LUCKY SEVERSON, guest anchor: For years, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s personal papers have been sitting in storage at Sotheby's auction house while his family, civil rights leaders and historians argued about what to do with them. Last week, a coalition of business and civic leaders in Atlanta worked out a $32 million deal to buy the collection and ultimately transfer it to King's alma mater, Morehouse College. Morehouse is promising wide public access to the papers. But several prominent historians are worried, because the King family is retaining copyright control and in the past has allowed only limited use. Before the sale, Sotheby's gave Kim Lawton a private glimpse of the collection.

KIM LAWTON: Many of the more than 7,000 items in the collection reveal the development of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s religious views and how those views shaped his civil rights work. Sotheby's curator Elizabeth Muller showed me King's earliest theological writing.

ELIZABETH MULLER (Curator, Sotheby's Auction House): What we're looking at are Dr. King's blue book examinations for a Bible class that he took at Morehouse College in 1946 and 1947, and it was because of this class that he decided to become a minister. He worked very hard on the course, as you can see, and he well deserved these "A"s.

LAWTON: But King didn't fare as well in his public speaking class in seminary.

Ms. MULLER: As we can see, in his third term, for public speaking he got a "C." So I think his professor was probably a very poor judge of his character and his abilities.

LAWTON: Numerous pieces are in King's own hand - notes where he started sermons on the backs of church bulletins or any scrap of paper he could find. There are also multiple drafts of some of his most famous speeches, including his I Have a Dream speech. Another interesting find - King's sermon boxes, where he filed all his sermons and kept an alphabetized index of quotes and ideas.

Ms. MULLER: Here we are looking at examples of all of those illustration cards which have quotations from various authors as well as quotations from the Bible, and these would be various ideas that he would incorporate into his sermons.

LAWTON: And they're all in alphabetical order?

Ms. MULLER: They're in alphabetical order, yes.

LAWTON: So he's giving a talk or sermon on evil, and he goes to E?

Ms. MULLER: E for evil, exactly.