King 'Monument to Greed'
AP
Last Updated: 3:29 AM, April 18, 2009
Posted: 3:25 AM, April 18, 2009
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/king_monument_to_greed_4DTe3bj9QcHd7Y2Hpvmp1O
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.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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