Hearse That Carried MLK's Body For Sale For $2.5M

ATLANTA, GA — A hearse that carried the body of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is being sold online as an artifact "too important not to be displayed for posterity." The asking price is $2.5 million.

A private seller is offering the hearse — a 1966 Superior Royal Cadillac that carried King's body in Memphis, Tenn., before it was flown back to Atlanta — through a Los Angeles-based dealer who has also tried to sell the bullet-riddled cars in which rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were shot to death.

On a website devoted to selling the King hearse called PreservingTheDream.com, Zimet calls the car "a significant piece of history, and history deserves to be preserved for future generations."

(For more news like this, find your local Patch here. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here.)

"Some things are vitally important for the world to see, and this is simply too important to NOT be displayed for posterity," the site reads.

Zimet writes on the site that the hearse was bound for a public auction and frames the online sales effort as an attempt to have it wind up in a public museum, not a private collection.

"(I)t only made sense to attempt to preserve history in a rather unique way: by allowing for a philanthropic individual or corporation with the ability to do so – to secure this artifact for donation to a museum where it can be seen by millions of people," the site reads. "If this goal is reached, then this important artifact will commemorate, educate and inspire countless others for generations to come."

The site claims that a percentage of money raised by the sale will be donated to whichever museum gets it to help build an exhibit area.

The site also defends what some may call the morbid nature of making millions of dollars off of the civil rights leader's hearse.

"Nothing about civil rights is pretty," it says.

King was shot and killed April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The hearse in question was used to transport his body to the airport there.

Two services were held for King in Atlanta on April 9, the first a ceremony for friends and family at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was pastor, then a public funeral at Morehouse College. During a funeral procession between the two, King's casket was carried by a simple farm wagon drawn by two mules.

Zimet put the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in touch with the anonymous seller of the hearse, who said he came to own it about a year ago but wouldn't say what he paid for it.

"How do you put a price on a priceless item?" he said to the paper. "It is hard to come up with a dollar figure."

He said he hopes to sell it to someone who promises to put it in a museum, but is not putting it in a museum himself because he needs to recover his investment in the vehicle.

The website for the sale of the hearse can be found here.

The railing outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, is draped with black fabric and a new wreath on April 4, 2017 in Memphis, Tennessee. The site is where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin's bullet 49 years ago. (Photo by Mike Brown/Getty Images)