Do note: The $800,000 charge wasn’t for the creation of the statue itself, which was made in China. No, the family just charged $800,000 to use his image and words. The cost of the statue was separate.
WASHINGTON — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 to use his words and image — and at least one scholar thinks that Dr. King would find such an arrangement offensive.
The memorial is being paid for almost entirely through a fund-raising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.
“I don’t think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has been paid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington,” said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. King. “. . . [He would've been] absolutely scandalized.”
Financial documents revealed that the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by the King family. They also showed that a $71,700 “management” fee was paid to the family estate in 2003.
Some of the largest contributors to the National Memorial Project Foundation include the government of the District of Columbia, bailed-out companies like Fannie Mae and Merrill Lynch, and bailed-out automaker Government Motors (GM). Additionally, Congress matched up the to the first $10 million. So taxpayers funded the project, too. Or rather, they funded the King family’s royalty demands.
25. August 2011 at 12:17 am
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY????????????
26. August 2011 at 2:25 pm
Reminds me of the statue of Stalin that once graced Prague. The monument is an embarrassing pastiche of the type of symbolism that is all too familiar to me from my decade in China- a man towering over us plebs, not deigning to even look at us, back straight with arms in determined, static pose. None of the heavy lifting we looking up are accustomed to, but then he doesn’t seem to acknowledge those doing the fighting, the striving, the suffering. But then the point of such memorials is to mythologise such heroes to strike an eternal distance between them and us. At least the mass-murderer Mao is always shown finished, with his feet moving slightly forward as with those showing the pharaohs. Compare MLK simply standing in stone with those Michelangelo had wresting themselves from their stone prisons. But then, because in the end the memorial has no honest, sincere meaning, $800,000 had to be spent simply to cover the superfluous blocks on either side with quotations.
28. August 2011 at 7:38 pm
Just another way for the tax-payer to spread the wealth and paid the king’s family welfare money.