CHAPTER 15
Odd Man In
Many people do not realize that the “I Have a Dream” refrain of my father’s most famous speech was spoken extemporaneously. He had prepared his remarks but, moved by the passion of the crowd before him and the tremendous significance of that day in August 1963, his mind soared and led him to those immortal words.
Soon after the speech was delivered, 20th Century Fox Records distributed a recording of the speech without his permission. The recording was important because many people then, as now, had not heard the speech in its entirety. My father sued the record company to stop their distribution of the record on the grounds of copyright infringement and won. Guided by his trusted advisers, he had been copyrighting his writings and speeches since he published his first book in the 1950s as a way of ensuring that the integrity of his message could be vigorously protected. He had also been represented by a New York literary agent since that first book. Daddy understood that the more important and controversial he became, the more vulnerable he would be to exploitation. Later, he in fact gave Berry Gordy and Motown the right to distribute “I Have a Dream” as well as other speeches, believing they would be in safe hands. As evidence that my father’s faith was well placed, Mr. Gordy eventually gave these masters back to my family when I was installed as head of the King Center in 1989.
My family and I have repeatedly been attacked in the media and unfairly accused in recent years of trying to profit from my father’s legacy. The intentions behind our efforts to protect his intellectual property—his name, image, writings, speeches, and recorded voice—have been mischaracterized and distorted. In fact, as my father did during his lifetime, we have simply been protecting this property in order to maintain, preserve, and protect the integrity of his message. When Daddy died, all of his property—both tangible and intangible—descended to us as his heirs; it happens with every individual. Curiously, these attacks against us did not seem to occur until we had conflicts with the National Park Service, a federal agency, and subsequent to that when questions were raised about the possible involvement of federal agencies in my father’s death. Could be a coincidence, could not.
In the early ’80s calls and letters started coming into the King Center about a novelty item on the market that was a miniature sculpture of my father sitting upon a base shaped like a coffin. It was disrespectful, tasteless, and tacky and an unauthorized use of his image. We brought suit against the manufacturer, and a Georgia court upheld our right to protect his image and stopped the distribution of the item. But the law requires that in order to maintain a protected image, as well as name and copyrights, you must actively and uniformly police them or risk losing them. Therefore we have been forced to police them in all instances whether that be a tacky image on merchandise or the reprinting of my father’s copyrighted words or usage of his spoken words without permission. We issue licenses to those people and entities who have our permission to use my father’s name, image, or words that establish the boundaries of that use; again, this is as the law provides.
Yes, the King Estate does in many instances receive fees for these licenses. But when making licensing decisions, we have never put profit over principle; we have always tried to maintain the dignity and the integrity of my father’s message. Many nonprofit organizations and schools receive the use of my father’s intellectual property for free. However, in many instances where the person or company is using my father’s name, image, or words as part of an appropriate commercial use or an endeavor from which they will profit, we do require an industry-standard financial arrangement. Is that unfair?
Even more important, the King Estate may receive monies from licenses, but for the most part these monies are not pure profit. It costs a great deal to maintain and police my father’s intellectual property. We have a staff that reviews the thousands of license and permission requests that come in from around the world. Each request requires administrative handling and assessment. And each time we are forced to legally protect and defend our rights we incur major legal expenses. Remember, if we don’t actively protect our rights, we lose them, and certainly this is not what my father would have wanted.
Much has been made of the fact that my father gave away a great deal of what he earned during his lifetime, including the $54,000 he received in connection with his Nobel Peace Prize. This generosity is used to argue that he intended to give everything he had freely to the world. Daddy did believe that monies he got specifically for the results of his work in the Civil Rights Movement should go back into the Movement, because it embodied the work and sacrifice of thousands of other dedicated people. However, my father also very clearly made a distinction between income derived from those efforts and income derived from his personal efforts. He believed that his message belonged to everyone spiritually, but his copyrighted words legally belonged to him in life and to his heirs after his death. This is why he put the copyrights for his writings and speeches in his name rather than in the names of the organizations in which he was involved; he knew these copyrights would be passed down to us. My father died with very little money and with few material possessions to be our inheritance. He was a loving husband and father, and he knew that given the nature of his life’s work his copyrights were the only way in which he could leave something behind for us. The results of the work of the public man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., unquestionably belong to the world, but the private man, my father, will forever belong to my mother, Yolanda, Martin, Bernice, and me.
There is an old saying that I have learned to believe, “that which does not destroy us only serves to make us stronger.” By 1994, I had pretty much gotten myself back on track. I had come to terms with the hurt and indignation I felt from my treatment by some of the board members of the King Center, and my resignation from the King Center and, as a practical matter, a few of these board members who had opposed me during my first term had by this time moved on.
