What’s in MLK’s Briefcase?
Students investigate the power of objects at BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
“What’s in MLK’s briefcase?” It’s one of the top five questions school groups ask when they visit BU’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, a repository for materials from more than 2,000 individuals and organizations dating back to the Renaissance.
Safely sealed in boxes and cases with the Civil Rights icon’s briefcase are prosthetic Vulcan ears donated by Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy (Hon.’12), President Richard Nixon’s letter of resignation, a manuscript of V. C. Andrews’ gothic romance Flowers in the Attic, Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, and a page from the 15th-century Gutenberg Bible, the first book in the Western world printed with movable metal type.
Gotlieb, housed on the fifth floor of Mugar Memorial Library since 1966 and named after pioneering BU archivist Howard Gotlieb (Hon.’88) who passed away in 2005, is one of the few archives in the world that actively collects from living individuals.
“Archives are not just about history from 30, 40, 50 years ago,” says Ryan Hendrickson, the center’s assistant director for manuscripts. That’s why Massachusetts poet Miriam Levine (CAS’63, GRS’65) has been donating her letters, manuscripts, and journals to the Gotlieb since 2008, offering the BU community a glimpse into her life and methodology. “We distill scents, get an essence and preserve it,” she says. “So, when we open a perfume bottle, there’s the distillation that we then put on ourselves,” much like opening a box that holds someone’s life’s work and drawing knowledge from it.
Although the Gotlieb’s collection spans nine miles of shelves and includes a secured reading room for scholars from across the globe to consult its treasures, it might just be the University’s best kept secret. “Most students at BU have no idea we even exist,” says Christopher Gately, an exhibition, outreach, and art administrator.
But, every semester, around 10 CAS students are afforded exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the archives. As they process and catalog donations, mount exhibitions, and research the origins of obscure materials, the students forge personal connections with the people whose belongings they come to know so intimately. Here, three recent CAS interns share their favorite objects.
Shannyn Schack (CAS’20)
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.’S BRIEFCASE
So, what’s in MLK’s briefcase? As it turns out: nothing. What matters is not what’s inside the briefcase, but what the briefcase represents, Hendrickson says. The Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) collection—approximately 83,000 items—has always been the Gotlieb’s most frequently consulted, but in the last year the archivists have noted an upsurge in visitors.
“We’re in one of those moments when people are wondering why the world is the way it is and what they can do to make it a better place. People want to know what Martin Luther King, Jr. would do,” Hendrickson says.
In 1964, the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize, King “gave us material about the movement he was a part of,” like files from his work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality, as well as correspondence from notable activists like Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson. He also donated personal items, like family photos and college exams, and his diary about his 1962 arrest.
MLK’S Report Card
At the end of his study at BU in 1955, MLK began to question the meaning of his formal education. Ironically, he earned a C in formal logic.
COMIC BOOK
MLK’s personal copy of The Montgomery Story comic book, a how-to for peaceful protest based on the work of Gandhi.
“He wanted people to understand that, collectively, there are ways to take action,” Hendrickson says. “He called himself a ‘drum major for justice.’ Drum majors lead the band; they don’t play an instrument. The people who matter are the ones marching behind them.”
“If it weren’t for the strides he helped this country to take, I don’t know if I’d have had the opportunities I’ve had,” says Shannyn Schack (CAS’20), who helped organize and mount the Gotlieb’s 2018 exhibition on the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination. The history major, whose dream job is a museum curator, confesses she was awed by the opportunity to handle King’s belongings. “One time, I had to wipe down his briefcase because it was getting a little dusty. It felt forbidden,” says Schack, who was too reverential to open it (that’s not allowed, anyway). “This is the briefcase he took everywhere with him. I was hoping to get some kind of information through osmosis.”
Ethan David Pike (CAS’19)
FREDERICK BRISSON’S LETTERS
Danish-born theater and film producer Frederick Brisson often said he’d noticed actress Rosalind Russell during a voyage across the Atlantic in 1939 when her breakout film, The Women, was screened repeatedly on his ship. He thought, “I’m either going to kill that woman, or I’m going to marry her.” He convinced his friend Cary Grant, who was costarring with Russell in His Girl Friday, to introduce him to the actress—and Roz and Freddie (as they were known in Hollywood) married in 1941, with Grant as best man. The power couple were married for 35 years and left an indelible mark on the screen and stage. While Tony Award-winner Brisson brought hits like Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game to Broadway and film, Russell was the better known, lauded for roles like the free-wheeling titular character in 1958’s Auntie Mame. In 1973, she received a special Academy Award for her humanitarian work.
