NEW YORK — An original handwritten outline for Martin Luther King Jr.’s first speech condemning the Vietnam War owned by his friend Harry Belafonte is going on the auction block this week.
Sotheby’s will offer the document for sale Thursday along with two others: the scribbled notes for a speech King planned to deliver in Memphis, Tenn., three days after he was assassinated and a letter of condolence from President Lyndon Johnson to King’s widow.
The auction house put the overall pre-sale estimate for the three documents at $750,000 to $1.13 million, with the Vietnam speech valued at $500,000 to $800,000.
Belafonte, a singer and actor, was an early disciple of King and his host on King’s visits to New York dating from the mid-1950s.
In a telephone interview, Belafonte said he was putting his documents up for sale because “I am at the end of my life — I will be 82 shortly — and there are a lot of causes I believe in for which resources are not available, and there is a need to redistribute those resources.”
The speech, titled “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” cited, along with military and civilian victims, a loss of moral principle, resources diverted from the fight for civil rights and the war’s effect in alienating other nations from the United States.
The Memphis notes, found in King’s pocket after he was gunned down April 4, 1968, on the balcony of a Memphis motel, were given by Coretta Scott King to the late Stan Levison, a close friend who then gave them to Belafonte.
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