King legacy has fallen on hard times

As civil-rights leaders and politicians heralded the life and accomplishments of Coretta Scott King on Tuesday, one of her more prominent legacies was suspended in a state of controversy and disrepair.

The King Center in Atlanta, which she founded in 1969 to perpetuate the struggle and the ideals of her murdered husband, is more than $11 million behind on maintenance, including leaks where some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic papers are stored. Rather than promoting King's message, its most conspicuous public role in recent years has been to serve as the arena in which King family members battle for control of — and profits from — their family history.

Two of King's children have proposed selling the center to the National Park Service, which manages the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and King family home nearby. Two other children, including Martin Luther King III, are trying to block the sale. Meanwhile conditions at the center, which is built around King's tomb and a reflecting pool, continue to decline, and many observers say the center's lofty mission of promulgating King's vision of peace and justice is an ever-fading memory.

"I know that she wanted the King Center to be her legacy, and I'm sad to say that's very much in doubt at the moment," said Digby Diehl, a California writer who was working with Mrs. King on her memoirs in recent years. "All of the social programs and activities of the center ceased years ago. What's going to happen now to it — it's a football. I'm very sad for her that she had to die watching that go on."

Mrs. King founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change shortly after her husband's death, and helped to raise $8 million to establish its current location in 1981, in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood. It was originally envisioned as a focal point for community outreach, educational programs and social research modeled after King's life.

As leader of the center for more than 25 years, Mrs. King made it a repository for her husband's archives and other historic documents related to the Civil Rights movement, and used it as headquarters for her drive to establish a federal holiday in her husband's name.

Much has changed since she stepped down in 1994 and ceded control to her son Dexter. Saying he feared his father's message was being corrupted, he fought government efforts to build a visitors center nearby, spurned the King holiday movement as a competitor to fundraising and continued enforcing the family's copyright of King's "I have a dream" speech. The family engineered a multimillion-dollar deal with Time Warner in 1997 to market recordings of King, and soon was licensing his image for television commercials and other advertisements.

The center's civil-rights work seemed to suffer. Much of the staff is gone, and community leaders are at a loss to name any social or educational programs it sponsors. Phone calls and e-mails to the center were not returned Tuesday.