I was happy with the work that Phil and I were doing with the King Estate and my father’s intellectual property. We had created effective administration systems and developed many worthwhile projects. Most important, through this work I had developed a new and more intimate understanding of how essential it was to me to protect and perpetuate my father’s message. And I believed that in time I could accomplish what I had set out to do four years before.
I came back on board as CEO of the King Center on December 31, 1994. After being voted in during October 1994, I wasn’t scheduled to come in until March ’95; I was supposed to get a smooth time of transition. I didn’t get a honeymoon. Due to a controversy with the National Park Service, an emergency board meeting by phone expedited my coming in three months early. Right away I made this point: “The King Center is the spiritual and institutional guardian of the King legacy. Our main goal is to educate the public about, and to perpetuate and promote, my father’s message of nonviolence to people around the world. To achieve this goal, we must protect my father’s intellectual property—the images, writings, and speeches that embody his message.” For lay-people, I explained that, “Land is the real estate of the past. Intellectual property is the real estate of now. If you stand back and let others steal his material, then you’re affecting every minority writer, every songwriter, every composer, every artist, every storyteller, every creative person—all of that—gone.”
Congress, in its wisdom, created the Copyright Act to encourage and protect creative works, including those inspirational in nature. Therefore I have always been baffled by those who attack the fact that my father’s works are protected. If Congress had believed that the inspirational speeches and writings of a public figure who is not a public official (as in the case of a U.S. president) belonged freely to the public, it would not have included such works under the legal umbrella of the copyright laws.
One of our biggest copyright battles was with CBS. They own this series called The 20th Century, hosted by Mike Wallace. On one evening, I saw a segment of a five-part series aired on the Arts & Entertainment network about the Civil Rights Movement, and there my father was, and there his speeches were, everything from “I Have a Dream” to “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” to… I lost count. I was sitting there wondering whether to call the lawyers, not really wanting to call anybody, but wanting to go have a tofu steak with onions, maybe call up Good Natured to see what she was doing. The lawyers and I talked. “We can’t let this go,” I was told. “It’s blatant unfair usage of your father’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. If you don’t say or do anything, you’re setting a precedent by your inaction, and it will be more difficult to enforce your copyrights in the future.”
I wanted to do the right thing. So first we tried to resolve it without litigation. But CBS would not budge, so we had no choice but to file suit. CBS has a tad more resources than we do, and they had their own legal point—this was their footage. We agreed it was their footage, but it was our father on that footage saying things he had copyrighted. We believed that CBS’s usage of the speech exceeded the fair use standard under the copyright laws. The network had included over two-thirds of the speech in a program that it aired and sold on home video. It was making a profit off my father’s name, image, and words. So, happy days were here again for the lawyers; we ended up in court.
The federal district court judge ruled at first that the speech was in the public domain; then we won a reversal on appeal, and our rights to the speech were upheld. However, the case was sent back to the lower court to decide some lesser technical issues. Eventually, we settled these remaining issues with CBS. While we felt victorious, we nevertheless incurred close to a million dollars in legal bills for our defense. But again, this was the price of protecting our property as well as an example of putting principle first over profit. We knew going into the litigation that it would be very expensive, and that in the end legal fees would more than likely not be awarded due to the complexity of the issues involved. This principle was especially important to uphold due to the fact that the “I Have a Dream” speech is generally considered to be the most important speech of the twentieth century.
While we faired well in the court of law, we did not fair so well in CBS’s court. Less than a year and a half after our settlement was reached, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a biased piece entitled “Selling the Dream,” which accused my family, in so many words, of engaging in profiteering in connection with my father’s intellectual property. CBS put forth the same argument that had been unsuccessful for them in court, namely that my father’s words should belong to everyone. Since they lost this point in the court of law, they attempted to win this point in the court of public opinion. One respected journalist ran an op-ed piece criticizing the motives and ethics behind CBS’s airing of this piece in light of the preceding litigation with the King family, and questioned whether it was being done in retaliation. Isn’t it ironic that CBS would raise these questions about profiteering when in fact it came out during our trial that the network charges schools and nonprofits $1,000 per minute (with a thirty-second minimum) to use their footage of the “I Have a Dream” speech?
* * *
My mother was in the process of semi-retiring from the day-today. “With his mother around, he couldn’t be a King, only a prince.” I’d heard this had been said, and it was repeated to me for effect. “What am I going to tell people I do?” I once asked a colleague before I got the reins. Did I feel I couldn’t get respect until Mother retired? It’s not my decision, who respects me. The question is better put elsewhere. Some people said, “You’re not your father.” No, I’m not. Who is? When I went to the Lorraine Motel and the light hit me, it then came back to me that I had to focus and redouble my efforts.
