“I would soon as leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar”
- Andrew Carnegie, American Industrialist
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The recent sale of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s personal papers through Sotheby’s Auction house to a consortium of buyers, led by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, has sparked renewed criticisms of the King Estate’s commercial control of Dr. King’s intellectual legacy. Over a period of years a chorus of scholars, civil rights leaders and others have decried the efforts of the family of Martin Luther King, Jr to reap financial rewards from reproductions of his speeches and other papers, his image, former parsonage, and the intellectual property value of his ideas. In 1999, the King Estate won a major lawsuit to enforce its copyright, Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. (link to Lexis; free version here).
The death of Coretta Scott King in January of this year leaves their four children as the last direct beneficiaries of the Sotheby’s private sale rumored to be valued at close to 30 million dollars. Some of this criticism in the last few weeks has been muted by Mayor Franklin’s successful arrangement for the papers to be archived in Atlanta, at Morehouse University, Dr. King’s undergraduate alma mater.
The criticism of the King children is based on a number of premises that are often in conflict with each other. The King legacy controversies provide a useful window into the ambivalence most Americans feel toward inherited wealth. For African Americans, the general black wealth deficit is an especially sensitive subject. To some, the King's emphasis on commercial exploitation is in direct opposition to the non violent, public service ideals by which Dr. King himself lived during his short 39 years of life. The King children’s efforts run afoul of the unstated, and somewhat unfair, expectation that they should take the same religiously inspired vow of near-poverty as their father.
The King Inheritance and The Black Wealth Gap
As sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro have demonstrated in their research here and here, “1 out of 4 white families received an inheritance after the death of a parent, averaging $144,652. In stark contrast, about 1 in 20 African American families had inherited in this way, and their average inheritance amounted to [only] $41,985.” The inheritance gap simply reflects the financial wealth gap that precedes death. Black households earn 59 cents for every dollar earned by whites, with whites holding a typical net worth of $81,000 compared to $8,000 for blacks.
So, one piece of the criticism of the King children’s efforts to generate wealth from Dr. King’s legacy is based on the fact that most blacks do not enjoy much in the way of inherited wealth and this effort to generate a large inheritance places King’s adult children (Yolanda Denise King, 50, Martin Luther King III, 48, Dexter Scott King, 45, and the Rev. Bernice Albertine King, 42) far out of the socio- economic class of most black families. This creates the perception that they are seeking to become “civil rights royalty”, economically and socially separate and apart from the rest of black America.
I do not subscribe to all of the criticism of the King children because one piece of Dr. King’s legacy was to lead the effort to break the barriers to economic and social parity with other Americans. So, I can see the benefit of the enforcement enterprise to the extent that this effort to be compensated for Dr. King's intellectual property rights is consistent with the struggle of all African Americans to overcome the dismal American legacy of commercial exploitation, beginning with slavery. Therefore this effort can serve as one role model for a way for African Americans to take control of the land, labor, and other resources that belong to our communities
The Curse of Children Who Do Not Work for the Money
It is more than fair to remember that “God Bless the Child that’s Got his own” The two wealthiest Americans, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have made clear their view that they do not want to pass on their entire fortunes to their children. Last week Buffett made news by publicly signing his commitment to give eighty percent, $37 billion of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett says that he is not cutting out his children, but that he holds firmly to his long held view that giving his heirs ''a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb'' can be ''harmful'' for them and is ''an antisocial act.'' Buffett has also said that, "I'm not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, especially when the alternative is six billion people much poorer (than we are) having a chance to benefit from the money." His recent gifts are an expression of his“philosophy….that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.” [Link: Should You Leave It All to the Children?] His daughter, Susan, has said that “If I write my dad a check for $20, he cashes it.'' At the same time that he gave the majority of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, Buffett gave one billion dollars each to the charitable foundations of his late wife, and to each of his three children.
The next source of criticism of the King children is that they have, for the most part, not established their own personal achievements to generate wealth. Thus, some of the resentment can be traced to the perception that they are seeking to establish a black civil rights royalty based on birth, not earned wealth. Dexter King states his view of this objection, "It has nothing to do with greed. It has to do with the principle that if you make a dollar, I should make a dime." [Link]
Does The Intellectual Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. belong to the Nation or to His Family?
Fueling the controversy about the wealth flowing to King’s children from control of his intellectual property rights is the often unstated assumption that his speeches, letters, books, and papers are a national treasure and should be available, like public documents, such as the Constitution or the Federalist Papers, without restriction, for researchers and others to use without cost. Lawrence Mamiya, professor of religion and Africana studies at Vassar College says of the King papers “if you have to cite it and pay royalties on it, it becomes problematic”.
I believe that King’s legacy is a hybrid: his papers are of interest to scholars, yet the family has a right to control this valuable intellectual legacy. I have a substantial objection, however, when the control of the intellectual property interest interferes with dissemination of the historical record. So, I was especially happy to see that Atlanta Mayor Franklin’s efforts will place the papers in the Sotheby collection at Morehouse College, an historically black university, where researchers will have access.
I was pleased to learn that Stanford University historian, and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford, Clayborne Carson, reports that “[w]e have photocopied and scanned these documents in order to ensure that the ideas expressed in them will be preserved and disseminated in our comprehensive edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “with the cooperation of the King family and the King Estate, [he has] taken actions to ensure that King’s visionary ideas, as expressed in the documents to be auctioned at Sotheby’s and elsewhere, will continue to be made available to researchers, students, and other interested people throughout the world”.
The Content of Their Character
At the end of the day, the King children will not be judged by how much money they have amassed in their personal fortunes, but by the “content of their character”.
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