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Entrepreneurship or Profiteering?

By Darryl Fears

ATLANTA -- After the lights were dimmed in the elegant ballroom of
a
downtown hotel here this past January, a video presentation rolled.
Within
minutes, one of the most influential voices in American history cut
through
the darkness, saying, "I have a dream." It was, of course, the Rev.
Martin
Luther King Jr.

But on this occasion -- the annual dinner hosted by the King Center
--
those famous words weren't meant as an introduction to King's plea
for
racial equality. They were part of a promotion by Target Corp.,
which was
heralding its work to help keep the dream alive by renovating the
center's
gift shop.

Several diners in the audience openly groaned.

It's been 34 years since King was assassinated on April 4, 1968,
but on
this anniversary the talk is increasingly about whether his family
is more
consumed with using the King name to cut rich corporate deals to
enrich the
estate than with promoting his legacy.

King died in Memphis while planning a massive poor people's march
on
Washington, yet over the past few years the family estate -- led by
his
41-year-old second son, Dexter Scott King -- has sought to sell the
rights
to his works and name to corporate bidders such as Alcatel,
Cingular
Wireless and AOL Time Warner.

With the family's permission, the Alcatel and Cingular
communications
companies featured King in a pair of television commercials
pitching their
products. The family has also supported congressional legislation
that
would allow the Library of Congress, to which material is usually
donated,
to purchase papers in the King Center archives for $20 million.

Last year, the Kings stood in the way of an effort by the nonprofit
Alpha
Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., of which King was a member, to erect a
memorial
in his honor at the Tidal Basin on the National Mall. The family
wanted a
fee for the right to use King's image.

"If nobody's going to make money off of it, why should anyone get a
fee?"
asked the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a former president of the Southern
Christian
Leadership Conference, which was co-founded by King. "I don't think
it's a
mortal sin for them to ask for money, but I think it's a venial
sin."

Other institutions named after American icons rely heavily on
grants,
endowments and the sale of intellectual works for money, as the
King Center
has. But the family has departed from the image of caretakers of
former
presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and Malcolm Shabazz,
formerly
Malcolm X, among others, in allowing companies to use King as a
corporate
pitchman and even as the subject of a proposed interactive theme
park.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who was active in the civil rights
movement,
has criticized the family. Two of King's closer allies in the
movement,
Hosea Williams, who served as sergeant-at-arms in the SCLC, and
James
Farmer, a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, spoke out
against
the family before their deaths.

"I think the family is seeking profit," Farmer told the Dallas
Morning News
in 1998, "and I don't think Martin would have approved." Farmer
died a year
later, and Williams died in 2000.

Dexter King declined nearly a dozen requests for an interview.
Robert
Vickers, a spokesman for Intellectual Property Management, which
represents
the King Center, asked for and received a list of questions, but
did not
respond.

Staunch supporters of the Kings spoke to The Washington Post on the
family's behalf, however. They said the Kings have a right to
produce
income from their patriarch's intellectual works, and that
criticizing them
for enforcing their copyright is shameful.

"I am firmly of the opinion that the family needs to decide the
image of
Martin Luther King," said the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former director
of SCLC
affiliates under King. "No one else is capable of determining what
that
should be."

Vivian said the family's critics assume "they have a right to say
the
family should not be rich and well-off. As far as I'm concerned,
they're
the first family of black America. I want Martin's children's
children to
be well-off, to be secure and have whatever they want."

Americans often fawn over the "I Have a Dream" speech. But shortly
before
he was killed, King said that his dream of racial equality could
not be
realized unless black Americans achieved economic parity with white
people.

Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers
Project at
Stanford University, said the nation's lofty expectations of the
King
family are unfair. "I didn't hear a peep out of people when the
government
paid tens of millions of dollars to get the Nixon papers," he said.
"And he
was a public official on the public payroll.

"When the Kennedys sell Jackie's stuff, they get a free pass,"
Carson said.
"If the King kids had done exactly the same thing, had their
mother died,
they would have taken a huge hit. It's just amazing to me that
there's this
double standard."

Nothing's wrong with entrepreneurship and using King's name as a
brand,
Carson said. "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.' "

But critics say there's a difference between promoting King and
promoting
Mickey Mouse. And they are worried that Dexter King, who bears a
striking
resemblance to his father, is running the King Center as if it were
Disney.

After taking control of the King Center from his mother, Coretta
Scott
King, in 1995, Dexter King traveled to Memphis to consult with the
managers
of Elvis Presley's gaudy Graceland estate for tips on how to market
an
icon.

During that trip, King didn't seek an audience with Arun Gandhi,
who runs
the Memphis-based M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in honor of
his
grandfather, Mohandas Gandhi. Arun Gandhi had been trying to talk
with
anyone in the King family since he founded the Memphis institute in
1991.

