Scholarly Access Now Available to the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection

Historian Clayborne Carson has had a love affair with everything “King” for most of his life. For the past quarter century, he’s been able to mesh that love with his professional passion. Now, Carson will expand that passion even more as he joins the Morehouse faculty as the Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Professor and executive director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection.

As executive director of the more than 10,000-piece Collection, Carson will be responsible for mapping the vision and direction for the Collection, including developing programming for scholarly access and public education. One of his most important roles, however, will be to mentor future King scholars.

Though Carson's new responsibilities will be largely administrative, he also will teach a seminar at Morehouse on the "Life and Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr."

"When the College began looking for someone to manage oversight of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, we knew that the ideal candidate would be able to develop and implement a strategic plan for the Collection and raise the visibility in the local and national community,” said Robert M. Franklin, president of Morehouse. “We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Carson to the Morehouse College faculty. He is a preeminent King scholar and brings to Morehouse time-proven expertise and vitality around this project,” he said.

For Carson, coming to Morehouse to head the Collection is serendipitous. He has been working with King’s personal writings since 1985, when the late Coretta Scott King asked him to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of King, a 1948 graduate of Morehouse College.

“I’m honored by the opportunity to direct this historic project, which marks a new stage in my decades-long effort to ensure that all of King’s visionary ideas will be available for future generations,” Carson said.

Morehouse has been the steward of the Collection since 2006. It is the most comprehensive collection of King’s personal writings and books spanning from1946 to 1968 and includes thousands of King’s personal documents, notes, speeches and books from his personal library. Approximately 7,000 pieces of the Collection are handwritten items, including an early draft of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and nearly 100 handwritten sermons from the 1950s and 1960s, some of which have never been published or studied before.

Scholarly Access Now Available
After nearly two years of dedicated work, the Robert W. Woodruff Library (RWWL) has organized and digitized 75 percent of the world-class Collection. The RWWL has served as archival custodian of the Collection since September 2006.

“Preserving and providing access to this Collection has been an honor for the Woodruff Library staff,” said Loretta Parham, RWWL CEO & Director. “Bringing this portion of Dr. King’s legacy to the world was a task staff approached with much reverence and the utmost professionalism. I believe the results of their efforts reflect well on Morehouse College, the Atlanta University Center and the library and archival professions.”

The Woodruff archival staff has created a state-of-the art Finding Aid and Digital Collection using the Archivists’ Toolkit and OCLC Contentdm©. By using the new Finding Aid and Digital Collection, the serious researcher and casual scholar will have the ability to view descriptions of every manuscript item in the Morehouse King Collection from anywhere in the world.

“The sheer volume and detail within the finding aid entries far surpass the norm for a collection of comparable size and will be invaluable to the scholarly community and community at-large,” Parham said.

Further, the quality, quantity and detail of the images within the Morehouse Digital Collection available for on-site review at the Woodruff Library are unmatched by any other King collection, Parham said.

Central to the development of the Morehouse King Collection Finding Aid and Digital Collection was the creation of the MLK Jr. Archival Collaborative, a partnership between the RWWL, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (HGARC) at Boston University and Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr., Research & Education Institute. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the three institutions focused on the collaborative development of digital finding aids that could cross-reference related, similar or even identical items in the King collections housed at Woodruff and the HGARC.

Descriptions and terminology created through Stanford’s King Papers Project were instrumental in the completion of the Morehouse King Collection Finding Aid and a similar one in development at HGARC. Once both finding aids are complete, the Collaborative will move toward creating a one-of-a-kind Web interface to support the simultaneous, electronic search of multiple King collections.

History of the Collection
A group of Atlanta business and civic leaders, led by Mayor Shirley Franklin, raised $32 million to purchase the Collection just before it was to have gone up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2006. The deal brought the Collection home to Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement and King’s birthplace. It was the wishes of the King Estate that the Collection be donated to Morehouse, from which King graduated in 1948.

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Range Research, Genetic Work Spell Hope For Chestnut Comeback

Location, location, location. It’s the mantra of Realtors everywhere. But it may also be the reason a mighty tree long since gone from most of the Georgia landscape may get another chance to thrive.

Georgia Department of Natural Resources biologist Nathan Klaus made national headlines in 2006 after discovering a stand of American chestnut trees near President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Little White House at Warm Springs, Ga. Once a fairly dominant species, the majestic chestnut was virtually wiped out by a fast-spreading fungal blight that swept through Georgia in the 1920s.

A long-time supporter of efforts to bring back the nearly extinct tree, Klaus recently began working on research that could continue to help restore the chestnut to its native range.

A few months ago, Klaus began looking at land lottery maps and using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to plug in historic locations of American chestnuts. He hoped to develop a map showing the range and density of the trees in Georgia before the blight.

Researchers with The American Chestnut Foundation are working to develop blight-resistant chestnut sprouts, using an established program known as backcross breeding to create American chestnuts that are 1/16th Chinese chestnut, a hardier cousin. The goal is to have a tree that has enough of the Chinese species genes to resist blight but mostly is the tall, hardy American species once known and loved in the U.S.

