The spiritual and intellectual legacy of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. could have been a lot more influential than it has been. His cause of equality, economic justice and peace have had to largely get by without his words due to choices made by his family and the establishment at the King Center, their decision to sue anyone who have presented his words without their permission and, in some cases, payment. The decision to use his words as an economic resource for those with a legal claim to them instead of the raw material from which a movement to push his causes has silenced his witness for the very things he sacrificed his life for. I think it has also distorted and diminished his place in history.
The King family pushed making a holiday out of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. ironically, in the context of the great Civil Rights Movement an occasion to close schools, a day to mount empty ceremonies and parades or, in most cases, to just have a day off from work if even that. That the greatest success of those with a legal claim to his words and voice is the pushing of the holiday instead of fighting against the reversal of what he lived and died for is nothing to celebrate.
I think their activities have, if anything, diminished the legacy of the man and his position in the world today. I suspect it is a product of lawyers and other advisers giving bad advice to his widow and children and seducing them with promises of riches. That decision doesn't take into account that those with the greatest interest in The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.'s words being heard had no money, the causes he promoted aren't profit making, they are wealth distributing, they are on behalf of people who have no money to spend for the use of anyone's words. That is something I'm certain he would have known and I can't believe he would have agreed with the decisions that they made and still push as an automatic policy. I can think of many of his words I'd rather post instead of this piece but I can't afford to pay for their use or to challenge the King Center for the right of people he struggled for to read or hear them. I wonder what he would have charged an audience to hear him speak the words that in so many cases he had to fight against the racist establishment to say. It is the cruelest of ironies that, now, it is his family and their business associates who do to his words what the racists tired to do while he was alive.
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