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OUR OPINIONS: MLK's heirs feel entitled to life of Kings Cynthia Tucker - Staff Sunday, December 2, 2001

These must be painful times for the men and women who knew and loved and risked their lives alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader's memory is being besmirched not by white supremacists or rabid segregationists or Jesse Helms, but by his own family, who are determined to live well off his legacy.

For years now, King's heirs have been at the business of turning King into a profit-center. His second son, Dexter, visited Graceland in 1995 to learn how to market King like Elvis Presley. Since then, the family has tried a variety of schemes for selling off bits and pieces of their father --- some more lucrative than others.

King's old allies must have watched all this with growing alarm, but they said nothing. The old bonds of loyalty were not to be breached, the family not to be criticized. After all, there is still a considerable reservoir of justified respect and admiration for the widow, Coretta Scott King, who conducted herself with such dignity in the days after her husband's assassination and was left to rear four children alone. So the old lions of the civil rights movement encircled the family protectively.

Until now. In a remarkable and timely report on CBS' "60 Minutes," airing tonight at 7 p.m., a handful of prominent civil rights activists criticize the Kings' commercialization of their father's legacy, especially the "I Have a Dream Speech."

(CBS had a run-in with the Kings over the speech five years ago. After the network started selling a video of news events that included footage of the famous speech, the family sued. The lawsuit was settled when CBS agreed to make a donation to the King Center.)

In the "60 Minutes" report, former King lieutenant Bill Rutherford says, "I think Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave. He attempted his entire life to communicate ideas for free. To communicate, not to sell."

Yet the selling goes on. Last year, the family's greed seemed to have hit its zenith when they rented King out as a huckster to two telecommunications corporations. They sold rights to Atlanta-based Cingular and Alcatel, a French company, to use King's image in advertisements.

But this year the family rose to a new level of crassness, demanding a "permissions agreement" from a nonprofit group trying to build a King memorial on the National Mall in Washington. In other words, the family wants a fee for the use of King's image and likeness in a national memorial. While the family's demands are negotiated, fund-raising for the memorial has been stalled.

While many of the family's old allies are fed up with their money-grubbing, they still have their defenders. Former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, one of King's closest associates, tells CBS, "There's nothing wrong with selling a commercial product, even for a saint."

King never claimed to be a saint. But he did make clear to all who knew him his disdain for money and material acquisitions. In a 1965 interview with Playboy magazine, King said:

"I think I'd rise up in my grave if I died leaving two or three hundred thousand dollars. . . . If I have any weaknesses, they are not in the area of coveting wealth. . . . I believe as sincerely as anything that the struggle for freedom is not one that should reward any participant with individual wealth and gain."

Young's stubborn (and wrongheaded) defense of the King family notwithstanding, he knows their profit-mongering would grieve King deeply. So do all of those who joined the struggle for something far more precious than money.

Cynthia Tucker is editor of the editorial page. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.

cynthia@ajc.com

-- Anonymous, December 02, 2001