NEW YORK — Sotheby’s has withdrawn from auction three papers related to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. after his estate claimed the documents being sold by Harry Belafonte are estate property.
Belafonte himself asked that the papers be withdrawn from Thursday’s sale, said Lauren Gioia, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman. The auction house did not comment further.
The documents, including a handwritten draft of King’s first anti-Vietnam war speech in 1967, had a collective pre-sale estimate of $750,000 to $1.3 million.
“The King estate believes the documents being offered in Thursday’s auction are a part of the wrongly acquired collection,” Isaac Farris, chief executive of the King Center in Atlanta, said Wednesday.
Belafonte could not be reached for comment. He earlier told The Associated Press that the papers were given to him by King or his wife after the civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968.
The King estate said unnamed members of the singer’s family previously tried to “anonymously and secretly” sell other such documents through a Beverly Hills, Calif., auction house.
It said that the estate managed to block that sale and that the documents were returned to it, with an apology by the would-be sellers to Coretta Scott King. It did not cite a date for that incident.
