MLK family charging foundation $800,000 to use Dr. King's words

[Bluebear]

WASHINGTON – The family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 for the use of his words and image — an arrangement one leading scholar says King would have found offensive.

The memorial — including a 28-foot sculpture depicting King emerging from a chunk of granite — is being paid for almost entirely with private money in a fundraising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation. The monument will be turned over to the National Park Service once it is complete.

The foundation has been paying the King family for the use of his words and image in its fundraising materials. The family has not charged for the use of King's likeness in the monument itself.

"I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family ... I don't think any other group of family ancestors has been paid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of King. "One would think any family would be so thrilled to have their forefather celebrated and memorialized in D.C. that it would never dawn on them to ask for a penny."

King would have been "absolutely scandalized by the profiteering behavior of his children," Garrow said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090417/ap_on_re_us/king_memorial

[Updike]

1. I agree with Garrow.

That sucks. Dr. King was not like that but I have seen many trying to make money from memorabilia attached to Dr. King.

[Bluebear]

3. welcome to DU!

[Thirtieschild]

4. Welcome. I've seen the same thing and am not surprised.

I agree that MLK wasn't like that. We were in Atlanta when he was killed. Mr. Thirties wrote the stories - death, funeral - for UPI. I took our two oldest children, ages 8 and 10, and marched in the funeral march. Many, many tears.

[MadBadger]

2. That's pretty terrible.

[burning rain]

5. The Foundation has operated like this for many years.

And certainly, this kind of petty pelf-obsession does not at all seem like the sort of thing MLK would endorse.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. The children of truly great people often fail to live up to their famous parent

I agree that it is unseemly for them to do this. But it is also not surprising. His children seem far less great than was their father.