They include a vast trove of letters, photographs, diaries, handwritten drafts of speeches and Malcolm X's personal Koran.
Of equal significance, Mr. Dodson said, are drafts of speeches showing Malcolm's revisions in red ballpoint.
The papers also include official carbon copies, telegrams, internal memos, privately scrawled notes, drafts of speeches — providing an almost frenetic sense of personal intervention and decision.
During the party, Connaughton slipped into the study, where he discovered a bound volume of Robert F. Kennedy's notes, including handwritten drafts of speeches.
They routinely call him to gush about his proposals, consult with him on drafts of speeches and accompany him on visits to schools as far away as Cincinnati.
There are political cartoons, drafts of speeches and a few objects like a set of braces Roosevelt had worn on his paralyzed legs.
The files, some nearly transparent and thin as one-ply tissue paper, include handwritten drafts of speeches, lists of production quotas, song lyrics, government regulations and minutes of groups that studied Mao's words.
There are drafts of speeches that are mapped out like poetry, a sample of Churchill's amateur landscape painting, his Nobel Prize in Literature from 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory".
A group led by Mayor Franklin, working through a nonprofit organization, secured a loan for $32 million to buy the papers, which include handwritten notes and original drafts of speeches by Dr. King.
The writing process has grown so complex since then — with drafts of speeches created or vetted by the State Department or the Defense Department or however many departments have a stake in the subject — that it can easily result in written-by-committee documents.
