THE FAMILY of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sells his image, speeches and name to the highest corporate bidder. This is disgusting and goes against everything that King stood for.
His second son, 41-year-old Dexter Scott King, leads his estate and has sold the rights to King's name and image to large corporations such as AOL Time Warner, Cingular Wireless and Alcatel. Alcatel uses images of King in their commercials for communications technology, where a digitally altered image has him speaking to an empty National Mall. What the family does not understand is that the legacy of King is not something that should be sold.
But the family does not simply try to sell the copyrighted King to large corporations. According to a Washington Post article, the King family has supported legislation to sell King's works to the Library of Congress for $20 million ("Entrepenuership or profiteering?," April 8). Material to the Library of Congress usually is donated.
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Perhaps the most despicable thing done by the King family was to block the efforts of the non-profit Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., of which King was a member, to build a memorial last year in his honor on the National Mall. The family wanted a fee to use King's image. Outrage from African-Americans became so large that Dexter King said the family supported the monument, but negotiations still are going on over another fee.
In 1995, Dexter King also toyed with the idea of building a theme park devoted to his father. Luckily the idea faded, but the family's greed and commercialism is appalling. Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis while planning a march for poor people. Now the family seeks to profit from items bearing King's name or image. King must be rolling over in his grave right now.
The King center in Atlanta, which Dexter King runs, is in a state of disrepair. The rugs are patched with duct tape and the bathrooms are disgusting. But Dexter King pays himself $149,000 a year while living 3,000 miles away in Malibu, California, which, according to the Washington Post, is far more than his mother Coretta Scott King ever paid herself when she ran the center.
Leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, such as the late James Farmer, have protested the exploitation of the King name and image by his family. Farmer, who co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that led the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s, told the Dallas Morning News in 1998, "I think the family is seeking profit. I don't think Martin would have approved."
Supporters of the King family claim they have a right to market the image and name of Martin Luther King Jr. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, told The Washington Post in the same article, "Quite frankly, I don't see how it's any different from the Disney corporation saying, 'We own Mickey Mouse and if you want Mickey Mouse on your pages you have to pay a fee.'"
King is not Mickey Mouse, however; he is considered by many to be one of the great men of the century in the United States. His image and words should not be put up for sale.
People close to Coretta Scott King say that she has protected the King name and image so much because of financial pressures. When King was assassinated he did not leave much money for his children.
That is not an excuse for Dexter King to support himself almost exclusively on milking his father's name over 30 years after his father's death. This shows greed and laziness rather than a means for providing for the King family.
The King family was put in a difficult position with the death of Martin Luther King Jr., a position that only they can understand. He was not a famous civil rights leader to them as much as he was a father and a husband. But in order to honor King's legacy properly, the family must allow the government and non-profit educational groups to have his works to allow his influence to continue for generations to come.
King died as a result of the ideas he believed in and the country owes him a lasting debt for everything he did to reduce segregation and racism. But problems still exist in this country, and there would be a no more fitting way for the King family to carry out his legacy than to share his works with the country so that his dream can live on.
(Harris Freier's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at hfreier@cavalierdaily.com.)
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