I had already read that article and concluded the man is trying to extort money from Harvard and is playing the race victim card.
If the alleged appraised value of the papers is really valid he’d have no problem getting a legitimate auction house to take them or another university to buy them. OTOH if the ‘appraisal’ is of dubious validity no wonder he has to resort to extortion.
Big deal, Louis Henry Gates (the one who mouthed off to the Cambridge Police and got arrested) is excited about the papers. If the papers are that valuable Christies would be knocking his door down. Harvard is not stupid. If the papers were more than old grocery lists and it filled a need in their museums they’d offer to pay more.
But if you want to believe that a guy from Chicago who buys up abandoned houses is going to burn some papers rather than auctioning them for $60,000 - go right ahead.
I believe the value is correct, if it is the genuine artifact of a Diploma of the first black grad of Harvard. I believe it will fetch a lot more than the $65K. As for threatening to burn it, well, I don’t think he was going to do it, and I don’t think he was trying to play “race victim.” He was really pissed off about the offer from Harvard. I would be too. I may have even threatened to burn it, just to piss them off.
I already said that, but go ahead, jump on my, I don’t care. No biggie. I just don’t like the way you were talking about other FReepers. I’m a little sensitive about that, these past couple days. I’ll get over it.