Two prominent historians and a former archivist at the King Center in Atlanta charge that the auctioning on June 30 of Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers by Sotheby’s to a private collector could violate agreements that Coretta Scott King made with federal agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, when, in exchange for grant money, she pledged to make King’s papers widely available to scholars.

“Mrs. King had fully committed legally to making all of this material publicly available. Period,” said the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” David Garrow.

A historian and former co-editor of the King Papers Project, Ralph Luker, and the former director of the archives at the King Center, Louise Cook, along with Mr. Garrow raised the possibility that the auctioning of these materials by Sotheby’s could violate the conditions of two federal grants – one in 1977, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for the processing of King’s and the SCLC’s records, and a second in 1985, from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, to support the King Papers Project.

A spokesman for the King Center had no comment, and a request for comment from the King Estate went unanswered. Sotheby’s said when it was contacted yesterday evening it did not have enough time to respond.

When Coretta Scott King tried to close the King Papers at the center 25 years ago, Ms. Cook used the grant documents to force her to open them. “In 1981, when the papers had been processed, Mrs. King decided she did not want to make them accessible to scholars,” Ms. Cook said. ” I threatened to go to National Endowment, and I met with her attorney, and her attorney looked at the documentation and said yes” – she had to make them accessible.

Both Mr. Garrow and Ms. Cook recalled the conditions of the 1977 grant as requiring that these collections be made available to scholars in perpetuity. The 1977 grant conditions were not immediately available. But a copy of the 1985 grant application, which Ms. Cook provided to the Sun, says, “In 1977, the King Center received a four-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to process the nine major manuscript collections (including the King and the SCLC papers) so that they could be made available to researchers.”

The 1985 application quoted an NEH program officer, Jeffrey Field, as saying the endowment grant had been used to create a “permanent archives.”

In a letter accompanying the application, Coretta Scott King wrote: “The King Center currently operates a number of programs funded by the federal government and by private sources which require stringent reporting and monitoring procedures.” She said the Center “is as firmly committed to the concepts of academic freedom and scholarly integrity as [a] university.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy,Coretta Scott King wrote, “is passed on to future generations through the work being continued at the King Center and in the vast resource of manuscript materials which I am personally committed to disseminating as widely as possible.”

Ms. Cook said what has happened to the archives since then “reflects the disregard that the King Estate has had over the years for really allowing – not only allowing but championing – the scholarship that could have made use of the papers” at Mrs. King’s house “and the papers at the King Center.” Ms. Cook said she left the King Center in 1987 because of her frustration with the family’s “unwillingness to live up to the commitments that they had made to the Papers Project and the Archives Project.”

An NEH spokesman said the original NEH agreement was archived and not immediately retrievable, but he said “we do require all of our grantees to make the materials as available as possible.”

Some of the documents to be auctioned by Sotheby’s are writings of King’s that Coretta Scott King kept at her home,in what Ms. Cook and Mr. Garrow said was a violation of a commit ment to turn them over to the King Center and the King Papers Project. The rest are documents in King’s own hand that Mr. Garrow said had been “cherrypicked” from the King Center, because of their financial value.

Mr. Luker pointed out that the center was intended to be a permanent archive not only of King’s and the SCLC’s papers, but those of other civil rights leaders and organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinatin Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality. “By withdrawing the holograph documents from the SCLC and the Martin Luther King papers, the Estate has not lived up to that public understanding – that this was to be the major archive for the civil rights movement,” Mr. Luker said.