Troubled Legacy
A King Family Squabble Comes to a Conclusion - Maybe
2009-10-14
By Eric Easter

Years ago when I traveled with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, I occasionally acted as the “stuff guy.” No matter what your title, on some days you got stuck with the task of carrying and finding a place for all the things Jackson’s fans and admirers handed him on political trips. The variety and volume of stuff was amazing – awards, appeals for money, letters from prison, coconut pies, signed books, Armenian brandy, artwork. It also included handwritten copies of speeches he had given – the few that were not extemporaneous.

On longer trips it became an incredible burden. Getting on planes was a task, mailing odds and ends from the road was even worse. One day I brought up the subject of leaving something behind and got chided by Jackson immediately. Without going into details, his point was that someday all that stuff would be very valuable to his children and perhaps to history if he were to die, and he – unlike his mentor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – was going to make sure these items were accounted for, properly stored and handled in a way that assured his family would be well cared for.

Jackson, like many people close to King and the family, knew intimately that when Dr. King was tragically killed, Black America’s First Family was left not only without a father but also largely without a secure financial future. Many were in fact, shocked by this. With great fame comes the assumption of wealth, but sainthood does not pay very well. According to some reports, family friends as diverse as Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr. and others contributed funds and other assistance to make sure the family’s needs were addressed.

Yet even for our own Kennedys, there was a point where people had to move on, the family had to find independence and the legacy became the best vehicle for achieving a measure of generational security. But most would agree that the last 40 years have been difficult to watch. Colleges and collectors fought the family for rights and ownership, papers were sold to the highest bidder, lawsuits were filed, opportunities were squandered, and amid other scandals, a memorial center that should stand as a symbol of pride fell into disrepair.

Now just a few days ago, a year-long court case pitting King sibling against King sibling came to an inconclusive end. After accusations of misdeeds, misappropriation, impropriety and worse, two brothers and their sister simply deadlocked. They agreed, essentially, to disagree. The court will now appoint directors to manage what the family could not. Things went wildly wrong, perhaps, but that doesn’t negate that fact that the family was and still are entitled to do what they think is best with the legacy it has been given.

For some observers, the failure of the Kind children in managing their father’s estate is justice. The loudest and most self-righteous voices among them argue that profiting from King’s legacy is unseemly, undignified, disrespectful to history, and that King belonged to the world. That argument is, in a word, ridiculous. Unless otherwise arranged, a man’s legacy and possessions is the domain of his family. How they choose to deal with it should be the family’s decision. We can only hope they make smart decisions that take the greater good into consideration.

In this case, profiting in some way seems to be only fair. We, the people who deified King, placed upon his children an impossible expectation. We wanted them to be dynamic, beautiful, smart, inspirational, extraordinarily gifted, powerful, shining examples for our own children. If on some points they fell short, than they are just like the rest of us. But in return for sacrificing the time, attention and life of their father, they should at least be rich.

I don’t think Dr. King would disagree with that. He was a man faced with mortality, and like any man thinking about death, you can be sure that he dreamed for his kids to be wealthy and successful beyond his own imagination, not struggling and invited to Black History Month programs as window dressing once a year.

But now that everything’s settled, the King kids still can’t catch a break. They’ve come to an agreement just at the time when no one can figure out how to make money with intellectual property in the age of the internet. The great irony is that they will now likely have to give away some of what they own for free on the web if they are to create a demand among an audience that has no connection to the times or the circumstances.

This last court case and the death of the family’s matriarch, Coretta, have effectively taken the King family name off of the pedestal they were chained to. Ultimately that’s a good thing. They can work together now to recover what is left of their personal relationship. Meanwhile, we can stop staring and start looking to get our own legacies in order.