A trip to Japan in the mid-1970s led Joseph Young to begin assembling an extensive collection of memorabilia chronicling Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1968.
“I was 18 years old when I started my collection,” says Mr. Young, a 47-year-old former D.C. school teacher. “After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, I traveled to Japan for six weeks as an exchange student and we dealt with questions about world peace.”
“While we were there, we visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and radiation hospitals where people were still suffering from the devastating effects of World War II. That’s when I became interested in the peace movement and Martin Luther King Jr.,” he says.
Mr. Young says he started his collection with one book by King — “Stride Toward Freedom.” Next, he spent a few bucks and bought a record album of some of King’s speeches.
His collection now consists of 500 pieces — newspapers, magazines, books, albums, posters, leaflets and buttons — all neatly categorized and preserved in plastic sheaths and valued at about $150,000.
“When I started my collection, there was no interest in African-American memorabilia. [The items] were available and inexpensive. Bookstores and antique shops were trying to move them to make space for other things. I got a jump on collecting,” Mr. Young says. “Today, black memorabilia is a hot commodity.”
The soft-spoken collector recalls a conversation years ago with an antiques dealer who said he was afraid to display black memorabilia and artifacts for fear the public would break them.
“Of course, things change and people saw the research value in the memorabilia,” he says.
One of his favorite pieces is a copy of the April 1963 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” which King wrote to white clergy sympathizers when he was imprisoned in Alabama during a protest.
Mr. Young says his copy is one of the original pamphlets distributed throughout the South.
“The letter was a definitive expression of his nonviolent philosophy. The jailers wouldn’t let him write. So his lawyer would give him paper and pens and then he would sneak King’s writings out and it was distributed throughout the South,” Mr. Young says.
Another favorite hangs on a wall in the living room of his Northeast apartment — a rare reprint of “The Montgomery Story,” a speech King delivered on June 27, 1956, to the NAACP while the historic bus boycott was in progress.
He says he came to own the speech by accident. “It just happened to be in the back of one of the books that I bought. It was five pages, stapled together and folded in half.”
Mr. Young, who has an 11-year-old daughter, is on a waiting list for a kidney transplant at the Washington Hospital Center.
He sometimes pulls out his issues of Life magazine that highlight the plights and triumphs of blacks during the civil rights era. He flips through the pages and re-reads the stories.
But he still makes time to scour the antique shops and bookstores around town.
Recently, he bought a newspaper he found in a used book shop in Bethesda. The banner story, of course, was about King.
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