A Signed Photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., Taken at the Very Moment He Stepped Forward to Organize and Lead the Civil Rights Movement

Signed photographs of King are extremely rare, a search of public sale records going back over 40 years revealing just 2 other examples

Beginning with the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955-1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., spearheaded the Civil Rights movement, and his nonviolent measures spread throughout the South and elicited considerable sympathy among whites nationally. After serving in Montgomery for six years, King traveled to Atlanta to help organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and eventually moved to the city on January 20, 1960. King was the dominant force in the SCLC and it was his principle vehicle for action. He also co-pastored at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta with his father.

By the time he moved to Atlanta, the Civil Rights movement had gained strong momentum. On February 1, 1960, a new tactic was added to the peaceful activists’ strategy. Four black college students walked up to a whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked for coffee. When service was refused, the students sat patiently. Despite threats and intimidation, the students sat quietly and waited to be served. The Civil Rights sit-in was born. Sit-in organizers believed that if the violence were only on the part of the white community, the world would see the righteousness of their cause. Before the end of the school year, over 1500 black demonstrators were arrested. But their sacrifice brought results. Slowly, but surely, restaurants throughout the South began to abandon their policies of segregation.

King watched these developments throughout February and into March 1960, and decided to take action that would organize young Civil Rights advocates and set goals. In late March 1960, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference sent out a flyer signed by King, and paid $800 in expenses, to announce that it was sponsoring a conference – a Youth Leadership Meeting – to organize and discuss strategy. The flyer asked “Where do we go from here?”, and hoped the meeting would provide the answers. The meeting would take place April 15-17.

Spelman College often produced the most students participating in Civil Rights activity. King spoke to students at Spelman on April 10, 1960, just days before his Youth Leadership Meeting, encouraging them to action: “In the racial struggle, this is vitally important to our nation and to other nations: we must come out of the mountain of hatred and violence. This is why I am convinced that as we stand up for freedom and as we stand up for justice we must always struggle with the highest weapons of dignity and discipline. We must never use weapons of hatred and violence…”

On April 15, the Youth Leadership Meeting opened. Students from the North and the South came together during the meeting and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Early leaders included Stokely Carmichael and Fannie Lou Hamer. The Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) was a northern group of students led by James Farmer, which also endorsed direct action, and was brought into the fold. These groups became the grassroots organizers of future sit-ins at lunch counters, wade-ins at segregated swimming pools, and pray-ins at white-only churches. Thus both the SNCC and CORE got their start or set their direction at this meeting.

When the meeting opened, King made an important policy statement, one that would be followed by these and other Civil Rights organizations. He said, “Today the leaders of the sit-in movement are assembled here from ten states and some forty communities to evaluate these recent sit-ins and to chart future goals. They realize that they must now evolve a strategy for victory. Some elements which suggest themselves for discussion are: (1) The need for some type of continuing organization. Those who oppose justice are well organized. To win out the student movement must be organized. (2) The students must consider calling for a nation-wide campaign of “selective buying.” Such a program is a moral act. It is a moral necessity to select, to buy from these agencies, these stores, and businesses where one can buy with dignity and self respect. It is immoral to spend one’s money where one cannot be treated with respect. (3) The students must seriously consider training a group of volunteers who will willingly go to jail rather than pay bail or fines. This courageous willingness to go to jail may well be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers. We are in an era in which a prison term for a freedom struggle is a badge of honor. (4) The youth must take the freedom struggle into every community in the South without exception. The struggle must be spread into every nook and cranny. Inevitably this broadening of the struggle and the determination which it represents will arouse vocal and vigorous support and place pressures on the federal government that will compel its intervention. (5) The students will certainly want to delve deeper into the philosophy of nonviolence. It must be made palpably clear that resistance and nonviolence are not in themselves good. There is another element that must be present in our struggle that then makes our resistance and nonviolence truly meaningful. That element is reconciliation. Our ultimate end must be the creation of the beloved community. The tactics of nonviolence without the spirit of nonviolence may indeed become a new kind of violence.”

The Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) started in 1902 as a news report service for different Scripps-owned newspapers. It started selling content to non-Scripps owned newspapers in 1907, and by 1909, it became a more general syndicate, offering pictures and features as well. By 1930, NEA had about 700 client newspapers. It still exists today. Seeing King sponsoring the Youth Leadership Meeting, and expecting demand for his image, on April 2, 1960, one of its photographers took a photograph of King. An 7 by 9 inch photograph of King, with the backstamp of the NEA and date “Apr 2- 1960”, signed, perhaps at the meeting, “To Bill, With Best Wishes, Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Signed photographs of King are extremely rare. A search of public sale records going back over 40 years reveals just 2 other examples.