The architects of the Constitution—“Somewhere I read!” my father used to say—had intentions of creating a document and a mechanism to check tyranny. They were trying to create checks and balances, but what they did not address is that, through capitalism, the true government would become global multinational corporations. If you look at it in economic terms, every corporation, technically, is controlled by the wealthiest shareholders. The government is like a corporation. So who controls it? The wealthiest citizens. What is Congress? Congress is like a board of directors. They serve at the pleasure of the shareholders. The president is the CEO, a manager. The people who have the power are the wealthy shareholders. They determine policy. Politicians are the middlemen. Everybody thinks politicians make the decisions. But they don’t. The decision makers are insiders. When CNN says before the State of the Union Address, “We’re about to hear from the most powerful man in the free world,” remember this: the people who pay for the president’s campaign are the most powerful, if he happens to win the election. The real issue now, the Cause, is economics and institutional self-empowerment, a concept my father espoused and ultimately gave his life for.
The King Center and King National Park site across the street drew an average of anywhere from 500,000 to 700,000 visitors a year, according to the superintendent of the National Park Service Historic Site. Many of these visitors were young people who were not inspired by the existing static exhibit and wanted a more interactive experience. In response to the numerous correspondence we received on this issue, Phil and I envisioned the nonprofit King Dream Center as a multimedia, emerging experience utilizing all of the latest technology, 3-D technology, animatronics, every kind of mood sensory technology that creates an atmosphere. You walk in, the lights go down and you’re instantly transported back to the ’60s. You have the March on Washington, where you can hear the applause and feel the energy; an animatronic Dr. King delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech; a re-creation of the jail cell where the letter from the Birmingham jail was written. More tangible than a static exhibit in a traditional museum, it would use interactive technology so people who went through it, particularly children, would feel like they were there and gain a much greater appreciation for the era.
This was put together in a proposal by designers. I didn’t know if we could ever get the King Dream Center to the Promised Land of reality due to the fact that our initial funding sources backed away as a result of the controversy surrounding the Park Service’s planned visitors center.
In the early ’70s, Mother traveled to Boston, reached out to Boston University to try to get my father’s papers back. You see, in the ’60s, Daddy was trying to decide on a place to house his papers, and at that time Boston University seemed like a logical place because it was in the North and the climate seemed more liberal; there was concern for the safety of the papers if they were kept here in the South. Morehouse didn’t have the facilities to do the kind of archival job the papers required. My father put some pages, about half of his papers, at BU with the intention of getting them back at some point; he didn’t realize at the time that he was “gifting” them. BU took a position that he was giving the papers to it versus loaning them to a repository.
It was his intention to get them back. He told my mother in the latter part of his life that he wanted to get them back because the SCLC had been talking about creating an institution to deal with the scholarly aspects of its work, and his papers would’ve been transferred to that entity. Well, he didn’t get around to documenting the SCLC’s suggestion in writing. The document BU had received originally for the actual holding of the papers was the one the court addressed.
Mother brought suit to get the papers back. Initially, there was communication between two entities, the King Center and BU. The legal part didn’t kick in until the ’80s. But, with the appeals process, it was not until the mid ’90s that we finally lost for good; the courts in Boston decided BU had clear title to that portion of the King papers. Yet again, we had huge legal bills as a result of this fight. The copyrights were never in question. The author retains copyright, but BU owns the physical documents now, via judicial fiat. They can’t publish them without our permission. They can’t use them for any purpose other than research. Scholars can come in and read them, but the minute the words are transcribed or in any way published, they need permission from the Estate.
The King Center has the other, greater half of Daddy’s papers. Those at BU only go up to his years in school at Boston, his early years to his formative years, so to speak, academically to probably about 1960, maybe through his doctoral dissertation; we have copies of those as well.
Mother’s feeling at the time was to just bring everything under one roof, and we felt it made sense for people to come to one place.
Boston University disagreed, in the person of its president, John Silber. I’d never before met anybody so rigid. I’d been told he was that way, that you really couldn’t talk to him about this issue. But you couldn’t convince me of that until I met him face-to-face. My brother, Martin, and I went up there as a last-ditch effort, before going forward with a trial. What happened was almost offensive. Dr. Silber is a man of average height and medium build, clean-cut, edgy, like flint, and a partial amputee, one arm. He told us how it was not really “our place” to decide what Dr. King’s wishes were, and asked who were we to judge; he said the King Center was no more than temporary housing and he didn’t know how long it would be around, but he knew that Boston University would be there throughout time, into perpetuity. Basically, those were his points.
