Sometimes you have to sit quietly, talk it out with your higher power and walk away from dinero that's sure to leave a bad taste in your mouth. So it is from that frame that I am calling out the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for taking more than $800,000 from the memorial fund.
WASHINGTON - 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. It 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. The family has not charged for the use of King's likeness in the monument itself.
I think this is shameful. Read on:
"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.
King's family defends taking the "fees":
In a statement to the AP, Intellectual Properties Management said proceeds from the licensing agreement go to the King Center in Atlanta, where King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are entombed. The statement said the arrangement was made out of concern that fundraising for the monument would undercut donations to the King Center.
"Many individuals believe all `King' fundraising initiatives are interrelated and don't donate to the King Center, thinking they have already supported it by donating to the memorial," the statement said.
Source - MSNBC.com, King family draws fees from memorial project Scholar: Civil rights leader would have been 'scandalized' by payments
Well then that means that the King family needs to clean up it's marketing literature to be more precise, not to grab money from the memorial to their patriarch!
What do you think?
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