Klaus’ research is important in helping determine the best place to plant the genetically strengthened trees. Old land lottery maps show where chestnut trees once were. Klaus scanned the paper maps into a computer-modeling program and has been able to determine which areas had a higher density of chestnuts trees and what species occurred with them.

The Georgia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation has been working for 25 years with the national organization’s backcross-breeding program. The chapter is now using pollen found in the wild to pollinate orchard-grown chestnuts. The hope is that using the information from Klaus’ work, the American chestnut will have a higher degree of success as the seeds or seedlings are brought back to the South for planting.

Pollinating trees in the wild can be a difficult process, according to Martin Cipollini, the chapter’s breeding program coordinator.

“It relatively easy to collect the pollen from wild trees in Georgia and use it to pollinate hybrid trees in orchards. This ‘father tree’ approach is easier than trying to pollinate flowers on wild trees that are often in rather inaccessible locations on steep slopes,” Cipollini said.

“In the past 25 years, The American Chestnut Foundation has made considerable progress toward breeding blight-resistant trees. But, its ultimate goal of reintroducing these trees to the wild in large numbers requires knowledge of proper habitat requirements and planting techniques.”

The American Chestnut Foundation, working with its state chapters, has created hundreds of lines of trees that are well advanced through the backcross-breeding process. In the next few years, thousands of “final” generation nuts will be ready for testing in the wild.

So far, the Georgia chapter has created three lines using surviving Georgia trees as “fathers.” These lines are in orchard test sites. This past summer, the chapter produced four more lines using Georgia trees. These will go into test orchards next spring. The chapter wants to produce at least 20 lines using different Georgia chestnuts and including genetic diversity from throughout the tree’s historical range in the state.

But the question remains, just where is that range?

“Where do they belong and where will they thrive today? What was their true historical range? Did they grow near creeks or up on ridges, and if so, in what type of soils? These are answers we need before we begin to restore this species,” said Klaus, a senior wildlife biologist with the DNR’s Wildlife Resources Division.

Klaus is using property line records from the early 1800s to develop mathematical models that look at factors such as slope, soil composition, landforms, geology and aspect and elevation. An accurate description of the tree’s native range is needed as most institutional knowledge has been gone for several generations and the anecdotal knowledge available is not always accurate or reliable. The hope is that these new models can be applied to modern maps to show the actual historic range for the trees.

For instance, Klaus says chestnuts were not everywhere in the mountains, although anecdotally it has been suggested the trees were dominant in the Blue Ridge. An elevation map will show where best to plant the trees since they have different relationships to elevation depending on the region.

“There was definitely a well-defined niche in the world for these trees,” Klaus said. “The tree’s range extended well down into the Coastal Pain. Many people do not realize that the trees were in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain regions of Georgia.”

Hybrid trees for blight resistance testing are being planted in orchard sites around the state, including Berry College and the Georgia Mountain Research & Education Center, operated by the University of Georgia.

Georgians can help conserve rare plants such as the American chestnut as well as animals not legally hunted, fished for or trapped and their habitats, through buying wildlife license plates featuring a bald eagle or a ruby-throated hummingbird. They can also donate to the Give Wildlife a Chance state income tax checkoff. Both programs are vital to the Nongame Conservation Section, which receives no state funds.

Visit www.georgiawildlife.com for more information, or call Nongame Conservation offices in Social Circle (770-761-3035), Forsyth (478-994-1438) or Brunswick (912-264-7218).

To find out more about the Georgia chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation, visit www.gatacf.org
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Arts Event Transforms Historic Castleberry Hill Neighborhood October 24

“Le Flash,” a night of art, light and sound
Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill district and Cleopas Park
7 p.m. to midnight Oct. 24

For one night, Georgia State artists will transform the streets of Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill district as part of “Le Flash,” an event coordinated by Welch School of Art and Design gallery director Cathy Byrd and local artist Stuart Keeler.

Performances and shows from percussionists, poets, filmmakers and fashion designers are among the more than 30 projects that will be featured as part of “Le Flash.” Highlights include an iron pour and the unveiling of a temporary fountain in Cleopas Park created by Paris-based artist Kristina Solomoukha.

“Stuart Keeler and I invented ‘Le Flash’ as a way to animate the neighborhood and synergize the relationship with the park,” Byrd said. “It’s a community project, and so many of Georgia State University’s staff, students and faculty members have become involved in making this happen.”

Byrd said she hopes that Solomoukha’s exhibit will help bring more Castleberry Hill residents to Cleopas Park, as it is currently an underused cultural space. “Le Flash” will be happening in collaboration with Castleberry Hill’s Fourth Friday Art Stroll, linking the historic district’s monthly event to the park.

“The energy’s there, the excitement’s there, and the community is waiting to share it,” Byrd said.

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