April 21, 2009, - 10:41 pm
MLK, Jr. Cha-Ching
By Debbie Schlussel
The name, Martin Luther King, Jr., is worth a lot financially. And I can understand his family’s desire to protect its value and carefully license it out for the best financial opportunities.
But let’s be clear. They’re not doing this out of any sense of public service or for any noble cause. They’re doing it for the same reason Jimi Hendrix’s family accepts millions in royalties for him, each year: CHA-CHING!
If they were really doing this for anything other than financial greed, they wouldn’t be doing this:
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. . . .
“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.
According to financial documents reviewed by The Associated Press, the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by King’s family. Documents also show a “management” fee of $71,700 was paid to the family estate in 2003. . . .
In the 1990s, the family reached settlements with USA Today and CBS over their use of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech without permission. . . . But historians and the National Park Service said they are not aware of any other case in which builders of a national monument had to license the image of their subject.
And it’s not just me and David Garrow who think this is objectionable.
It’s also Black commentator Cynthia Tucker, Editorial Page Editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The project’s organizers have also been subjected to the exquisite torture of dealing with the King family, which has demanded tribute even as fund-raisers have struggled to raise $120 million for construction. The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation recently disclosed that it had paid the King heirs $800,000 to use their father’s image and likeness in its fund-raising.
Never mind that the King memorial will be the first built on the National Mall commemorating a black person. Never mind that the memorial will represent widespread national recognition of King’s contributions to American democracy.
And never mind that the revelations of this extortion may well curb the enthusiasm – and close the wallets – of potential donors. While Henry Johnson, president of the foundation, went out of his way to say the money paid to the Kings was not a problem, one major donor asked that its funds not be used to pay the King estate.
“We think the memorial is an important and overdue recognition, but we really don’t want to get involved with relationships with the family and their estate,” Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of the Pew Charitable Trusts, told reporters. Pew has donated $1 million.
If news of this latest money-grab is surprising, it shouldn’t be. King’s heirs have spent their adult lives turning their father’s legacy into a profit center. No books about King may be written, no songs about him sung, no museums dedicated to his memory unless money is paid to those greedy, grasping King children.
The whole thing reminds me of the Rosa Parks story–the real Rosa Parks story you never hear about her greedy family which didn’t know her when she was alive.
While the entire cadre of civil rights movement race merchants constantly trot out the name of Rosa Parks and the images of her refusing to get up from her seat on the bus, they ignored her poverty and destitute state during the last decades of her life.
When a story ran in the Detroit papers about how Rosa Parks was broke, frail from illness and aging, and about to be evicted from her apartment in a bad section of Detroit, no-one in the civil rights trade could be bothered to help her. Nor would any of Rosa Parks family members bother to help her.
Instead, two wealthy Jews–you know the evil Zionist Jew crackers, Max Fisher and A. Alfred Taubman, gave Rosa Parks a fancy apartment, rent-free for the rest of her life, in a luxe development on the Detroit River. They also gave her regular, generous stipends for food and paid for her to be cared for and have live-in help.
But, at Rosa Parks funeral, suddenly all the race merchants–Farrakhan, Sharpton, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright–were there to show they were down with the Rosa Parks legacy, so down with it that they couldn’t bother to help her when she was alive. Ditto for all of Parks’ family members. It was the White Zionist Jew interlopers who took care of her.
It was with this in mind that I laughed to myself each time I read cover stories in the Detroit papers about Parks “beloved” family members fighting over the rights to her estate, so they could make millions licensing out her name and image. You know, the same name and image none of ’em refused to set foot near, when she was alive, sick, and about to be kicked out of her home.
Yup, “cha-ching” is the universal sound that brings the families of deceased civil rights leaders to their sudden “nobility” and righteousness, once their family members are but disintegrated remains.
Yes, greed is good. But only to a point.
You got that right.
rickster on April 22, 2009 at 6:37 am