But what right did he have to tell the family that a man’s legacy is temporary; that his work, and we, his heirs, my mother, are temporary?
Martin and I moved uncomfortably in our seats. Wood and leather creaked. We’d heard this man was stern. He said things that to our ears sounded self-righteous. He said, “When my father died, he had a very special document that was written in German and he left it, willed it to my brother. You know, that really upset me because my brother didn’t even speak German and I spoke German. I was the one proficient in German literature.” Dr. Silber talked about how he had to accept that, and live with it, and what right did we have to come in and go against our father’s wishes? I was staying with his logic until he brought Daddy and our situation into it. He’d found a way to invent the wishes of my father, to invest them with his own brand of logic and interpretation.
And both Martin and I could see he was intractable. We left the meeting deflated.
Dr. Silber, as we knew he would be on his home court, was effective in rallying support, in effect villainizing the King family and King Center. People who otherwise probably would’ve been supportive got caught up in the issue being polarized. “Dr. King belonged to everyone.” “He was a son of Boston too.” Who were we, then, coming to tell them what to do? It got to that level, at which you can’t win. At least, I can’t. People lose their perspective, and the plainer aspects of right and wrong and ethics and morals, and none of that matters anymore. I’ve often wondered, since Daddy was held in such high esteem, if there wasn’t some inevitable backlash against the next generation, his children. I do know we all learned to walk on eggshells.
What I don’t know is if anything could have been done differently to salvage that situation. We were up against it, there in Boston: the case was so technically driven that even the lawyers, never mind the jury, hardly knew what was going on. The judge gave the jury instructions that, in my opinion, were confusing. It was very technical, and the feeling was that she, the judge, seemed sympathetic to BU and President Silber. I felt there was no way we could have won up there.
So, we lost that portion of the King papers—the physical property but not the copyright. We never physically had them, but the principle of losing something that seemed rightfully ours was disheartening. But we moved on.
We had another incident over intellectual property rights with the late documentary producer Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize. I met with Henry Hampton and his people up in Boston, and it wasn’t so much Henry, but rather his people, who believed that they had a right to exploit my father’s intellectual property and not get permission. We were very clear: If it is truly fair use, go about your business, but once you start making Dr. King the focal point, using his copyrighted speeches and selling the video in Blockbuster stores, as you are doing now, we’ve got an issue. Our policy is simple: If you make money, the Estate should get the industry’s standard royalty.
In January 1997, we announced that we had entered into a co-publishing agreement with Time Warner Trade Publishing to make available to the public my father’s vast body of writings and to re-publish his out-of-print books. We made this arrangement in hopes of introducing his message of nonviolence to future generations.
With this agreement we really had an obligation to protect our rights. Many decisions hinged on the following question: Now that we are in business with a major multimedia publisher and player, what will that publisher look like paying for rights we in the past haven’t been able to protect?
The National Park Service came to us in 1980 at the request of Mother to manage the historic district in which the King Center resides. Initially, once legislation was passed in Congress officially designating this district, the NPS had scant resources to maintain it. The district was the stepchild of the Park Service, because my father still was not seen by many conservative politicians as being worthy of having any national honors. This was before the creation of the King holiday. Consequently, the NPS only had a few of its people operating from one of the row houses across from my father’s birth home and it gave tours through that home.
Over the years our locale became a more popular tourist destination, and it attracted more resources; as it attracted more resources, the NPS started acquiring more real estate. Eventually, the National Park Service became the largest landholder in this immediate vicinity. They knew about our interest in building the King Dream Center, but they were interested in building a Park Service Visitors Center that would house exhibits on my father. Two centers would be redundant.
One of the NPS’s first big moves was to acquire the old Ebenezer Church through a land-swapping arrangement. In this land swap, the National Park Service got a long-term lease on the original historic church, adjacent to the King Center, in exchange for land that it owned that would go to Ebenezer to build a new church. I think Ebenezer got cash as well. Maybe it was a good move for Ebenezer. I knew as the land-swapping deal was being made that I was blinded by my strong personal ties to the old church and my family. I’d seen my grandfather preach there. I’d listened to the music of my father’s sermons there. My grandmother had been shot down there. Now you can’t even worship there as part of an ongoing regular church service—which especially affects visitors from around the globe who have never had the opportunity to worship in this historic sanctuary—because of the agreement with the NPS, which is governed by separation of church and state issues.
