Politics

Misusing MLK's Image to Promote a 'Freedom 2 Twerk' Party in Flint

January 17, 2014, 6:18 AM by  Darrell Dawsey

Without question, Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., had every right to express dismay earlier this week at a Photoshopped image of her father that was being used to promote a now-cancelled booty-shake party up in Flint. 

The flyer, which was promoting some ridiculous kiddie disco dubbed “Freedom 2 Twerk,” featured King’s head on the body of a man wearing a huge necklace and throwing up the “westside” sign with his fingers. In an interview with an Atlanta TV station, Bernice King called the flyer “appalling.” 

While I admit that I chuckled hard when I first saw the flyer — for all its irreverence, the flyer reminded me of just how young King really was (26 at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott) when he took on the mantle of a movement — I won’t begrudge anyone, let alone his child, their right to  deem it tacky and inappropriate. 

But as tasteless as we might find the flyer (and the others like it that seem to pop up every year now), there’s also an argument to be made that Bernice King and her siblings have done at least as much in recent years to shame and stain their father’s image and legacy as all the ignorant-ass party promoters between here and Genesse County combined.

At the heart of the critique of the Kings is, unsurprisingly, money. For more than a decade now, critics have accused the King family of exploiting MLK’s legacy by attempting to wring every last cent possible out of his memory — at the expense of advancing his message.

In 2003, for instance, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker lambastes the family for “relentless profiteering” and accuses them of turning “King’s legacy into a profit center — I Have A Dream Inc.”

A Domestic Squabble

About six years ago, the family fell into an ugly domestic legal squabble, with Bernice and her brother Martin III filing a lawsuit against sibling Dexter King. The suit accused Dexter of mismanaging funds for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolence and Social Change and allowing the center to fall into disrepair.

Last spring, meanwhile, the King family shocked (and, yes, “appalled”) observers nationwide when they refused to grant license to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation to continue to use King’s name. The Foundation had spearheaded a six-year, multimillion-dollar effort to create the monument to King in the National Mall in Washington, DC. 

They even got Roland Martin’s ascot in a knot:

King’s surviving children – Dexter, Bernice and MLK III – control the copyrights to their father’s images and words through a for-profit entity, King, Inc., which was set up after his death to handle all affairs of his estate.

There have been a number of contentious moments between the MLK foundation and King, Inc., over the last few years. At one point as the memorial was ready to be dedicated, King, Inc. had all of Dr. King’s books removed from the bookstore on the site of the memorial. The King children wanted to control the bookstore and reap all profits from the selling of merchandise.

All of this despite the foundation paying MLK children through King, Inc., $2.7 million to use the likeness of King and his quotes on the memorial on the National Mall.

Fighting Harry Belafonte

And in probably their most ignominious move, King’s heirs decided a few years ago that it would be a good idea to take on singer Harry Belafonte — a titan of the human-rights movement in his own right — to prevent him from selling some of King’s documents to raise money for an anti-gang program.

This is the same Belafonte who was one of Dr. King’s closest confidants. The same Belafonte who marched with King, who underwrote King’s work, who maintained an insurance policy for King on behalf of those very same ingrate children.

Tensions got so bad that Belafonte — who accused the family of disinviting him from Coretta Scott King’s funeral after he criticized George Bush — had to sue last October to keep the King family from trying to take papers that MLK himself had given the entertainer. Scholar and author Taylor Branch, who’s written extensively on the civil-rights movement, called the family’s legal challenge to Belafonte “sad to the point of tragedy.”

Is that then the equivalent of a tacky club flyer that transposes Dr. King’s head onto some young hustler’s body? 

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying it’s cool to mindlessly trash King’s image. It is not.

Martin Luther King fought for black people’s right to live and work as fully formed American citizens, as equals, not to jiggle butt cheeks. I am a child of those civil-rights struggles, having been sent to college on a four-year scholarship provided by the late Rosa Parks. I would never minimize the influence or importance of what Parks, King and others taught the world. 

But in the same way that the legacies of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington survive having those men’s images plastered all over President’s Day retail sales circulars every year, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. will endure tasteless party promotions and bad Photoshop jobs. 

Bernice King, graceful and compassionate in her reaction to the flyer, was right when she said of the “Freedom 2 Twerk” promoters that King “would have worked to elevate them, to connect with them, and bring them into the movement.” That was indeed part of his legacy.

But if his estate’s chief aim today is simply to cash in on his image, how does that place King’s family on any loftier perch than the Flint party pushers?

Dr. King’s family should indeed work to publicly preserve his legacy. But in doing so, they also should hold themselves to a higher standard than those who would pervert it. 



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