MLK Jr.'s History Up For Sale

For years, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. has been trying to sell his papers, manuscripts, books, even his draft of the famous I have a dream speech.

But Congress deemed the price too high to go along with a plan to have the government buy it, so next week, the collection will be sold at auction by Sotheby's, the famous New York auction house.

It promises to be quite an event.

The pre-sale price for the treasure trove of some 10,000 documents and items – a lot which the King family has specified must stay together and go to a single bidder – has been set at $10 million to $30 million.

"This is the greatest archive from the 20th century in private hands in America today," says David Redden, vice chairman of the auction house.

The U.S. government, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason, paid President Richard Nixon's heirs $18 million for the Watergate tapes and other presidential materials.

Redden hopes a public institution will purchase the collection and put it on display.

"King speaks to us," says Redden, in awe of the artifacts temporarily in his care. "We look at that page with his handwriting on it and he's speaking to us."

The collection contains a lot of messages from the slain civil rights leader, including the draft of the 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech envisioning a future free of racial discrimination.

Look at the document and you'll see the words "I have a dream" don't appear – anywhere. That's because the historic phrase was an ad lib – taken from thoughts King had sketched out - but cut - from another speech a year earlier.

Among the artifacts are card files in which King kept thousands of thousands and quotes to be used as themes for his many sermons and speeches.

"I think these materials open the door to Martin Luther King as a human being," says Clayborne Carson, director of Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. "They illuminate his life."

There are many surprises in the collection, which includes his school transcript from Crozier Theological Seminary.

He was class valedictorian, as you might expect.

But there was one subject, says Redden, in which King constantly got Cs: public speaking.

"I think that tells you about the value of grades, actually," says Redden.

The auction is set for June 30th.