MLK Family Feud
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Smoking Gun, July 11, 2008
A family dispute over the valuable estates of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King has landed the late couple’s children in court, with two of the siblings claming that a third has misappropriated money from their parents’s estates. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III charge that, in late June, their brother Dexter improperly transferred “substantial funds” from Bank of America to accounts he controls, according to a Superior Court lawsuit filed yesterday in Fulton County, Georgia. {snip} Bernice King, 45, is administrator of her late mother’s estate, while Dexter, 47, is president of the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr. corporation, of which the siblings are all shareholders. The operation of that business is in disarray, with the siblings “deadlocked” in its management, according to the complaint, which charges that the company’s assets are “being misapplied or wasted.” {snip} In 2006, the King corporation, which controls the use of the late civil rights leader’s image, sold a private collection of his papers that had been estimated to be worth about $30 million. The material was to have been auctioned by Sotheby’s, but was purchased by a coalition of Atlanta civic and business leaders for future display by Morehouse College, King’s alma mater.
[Editor’s Note: The text of the complaint can be read as graphics here.]
(Posted on July 11, 2008)
Comments
The King corporation? Who ever said Commies were against profit? Capitalism isn’t good enough for us peasants, but the liberal elite are allowed to enjoy it.
Posted by Roman Holiday at 5:55 PM on July 11
What’s the scam here?
All of them want it all for themselves. So of course, each one is going to say that the other(s) are up to no good if any of the rest have anything.
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:16 PM on July 11
This is nothing new with this crew. They’ve been at each other for years. They all want their piece of the pie before it’s too late. None of them would ever think of getting a real job though.
Tom Iron…
Posted by Tom Iron at 6:28 PM on July 11
Michael also had a daughter that died recently. The circumstances of her death were shrouded in mystery.
Any posters ever see an article on the cause of death?
Posted by Nordic at 6:38 PM on July 11
Who is placing this kind of value on MLK’s private papers and why? I could see some kind of historical significance but they’re about as valuable as a 1975 Elvis Presley toilet seat cover.
Posted by at 7:25 PM on July 11
The King boys and girls are far smarter than we usually give them credit for.
They “sold” their father’s papers for 32 mil. The papers are to be housed at Morehouse University. Atlanta’s mayor (a black female under whose capable administration the City of Atlanta last year spent about $1.30 for every dollar it collected in revenue) raised money to pay the Kings children for MLK’s papers.
The $ came from big corporations, “white” corporations whose executives for some odd reason think it helps their stockholders to give their money to black politicians and other black shakedown artists).
OK, so the King heirs got 32 mil. Morehouse gets to house the papers. Donors get to pay for the upkeep. But the King heirs keep the copyrights. The kept the intellectual property, the property that is really valuable. What they sold is the physical property which is nothing but a liability because of the expense to maintain it.
Posted by GB at 7:51 PM on July 11
MLK spoke of a time when hopefully blacks would be judged by the content of their character and not just the color of their skin.
Father King would be disappointed to know of the content of the character of his immediate family and the rest of his children world wide. I’m afraid all we can do is look at the color of their skin.
Posted by at 8:24 PM on July 11
Like who cares about those idiots???? We always knew the whole king family were a bunch of lying, cheating, money hungry thugs….and the father was whoremaster….number one….and the wife, covered up for him…she probably had affairs as well so maybe some day soon one of those worthless kids will write a book (with a ghost writer of course) and tell us what really went on behind closed doors!
Posted by lydia at 11:00 PM on July 11
Substitute the King names and insert MBEKE, MUGABE and AMIN and you still have the same kind of greed and infighting. I didn’t knkow the mayor of Atlanta was a black WOMAN! I knew it had a black mayor though, no city could be run so bad with a white mayor (Well!! maybe Chicago was)
Posted by Skip at 12:02 AM on July 12
From rags to riches back to rags in 2 generations. What a story of failure!!!
Posted by Lost in Paradise at 2:16 AM on July 12
Think any of them could afford land in, air fare & moving costs to, their country of choice in their wonderful homeland they’ve named themselves after?
Just wondering.
Posted by Cousin Charlie from TN at 4:57 AM on July 12
The King kids shopped these papers around for years, but couldn’t get their asking price.
Posted by at 1:17 PM on July 12
The rhetoric of the left is: no justice, no peace. The extension of that should be: greed, no justice, because greed means wanting more than the fair share.
Ecclesiastes, in the Bible, says that what is crooked cannot possibly be made straight. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story: where all the writings of humanity were thrown in a bonfire to give a new start for civilization; of course in time the same old corrupt civilization emerged. The moral being don’t reform civilization unless you first reform the human heart.
King and his successors claimed to want justice, diversity, inclusiveness; but the Naive confused the noble words for real world implication. The King family fight is so distant from the original idealistic language that it’s getting difficult for them to maintain a credible connection. ‘Religion’ becomes farce. Those that like King feel pathos, those that don’t like King feel the comedy. Comedy and pathos are both rooted in the distance between the reality and the pretentions. The original words become a rather limp and tortured, and distant matrix.
King manifested his diversity by having both white and black prostitutes. Inclusiveness, for his followers, becomes an angry, unreasoning, “I want mine”. Where it’s impolitic for an impure heart to be honest, motives are hidden behind hypocrisy or self-deception.
It’s like a horse that’s pulling a sleigh. He suddenly feels stronger, thinking how much progress he’s making, not noticing that the connection to the sleigh has broken and left behind, and he’s only running free.
Posted by Patrick2 at 1:19 PM on July 12
The Merriam-Webster definition of kleptocracy is as follows.
kleptocracy: a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed;
The leaders of Africa practice kleptocracy to no end.
Does the MLK family fued remind you of a similar practice? What better example of kleptocracy than the family of the most well-known civil rights leader in American history?
Black Americans and black Africans share something in common.
Posted by Always Disappointed at 6:21 PM on July 12
I personally knew one of mlk’s white prostitutes, she disliked blacks as much as mlk disliked Whites, but she said his money was always very good and he did not beat her.
Posted by Lars at 10:38 PM on July 12
The leaders of Africa practice kleptocracy to no end.
Sadly, so too do the leaders of our own country.
Posted by Skip at 11:50 PM on July 12
It is fitting that the legacy of MLK’s estate is the same as his legacy on this country: namely, in a state of confusion, conflict and disarray.
Posted by Kevin at 12:33 AM on July 13
This is how all black dreams end.
As I say, if you want to destroy blacks, just give them what they want, stand back, and let time do its work.
Everything with blacks comes full circle because this is their nature. They do not advance, they revert.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 9:58 AM on July 13
Reply to sbuffalonative:
Your comment is well said. Its true. Just look at Haiti, or Jamaica, or anywhere else in the West Indies. What have any of these places ever accomplished? Look at all the sub-Saharan countries in Africa. What have any of them ever achieved since gaining their independence? If slavery or colonialism had been the source of the black problem then its ending (205 years ago in Haiti for instance) should have resolved it. But it didn’t.
Posted by at 3:07 PM on July 14
I wonder - does King County, Washington, which recently changed it’s logo to that of an image of MLK, have to pay royalties to the King family for use of it?
Posted by S.L. Cain at 3:23 AM on July 15
“MLK spoke of a time when hopefully blacks would be judged by the content of their character and not just the color of their skin.”
I was under the impression they have been judged by the content of their character from the get-go. The color of their skin just gives everyone else a heads-up, sort of an early warning system which activates one’s personal radar.
Posted by Sam at 12:30 PM on July 15