Preserving the Dream
D.C. Man's Collection Is a Tribute to the Civil Rights Leader and His Cause

By Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 21, 2008

Entering Joseph Young's Northeast Washington home is like stepping into a black history museum with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as the main attraction.

There are posters tacked to the wall leading to the second floor of his impeccably kept rowhouse. Alongside the prints are buttons and leaflets from the poor people's campaign that King led in the 1960s. In the living room is a framed copy of a speech that King delivered to the NAACP in June 1956 at the height of the historic Montgomery bus boycott.

Almost every inch of Young's home is adorned with newspapers, magazines, books, albums and other memorabilia meticulously displayed on tables, shelves and walls.

Today, as the nation pauses to pay tribute to King, who would have been 79 this month, Young, 51, will take in his collection and reflect on the legacy of the civil rights leader who was slain April 4, 1968, on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis as he prepared to lead a protest march.

"I was 12 when Dr. King was assassinated," said Young, a writer for the Washington Informer. "After his death, I started to listen to his speeches on the radio. The whole issue of war and violence as a means to solve issues just didn't seem right to me, so I began to study his view of nonviolence."

Young also began to seek out all things King. Much of what he has amassed over the past three decades is dedicated to King and the civil rights movement. Other pieces are about slavery and black history in general. Young estimates that he has about 500 pieces in his collection, which he values at about $150,000.

Denise Rolark Barnes, publisher of the Washington Informer, said she learned about Young's collection only this year after talking with her staff about how best to cover the holiday. Young, she said, told her he had a collection of King memorabilia. "I thought that we could take a few pictures," Barnes said. When the photographer returned, she said she was amazed. "I couldn't believe that he had such an immense collection."

Young, who favors dark ties and white button-down shirts similar to those worn by King and the ministers of his day, said his interest in black history began when he was a boy and intensified on a trip to Japan shortly after he graduated from high school in 1974. There, Young said, he visited victims of the Hiroshima bomb and learned of the effects of the atomic blasts of World War II. The violence, he thought, ran contrary to King's preaching about peace through nonviolent tactics.

In 1975, Young enrolled in Los Angeles City College. When he wasn't studying, he was scouring antique shops and black history events, looking for black history memorabilia. In the mid-1980s, he was invited to display his pieces at an African American museum in California. In 1987, Young packed up his budding collection and moved to the District, where he completed his education and became a teacher. But as the years wore on, he craved to exercise his passion for collecting, and in 2000, he left the classroom to work in art galleries and continue the hunt for King and black history memorabilia.

As Young tells it, the pieces in his collection are as interesting as they are different. One of his favorite pieces is an original pamphlet of the letter King wrote from the Birmingham jail to sympathetic white pastors in the spring of 1963.

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

Some of his other favorites include audiotapes of King, who at 35 was the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, along with speeches and books autographed by the likes of Coretta Scott King and other leaders of the civil rights movement; slavery freedom papers; and an original Harper's Weekly published in 1862 depicting a slave in shackles.

But it's the King items -- the tapes, typed speeches, buttons, posters and Life, Time and Ebony magazines with their dramatic pictures of King's face on the covers and African Americans enduring the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s on the inside pages -- that are dear to Young's heart. It is through collections like his, he said, that people learn about the past.

"I think it's important for young people to be connected to civil rights history," Young said, adding that many are not fully aware of the sacrifices that King and other blacks made. Young people, he said, need to know what the previous generation obtained through their struggles so that they won't take their freedom and prosperity for granted.

Robert Hall, associate director of the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum, said private collectors such as Young are not uncommon. What makes a collection special, he said, is its breadth.

"If someone went to the march on Washington in 1963 and they kept a sign, or if they visited a sermon by King, they may have kept the program," Hall said, adding that it is the collector who seeks out additional pieces that tell a story who lifts a collection.

Except for family, friends and co-workers, Young said he does not share his collection with many people. Instead, he keep his pieces private, in his home, where he can study them and think back to that turbulent time.

But one day, he would like to see his collection, especially his King items, in a black history museum.

"It really is touching to know that someone shares that much admiration for King," said Barnes, of the Informer. "I think that the older we get, we realize the importance of King and how important it is to pass on that legacy. Otherwise, how will our children know?"