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Contract Formation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The great variety of contract theories since the Romans attests to the fact that the power of making promises has occupied the center of political thought over the centuries.
– Hannah ArendtGIFTS, BARGAINS, RELIANCE: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is among the most consequential figures in America’s civil rights movement. As an activist and leader, he corresponded with luminaries of his time and wrote passionately. His voluminous papers have historical significance, so valuable that many have bid hefty prices to buy them. Most spectacularly, in June 2006, King family members planned to auction the bulk of his papers to the highest bidder at Sotheby’s in New York City. Civic leaders in Atlanta, where King was born and raised, worried about the papers landing in private hands, never to be available for public reviewing or scholarly research. To avert that fate, distinguished civic-minded citizens, led by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, engineered a $32 million loan to a new foundation to buy the papers. The foundation deposited the papers for permanent public access with Atlanta’s Morehouse College, where King studied as an undergraduate.
The Morehouse College episode was not the first drama surrounding where King’s papers would reside, nor was it the most controversial. That distinction goes to an earlier batch of his papers that King deposited in the 1960s with Boston University, where he earned the PhD that made him “Dr. King.” A July 16, 1964 letter that King wrote and signed, and on which he followed up by delivering many papers, read, in part:
I name the Boston University Library the Repository of my correspondence, manuscripts and other papers…. It is my intention that after the end of each calendar year, [additional] files of materials … should be sent to Boston University. All papers and other objects which thus pass into the custody of Boston University remain my legal property until otherwise indicated….
I intend each year to indicate a portion of the materials deposited with Boston University to become the absolute property of Boston University as an outright gift from me, until all shall have been thus given to the University. In the event of my death, all such materials deposited with the University shall become from that date the absolute property of Boston University.
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- Contracts in the Real WorldStories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter, pp. 11 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012