When Americans celebrated the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1986, his widow, Coretta Scott King, encouraged businesses, banks and stock markets to close. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been elevated to the pantheon of American heroes, and Coretta Scott King, idealistically, hoped the holiday would enable the United States to “realize its destiny as … the first nonviolent society in human history.” She believed that Americans needed to sacrifice consumerist desires to create this nonviolent society.
Today, not only is it evident that the United States is not a nonviolent society, but King’s legacy has been thoroughly commercialized. From Walmart and Amazon, to the King Center in Atlanta, consumers can find an array of T-shirts, keychains, mugs, posters and more, all decorated with King’s words and image.
Yet, although Americans can own a shirt emblazoned with King’s words, it is the King estate that owns his words. It zealously guards his intellectual property so it can license the right to quote him to the highest bidders. In 1999, Apple used King in its “Think Different” campaign, and Dodge used King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon to advertise trucks during the 2018 Super Bowl. The founders of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall paid the estate about $800,000 to quote King and use his image — on his own memorial.
Looking at King’s personal view of materialism — and the history of how his legacy has been commercialized — reveals how far the United States has strayed from his message.
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, King preached at the Riverside Church in New York City. He said: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” Unafraid to turn words into action, a year later, he urged Memphis to boycott Coca-Cola, among other companies whose hiring practices he said were unfair.
Shortly after King’s death, his widow established the King Center memorial in 1968.
When Congress passed a bill in 1983 establishing a federal holiday to mark King’s birthday, it also created the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission, which was dedicated to ensuring that Americans appropriately observed a holiday dedicated to racial equality and nonviolence. Coretta Scott King, who led the commission of appointed political and community leaders, thought that most “Americans will not have the faintest idea of how to celebrate” the holiday, as she wrote to the Advertising Council, a nonprofit that created public service announcements.
To guide the nation, the commission promoted the holiday with the slogan “Living the Dream” and urged Americans to fly the American flag, pray, commit to nonviolence and march in parades dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. In 1994, with President Bill Clinton’s support, the commission transformed the holiday into a day of community service.
Then — nearly three decades after King had spoken against materialism — his son Dexter Scott King laid out the strategy for selling his dream. In a March 16, 1995, meeting at the U.S. Capitol, Dexter Scott King spoke to the commission’s operations committee.
There, Dexter Scott King made clear that he meant to package and market his father’s legacy as if it were a brand, like Coca-Cola. He told the meeting that the King Center is “moving more toward the ‘Coca-Cola’ scenario, if you will, where we create the formula or the syrup and package it so that it can be disseminated so that King in Japan looks like King in Seattle. In other words, the continuity and the uniformity is there wherever you are.” Like Coke, all one had to do was mix the formula with water and sweetener, and voilà, the same product could be reproduced around the world — even if it meant watering down and sweetening King’s radical message for domestic and international audiences.
Dexter Scott King already managed the King estate and held influential positions within the King Commission and the King Center as well. The latter organization had accumulated a $1.75 million debt by 1992 and Dexter Scott King sought to relieve this financial pressure. Before the “Coca-Cola scenario,” the estate sued Boston University for the return of a collection of King’s papers. It lost, and it also lost a case against CBS News, which sold a video that contained news footage of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
But by 1995, Dexter had visited Memphis to learn about the Elvis Presley estate. The message he took away was the need to “find out how to package King in a way that you don’t lose the intensity and the reverence that people place on it.” Soon after, the King estate vigorously and more successfully enforced the copyrights to King’s work. This restricted access to King’s words, thereby increasing demand so that the estate could charge expensive fees to quote King.
The commercialization and standardization of King’s legacy did not go uncontested. In January 1995, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights activist and political leader, proclaimed that King’s “legacy should not be bought and sold like a box of soap.” Fellow civil rights activists asserted that King’s legacy should not be so easily simplified.
There was a commercial logic to Dexter Scott King’s strategy. Coretta Scott King had been reluctant to capitalize on the potential value of her husband’s intellectual property, and when she stepped down from leading the center in 1994, Dexter Scott King took charge. He criticized National Park Service’s plans to build a visitors center opposite King’s crypt in Atlanta, because he planned to build an interactive museum on the same site. He also restricted the King Commission’s access to his father’s words and image, forcing a crisis within the commission that directly led to the organization disbanding in 1996, due to a lack of King family support.
By that year, King merchandise was available at the Atlanta Olympics. A multimillion-dollar book deal with Time-Warner followed in 1997, the center’s annual deficit was reduced to $50,000, and the estate put King’s papers on the market. Even after the city of Atlanta paid $32 million for them, the estate kept the copyright and continued to charge steep fees to use King’s words.
However, not everyone can, or is willing to, pay. The 2014 hit film “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, steered clear of using King’s words, for fear of being sued by the estate. When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016, it displayed no major artifacts from King’s personal papers or collection. The museum did not have the “kind of money on hand” to pay for items, such as King’s Nobel Peace Prize and traveling Bible, that the estate showed to curators.
Some, such as Andrew Young, one of King’s closest advisers, have supported the family and the direction the estate has taken, noting that King, as he had promised, did not leave much behind after his death. And the historian Clayborne Carson, while expressing reservations, has argued that the estate has prevented the misuse of King’s words in political advertising.
To be fair, Dexter Scott King’s strategy showed a knack for business and anticipated the coming information technology revolution and its effect on intellectual property. And for a price, King’s dream is still accessible.
Yet his Coca-Cola plan is a far cry from Coretta Scott King’s vision of a consumerism-free holiday, and even further still from the night in April 1968 when King urged Memphis to boycott Coca-Cola. Those who heard King speak that night did not know that the next day, James Earl Ray would assassinate him, and that King’s legacy would, from that point on, be shaped by forces beyond his control.
The copyright on his words will expire in 2058.
This piece was originally published in Made By History at the Washington Post under the title "The Strategy for Selling Martin Luther King's Dream."