Because the Olympics were coming to Atlanta in ’96, the Park Service wanted to have the best face on the King Historic District, particularly for the foreign visitors. The city of Atlanta wanted its best face forward too. The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one reason Atlanta was chosen as the venue for the ’96 Olympics in the first place. The NPS sought a $12 million allocation from Congress to make improvements to the King Historic District, including the construction of its proposed visitors center. They solicited my mother’s support, saying it was crucial for its success. Mother finally agreed, but she had two requirements for her support. First, the King Center had to be given control over the exhibits at the new visitors center. We wanted to make sure that exhibits were consistent with the Center’s message. Second, a portion of the allocation had to be given to the King Center to help with the refurbishment of its infrastructure in preparation for the Olympics. My mother was led to believe that these conditions had been agreed to. But in the end, the NPS got the $12 million allocation and these conditions were not met. However, a few months into the conflict Congressman John Lewis facilitated a meeting between the Park Service and us, where we resolved our differences. As Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt expressed at the dedication of the visitors center, sometimes struggle and conflict in the end serve to strengthen a relationship through better understanding.
Ever since that light hit me outside Room 306 at the former Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum) in the early 1990s, ever since I stood on that balcony where Daddy stood, I knew eventually I’d ask, “Why?” and “How?” I knew when I asked it wouldn’t be for revenge or profit. I would seek only to help right the listing ship of my own family.
My cousin Isaac Farris, Jr., was the impetus—he convinced me to look at the assassination. I had busied myself with issues around the King Center, but I hadn’t forgotten that light hitting me on the balcony. Isaac was the first from our circle to read William Pepper’s Orders to Kill. In this book, Pepper details a broad conspiracy involving organized crime, governmental agencies, and individual coconspirators behind the assassination of my father. Isaac called me and said, “Dex, I think Pepper’s got something. I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, but he’s got something.” As a result, I said I’d read the book. Isaac was aggressive and said, “Why not set up a meeting with Pepper?”
Pepper flew in from London and we met in the living room of Isaac’s home. Isaac, Phil, and I were at the meeting. We listened to him intently. After he left, we came up with a plan of action. Isaac looked at me gravely. “The first thing is to confront James Earl Ray,” he said. There is a closeness between me and Isaac. Goes back to childhood. He was my first playmate and confidant, outside of my brother and sisters. Also, he’s my blood relative. We battled. We played together. We took whippings. Our parents were near-interchangeable. There is a trust, a respect, a knowledge beyond the spoken. “First thing is to confront Ray…” Isaac said.
The media proceeded to paint our quest for answers as our getting some type of payoff, where we were puppets and Pepper was puppeteer. We were doing it so a movie would be made, another example of trying to cash in on our name. Of course none of this was true. But, unfortunately, many people tend to rely on what they read in newspapers. I grew up trusting the media because they had been fairly generous to my family and to the Civil Rights Movement; they had, for the most part, kept a spotlight on the injustices of the day. As a child growing up in the eyes of the media, constantly having photojournalists around, I bonded with some of them and felt very comfortable around them. But now that some in the media have turned against my family, I have become wary of a few bad apples that unfortunately can sometimes spoil the whole bunch. I know how often our intentions and views have been cleverly misrepresented. This is not to say that all of our coverage has been bad by any means. For instance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article entitled “Tasteful Marketing of MLK,” which discussed in detail the positive approach we have taken toward the licensing of my father’s name, image, and copyrighted words. Now I read the paper and watch television critically. I don’t swallow everything. I can’t blame people for not knowing the interior motivation of my mother, my siblings, my extended family. But how can it be hard to understand that like any other family in our situation, we wanted to learn the truth behind my father’s murder? We needed to confront the issue of the assassination, look at it squarely; we would not shy away from it just because people got upset about it and said, “Don’t look any closer at this.” If there was nothing to hide, why not?
What kind of man would I be if I went along with that? Who could respect such a man? You can put seeking the truth off to one side, especially within the same generation, or, in our case, my uncles, my aunt, my mother, my grandparents—they put it off to the side. My siblings and I did too, for a long time. But then there comes a time when you just can’t keep hiding from it anymore, when it’s affecting your life so profoundly, so deeply, it no longer can be ignored except at peril of your own life, health, sanity. Even if people make sour faces, even if the pundits say you’re “wrong,” even if sanctified folk say it’s “part of God’s plan.” In putting it off to the side, we’d left Daddy on the battlefield. We hadn’t gathered his remains, taken them home, honored them properly. I was elected by my family to go over books like Orders to Kill to try to make sense of it all.
Most people view my father’s assassination as a world event, another moment of collective horror, as it surely was. But as time has passed, they seem to have forgotten that it was equally a very personal event; that it was the defining tragedy in the lives of my mother, my siblings, and me. We needed closure to find real peace.