PORTRAITS OF A STAR
A portrait of Brisson’s wife, actress Rosalind Russell, one of 12 black and white headshots in the box.
A REALLY BAD PLAY
An audio reel that an aspiring playwright sent to Brisson for review. Brisson’s box includes a letter he wrote to the playwright stating that the play was “not in my opinion even a little ready for production. I find the book rather pompous and over-conceived; the lyrics are pretentious.”
The single 18-inch cardboard box of Brisson’s materials at the Gotlieb includes glossy portraits of Russell, as well as letters written by her; scripts by playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal; programs for Brisson’s productions; and letters he wrote to his mother in Denmark as she was dying. The letters particularly resonated with Ethan David Pike (CAS’19), an English and philosophy major who interned at the Gotlieb in preparation for a career in library science and archives. He processed and organized the contents of the box that had lain in storage since they were donated to the archives in 1984. (“That material came at a time when probably we didn’t have the staff to process it,” Hendrickson says. “The nice thing about having students like Ethan is that we can dig back into those materials.”) Pike says, “There is something very raw and moving about reading the letters between a son and his family during a time like that.”
Amanda Troendle (CAS’18)
MIRIAM LEVINE’S JOURNALS
“I’m not a super famous person,” says Miriam Levine, author of three poetry collections, a novel, a memoir, and A Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. While she may not be a household name, Levine believes the value of archives is not derived from celebrity; students and researchers may find her records significant because they offer a glimpse into a specific time and place—Massachusetts from 1969 to the present—and a personal history, the “texture of a life,” she says. “I would love people to come away with an understanding of how a writer is connected to other people, to society.”
Among her most personal donations: journals, dating back to 1969, which contain everything from drafts of poetry to ruminations on her marriage to grocery lists. She’d initially held onto her journals because “I’d become attached to them, just the way other people become attached to things like family photographs, clothes, mementoes of the past. Even though these objects are not alive—they don’t have legs and arms, and tails and fur—it’s as if life is in them.”
Through Levine’s journals, “you see how she does her work and how she thinks,” Hendrickson says. “One of the things students get excited about when they see the Gotlieb’s material is that they’re seeing it unfiltered. They’re seeing the evidence of the way people thought, the decisions they were making, the processes they were going through to get to a finished product,” whether that’s a poem or a social movement.
PERSONAL JOURNALS
The journals “date back to, I think, the late 1950s,” Levine says. “They’re literary, they’re personal, they’re political, with information about the Vietnam War and other things. At one point I thought I would burn them all because there are personal things in there about people I really care about. It was actually my husband, John, who encouraged me to send them to BU.”
“It was intimidating at first because there is just so much—to realize how much a person could write. This is her whole lifetime in written form,” says Amanda Troendle (CAS’18) who organized and logged the contents of three boxes of Levine’s journals. As a history and international relations major, Troendle normally studies government documents, “so it was a nice change of pace to read poetry. Something really personal,” she says. She was most struck by Levine’s “poetry that encapsulated a moment. She talks about sitting in her home and looking out the window and feeling abandonment and sorrow, being alone in the house. That’s something everybody can relate to.
“I think we go to archives because we like to look for similarities in someone else’s life,” she adds. “From MLK to Miriam Levine, it’s nice to see that they’re still people who have regular lives. They’re not just figures—they’re human beings. I think we like feeling close to other people, and learning about others makes us maybe learn a little bit about ourselves, too.”
5
Notable Objects
from the Gotlieb
FRED ASTAIRE’S TAP SHOES
Although Astaire dominated the silver screen, he wasn’t particularly tall, as his size 8 1/2 shoes attest. At 5’8″, he was filmed to look taller, even when dancing with Ginger Rogers (above), who was 5’5″. His letters to his first dance partner—his sister, Adele—are also part of the archive.
ROBIN WILLIAMS’ STAND-UP SCRIPTS
Williams’ scripts for his stand-up routines were composed of lists of words and phrases in large type, all capitalized. They served as prompts for improvisation so every show would be different.
LOVING LETTER FROM A PRESIDENT
A letter from Founding Father and future US president John Adams to his wife, Abigail, when he was away from home. Adams writes, “Sunday is not a Day of Rest to me, unless I am with my Family. Kiss my sweet little Nabby for me.”
FIRST PRINTED BOOK
A page from the Gutenberg Bible—the first book in the Western world printed with movable metal type. Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing process in the 1450s.
OSCAR SPEECH
Michael Douglas’ handwritten Best Actor acceptance speech for 1987’s Wall Street, in which he thanks his father, actor Kirk Douglas, who he says “never missed one of my college productions,” and also “helped me step out of his shadow” for which he’s “eternally grateful.”