The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 to use his words and image -- and at least one scholar thinks that Dr. King would find such an arrangement offensive.The Lincoln family clearly missed the boat when they allowed a nation to memorialize the 16th president and post his words on the wall without first getting a big check.
The memorial is being paid for almost entirely through a fund-raising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.
"I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has been paid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. King. ". . . [He would've been] absolutely scandalized."
Financial documents revealed that the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by the King family. They also showed that a $71,700 "management" fee was paid to the family estate in 2003.
The Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday was the product of political correctness, and now his memorial will be tainted by greed.
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2 comments:
One consolation is that it doesn't look like him.
If only our elected officials could set a striking example of Dr. King's vision for us to follow. Unfortunately, the political rhetoric of the times falls far short of the Promised Land vision he set before us. Fortyeight years has past, since Martin Luther King first laid down this vision to the county in his "I Have a Dream" speech. We have accomplished quite a lot. There still remain peristant weed seeds of hate, embedded in his Dream, that crop us, given the right conditions. We must find a way to weed out this kind of hate.
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