3 Stories You Won’t Read This MLK Weekend|SPOTLIGHT

More than a dozen companies contributed less than $100,000 or nothing at all to the King memorial. They include: Citigroup, Philip Morris, Home Depot, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, AOL Time Warner, Goldman Sachs Group, United Parcel Service (UPS), Allstate, Sprint and American Express, according to records available as of July.

Many of those companies actively court Black consumers.  Some even quote Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from time to time. Yet, when it is time to honor the dreamer, they are asleep at the switch.

The third story you won’t be reading about this weekend is in equal parts sad and familiar. It is yet another example of the King children’s greediness. Harry Johnson, head of the Mall project, should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for being able to deal with the family dysfunction.

According to documents examined by the Associated Press, the mall foundation has paid Intellectual Properties Management, a company owned by the King children, approximately $800,000 for the use of Dr. King’s words and image.

Records show that the foundation paid the King entity $761,160 in 2007 to use Dr. King’s image and words in fundraising materials. It also charged the memorial a management fee $71,000 in 2003.

The firm representing the Kings issued a statement saying the fees would go to the Martin Luther King Jr. King Center for Social Change in Atlanta. It said the fees will help offset donations that would go toward erecting the memorial instead of the King center, where both parents are buried.

The King family has had its own version of the television show “Family Feud” for years.  Dexter, the youngest brother, was named head of the King center but was released within months by his mother, Coretta Scott King. In 2008, Martin III and Bernice sued Dexter, claiming he had misused MLK center assets and failed to properly involve them in family business matters.

Dexter countersued, charging that his two siblings had misused King Center funds and kept money that should have gone to the center. Under pressure from the judge, the Kings settled out of court.

But they have never been able to shed the image of profiting from the name of their father.

David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Dr. King, said the civil rights leader would have been “absolutely scandalized by the profiteering behavior of his children.”

He told the AP, “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. 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.”

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his website, www.georgecurry.com. You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.

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