Not Fit for a King !

By John Greenwald

Visitors to the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta last week were astonished to find it locked up tight. A sign posted a block away declared that tours of the two-story Queen Anne house had been "suspended until further notice," although park rangers were still conducting sidewalk lectures about the property.

The lockout was the immediate result of a dispute between the Park Service and the King family over a new visitor center being built on the Martin Luther King historic site -- a 23-acre parcel that encompasses the birth home, the Ebenezer Baptist Church, King's tomb and the family-run King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. But in a broader sense, it was symbolic of the troubles that have beset the legacy of the slain civil rights leader in his hometown even as the U.S. prepares to celebrate his birthday next week.

Inevitably, the much publicized showdown prompted the larger question of whether Coretta Scott King, 67, and her son Dexter, 33 -- the third of her four children, who heads the King Center -- still have the political standing and moral authority to represent Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision. In a news conference about the Park Service dispute, Coretta King declared that "the same evil forces that destroyed Martin Luther King are now trying to destroy my family."

Ironically, the blowup occurred after an amicable 14-year partnership between the Park Service and the King family, which invited the federal agency to assist in administering everything except the Center in 1980. Since then, the site has become the Park Service's third most popular historic attraction (after the Statue of Liberty and Philadelphia's Independence Hall). The visitor center, which Coretta King originally supported, was proposed to alleviate a serious shortage of parking and toilet facilities before the onslaught of 1996 Olympic crowds. The Park Service began construction in November but, the King family claims, failed to include them in the final plans.

At that point, the Kings declared that the visitor center would pre-empt their own ambitious plans for an "interactive" museum -- and the battle was joined. The family's position infuriates community leaders, who have watched the Park Service renovate many neighborhood homes and take an active role in this low-income area, while they regard the Kings as standoffish outsiders. "We hardly see any of these people," says Mtamanika Youngblood, who heads a local historic-preservation program. "For them to unilaterally decide that the National Park Service cannot stay in this community is not acceptable to us." As for the Kings' proposed museum, city councilwoman Debi Starnes asserts that "we have seen no plans, no timetable, no financing package."

What Atlanta has seen, unfortunately, is the King Center struggling on from year to year with little apparent direction. Founded by Coretta King in 1968 to instill nonviolent principles in future generations of civil rights activists, the Center now has 60 employees and an annual budget of $5 million. But grants are shrinking, the deficit is rising (from $400,000 in 1993 to $600,000 last year), and King, who like her son takes no salary from the Center, spends much of her time fund raising. The Center is now chiefly an archive that houses King papers and memorabilia and sponsors King Week, an annual celebration of his life. Declares David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer prizewinning biography of King: "Given the Center's 20-year record of not pulling off any visibly successful programs, I don't believe anybody should be sanguine about its ability to put together a museum even if the Park Service didn't exist."

Yet Dexter King believes nothing less will do justice to his father. "If the Park Service gets its way, a majority of the tourists who come here will leave with a superficial understanding of my father's teachings, history and legacy," he said last week. "They will learn about the Martin Luther King Jr. of 'I have a dream,' but they won't learn much about his leadership of labor struggles ((or)) protests against the Vietnam War. They won't learn much about what he said about racism, economic oppression and the power of nonviolence." Moreover, King charges, the Park Service has in effect been annexing the historic site by buying up neighborhood houses.

To finance his own grand vision of interactive "edu-tainment" about the civil rights era, King has been consulting Oppenheimer Capital about structuring a tax-exempt bond offering that could eventually make the King historical site self-supporting. (It now receives Park Service funds -- another source of friction.) But with the Olympic deadline looming, many Atlantans fear that Dexter King's own dream may turn out to be too little, too late.

With reporting by Sophfronia Scott Gregory/Atlanta