm a report circulating among scholars that the owner had acquired the papers at an auction held by a self- storage center. (Such facilities frequently auction the contents of storage containers after renters default on payments.)
If the current owner "hadn't bought those items," Mr. Morgan added, "they would have ended up in a trash bin."
Malcolm X's surviving family members do not share this view. Mr. Fleming cited a 1999 attempt by Butterfields to sell a bloodstained, bullet-marked address book that had been in Malcolm X's jacket pocket when he was shot. The address book was withdrawn from auction after the family and Mr. Fleming raised questions about ownership. The book later turned out to have been stolen by a court clerk from an evidence safe at the Manhattan State Supreme Court.
Mr. Fleming said that he had traced the documents now being auctioned to a storage center in Florida, though he declined to say who had rented space there. In addition to trying to halt the auction, he said he was seeking to have the Florida sale voided.
Ms. Williamson acknowledged that the documents had not been evaluated by independent experts or put through a formal probate process. Nevertheless, she said, the auction house was confident that they had been legally acquired.
Determined to keep the materials together, Malcolm X scholars have lobbied the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, in the hopes that it would spring for the whole archive.
Howard Dodson, the center's director, said he had alerted Butterfields of his interest in acquiring the entire collection and was actively trying to gather the funds to purchase it. He said that either he or a representative of the center would be traveling to the West Coast to examine the material at a preview.
One way or another, Mr. Dodson seemed determined to succeed. "Schomburg will seek to acquire the collection by any means necessary," he said.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
