King family Bible will be auctioned

The old family Bible, stained and worn and encased in black leather, is inscribed simply "Alberta W. King, Feb. 23, 1962."

Once owned by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s mother, the holy book will be sold to the highest bidder Jan. 31 by a New York auction house.

Cox file photo (enlarge photo) The Bible of Alberta W. King, seen here with her husband Martin Luther King Sr. in 1971, will be sold Jan. 31.

The Bible includes Alberta King's notations of family births, weddings and deaths, including "Son Martin Luther, Jr., Apr. 4, 1968," according to a description on the auction house Web site.

No one knows exactly when or how the Bible wound up in Detroit at the home of Alberta King's sister-in-law, Woodie King Brown.

It might have been given to Brown after Alberta King was fatally shot in 1974 while playing the organ at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. Or maybe it was a decade later, when Martin Luther King Sr., known as "Daddy" King, died at age 84.

The auctioneer says the Bible's provenance is clear.

"It came from Woodie Brown's home in Detroit," said Bob Snyder, vice president of Cohasco Inc. Document Preservation Center in Yonkers, N.Y. "When she died, the family stopped paying taxes and the city of Detroit foreclosed on the property and held a municipal auction. And anybody was free to simply show up and wave their hand in the air."

Snyder declined to identify the current owner, citing privacy rights.

Alberta King's only surviving child, Christine King Farris, could not be reached for comment. But Farris' niece, Alveda King, said she was not surprised to learn of the Bible's existence.

"We all have Bibles, and we really read them," she said. "We don't have Bibles that sit on the coffee table."

Asked how she felt about the impending sale of her grandmother's Bible, she said, "There are other family things that have been auctioned over the years. I've always felt that the legacy had been commercialized, and that wasn't the intent."

The Bible is being sold in a lot that includes a 1978 newspaper article, a studio portrait of Alberta King and a handwritten list of friends — "Lillie & Howard King, Mae Bell Lowe, Carlotta ..." and hosiery needs — "5 pr. Off White, 3 Bone, 3 pr. Navy, Seamless Stretch @ 69¢."

On the Bible's endpaper, an elderly Woodie Brown shakily scrawled Proverbs 15:3 — "The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good."

Historian Ralph Luker, who interviewed Brown in 1989, said he believes Daddy King might have given the book to his older sister after his wife died.

"I don't know that, but they were close," he said. "By the time Daddy King died, [the King heirs] were already pretty well retaining and conserving family material."

Woodie Brown, a widow who had no children, died in 1992 at age 95.

Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, editor of the King Papers Project, notes that the Bible being offered for sale is unlike traditional Bibles that were passed down from one generation to the next.

King's mother only wrote Martin Luther King Jr.'s date of birth in the Bible after she acquired it, apparently in 1962.

"It's not quite as valuable as [it would have been] if it had been written in 1929, when Martin Luther King was born," Carson said.

However, Luker said he believes the Bible could offer historians, particularly King biographers, new insights.

"The Bible is of some value as an artifact, of course, and those pages on which Alberta made a record of family births, marriages and deaths would be of interest," he said. "It could conceivably add some information to what is already known."

The auction house will take bids by mail and phone, Snyder said.

"It will become live on eBay seven days before the 31st," he said. "So anyone is free to review the description and submit a bid, if they wish."

The opening bid is "half of the low estimate, which in this case would be half of $1,100," Snyder said.

He called the appraisal "a conservative current market estimate."

For more information, visit the Web site www.cohascodpc.com or call 914-476-8500.