King family draws $800K from D.C. memorial project

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.

It’s an arrangement one leading scholar says King would have found offensive.

The memorial is being paid for almost entirely with private money in a fundraising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation. The monument 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 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 nephew, Isaac Farris, denied the family was benefitting financially. Farris said all of the proceeds have gone to the Atlanta-based King Center, where he is chief executive officer and president.

“This isn’t about his kids profiteering,” Farris said.

According to financial documents, the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by King’s family. Documents also show a management fee of $71,700 was paid to the family estate in 2003.

Farris said the arrangement was made out of concerns that fundraising for the monument was indirectly undercutting donations to the King Center.

“Every day, Fortune 500 companies are saying they’re helping us by contributing, but it’s going to the [monument] project,” Farris said. “Spiritually, it’s the same. But technically, it’s not the King Center.”

King’s son Dexter serves as the center’s chairman. King’s two other surviving children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, are lifetime members of the board of directors.

For years, King’s family has fiercely protected his legacy, suing for a share of the proceeds from the use of his words and images in merchandise and publications. But historians and the National Park Service said they are not aware of any other case in which builders of a national monument had to license the image of their subject.

National Park Service spokesman Bill Line said licensing fees are “unfamiliar territory” for a memorial that will eventually be turned over to the government. The Park Service was unaware of the fees but plans to discuss their potential implications, he said.

Harry Johnson, president of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, said that the fees were not a burden and that the foundation has a good relationship with the King family.

The foundation hopes to begin building the $120 million memorial this year. It has raised $104 million of that so far, including $10 million from Congress.

Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which gave $1 million to the project in 2007, said the group was not aware of the licensing arrangement but is now asking that its gift be used only to support the memorial’s construction.

“We think the memorial is an important and overdue recognition, but we really don’t want to get involved with relationships with the family and their estate,” Rimel said.

Charon Darris, a New York banker and alumnus of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, said he raised about $1,000 for the memorial project with friends and did not have a problem with the fees.

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable amount,” he said. “Ultimately, the kids lost their father, the wife lost her husband.”

— Staff writer Eric Stirgus contributed to this article.