"They don't want to be a part of what I'm doing, and they don't
give any
reasons for it either," Gandhi said. It doesn't seem to matter that
Mohandas Gandhi's teachings were the inspiration behind King's
philosophy
of nonviolence. "After a while, I gave up asking for cooperation,"
Gandhi
said. "I just do what I do."

Dexter King returned to Atlanta from Graceland, determined to build
an
interactive theme park devoted to his father. A critic viciously
mocked the
idea, calling the proposed park "I Have a Dreamland." The name
stuck, and
the idea faded, but King went on to sign a deal with AOL Time
Warner to
distribute his father's works. He boasted that it might eventually
bring
the estate $30 million to $50 million.

Meanwhile, the King Center is falling apart. Holes in the brownish
carpet
leading to its display rooms are patched with silvery duct tape.
Black
blotches of gum discarded by tourists haven't been scraped away.

A journalist visiting the center from Ohio this year wrote that he
was
appalled by the stench in a men's restroom. "I had been greatly
disappointed by the dismal and dirty circumstances I found at Dr.
King's
final resting place," Mansfield B. Frazier wrote.

"The grounds of the building hadn't been properly maintained, and
the men's
restroom was in deplorable condition," Frazier wrote.

The center is no longer active in teaching nonviolence, its
original
mission. Part of the problem is money. Dexter King laid off much of
the
staff to help erase a $600,000 debt when he took over seven years
ago,
declaring that the center was never meant to be a civil rights
organization.

In subsequent years, tax records show, the center's income from
donations
and grants steadily fell. Nevertheless, Dexter King pays himself a
salary
of $149,000, the kind of paycheck his mother never received.

While the center languishes in Atlanta, its director lives 3,000
miles away
in a beach house in Malibu, Calif., where he's pursuing an acting
career.

Last year, he portrayed his father in a television movie, "The Rosa
Parks
Story." In a story about Dexter King and his brother, Martin Luther
King
III, Gentleman's Quarterly reporter Matthew Teague wrote that
Dexter could
not remember a few sentences from his father's speech to a church
gathering. The director, frustrated, turned to cue cards.

In a dressing room trailer afterward, Teague wrote, Dexter King --
who was
only 2 during the march on Washington -- commented that the King
Center,
which he directs, teaches six principles of social nonviolence.
Teague
asked what those were. More than 15 minutes later, King was able to
recall
only four.

D. Louise Cook, a former director of the King Center archives and
museum,
said Coretta King once asked her to give her son Dexter a job after
he left
an Atlanta college in the mid-1980s. Cook put him to work
transcribing one
of his father's speeches. "He didn't last the day," Cook said.

Since retiring in 1987, Cook has refused to return to the King
Center,
because "it would break my heart," she said. Conditions were bad
enough
while she was there, she said.

"Windows in certain parts of the floor in the archive needed
special
screens to block out light so they didn't damage the documents,"
she said.
"But they would never replace those. There are leaks of water
lines, no
money to buy supplies. They had many directors of development --
fundraising people -- and they would leave out of sheer
frustration."

During her stay, Cook developed a measure of respect for Coretta
King, even
when they argued. Coretta King was prophetic, holding on to the
papers
containing her husband's powerful words and reflections even though
appraisers told her after his death that the papers weren't worth
much.

"She thought it was her main legacy to the kids," Cook said. "She
proved to
be right."

Cook said it upset her when Coretta King wouldn't allow the papers
to be
viewed, even after accepting thousands of dollars in grants from
the
National Endowment for the Humanities to make them available for
public
viewing.

"I had to fight her," Cook said. "It was a pitched battle, but her
lawyer
told her she'd better to do this. She was concerned about the
money. She
had the experience during King's life where he gave away a lot of
money, he
had no property. He left nothing for the kids. She had always had a
concern
about how to support the family."

Coretta King believes she has not been credited for her
accomplishments.
Because of her work at the King Center, she said, there will be
another
civil rights movement. "We've put a lot of stuff out there; a lot
of people
have gone forth," she said. "I'm very pleased with what I have done
in
terms of being faithful to the legacy."

But what about the Alcatel commercial that had King huckstering for
the
company's communications technology, and the Cingular advertisement
where
the esteemed leader was placed with Kermit the Frog, a Muppet
singing about
"dreamers like me"?

And what of the King memorial? The organizers trying to build it,
the Alpha
Phi Alpha fraternity, need $50 million by fall 2003 to break ground
-- a
deadline set by Congress. Raising funds has been difficult, and the
last
thing the fraternity says it needs is to have to pay a generous
license fee
to the Kings.

When outrage poured in from black Americans after the fee made
news, Dexter
King issued a statement saying the family supported the memorial
and did
not seek the fee. But that same statement said negotiations
involving a
permissions fee were ongoing.

"If this family stops this monument from being built, they will
never stop
hearing from me," said Cynthia Tucker, the editorial page editor
for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a frequent critic of the Kings. "I
can't
believe that they'd interfere with this project. Even their
supporters are
so frustrated that they're finally speaking out."