What's really going on?

A few years ago, I was appalled to learn of the personal history of Martin Luther King Jr's children. Its hard to fill those shoes, we all know - but his children seem to experience hardship that is hard to justify. Every black family (hell, every family) has dysfunctional behavior, bickering among themselves, and disagreements, but at the end of the day you love your relatives if only for the fact that you share common ancestors. Being that their ancestor is one of the most acclaimed Civil Rights and humanitarian leaders in history, I guess I expected more from them. I was upset that one of his daughters died relatively young, and had not passed on her father's legacy by having children. I was surprised that MLK III had just gotten married and produced the first King grandchild. And I was very disappointed by the lawsuits and countersuits that they've filed against each other.

This morning, as I was reading my subscribed blogs, I came across this story:

Harry Belafonte was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and a follower of the civil rights movement but now Belafonte has come up against the King estate
over King memorabilia that he was set to auction off at Sotheby's. The
papers include a three-page handwritten draft of King's first anti-Vietnam
war speech in 1967 and notes found in his suit pocket after his 1968
assassination. Belafonte said the papers were given to him by King and his
late wife, Coretta Scott King, and that he was planning to donate the
proceeds of the sale to charity. But the King estate blocked the sale of the
papers, which were estimated to bring in up to 1.3 million dollars.

The estate believes the documents are "the property of the estate of Martin Luther King Jr" and were wrongly acquired. Belafonte withdrew the documents from auction. The Telegraph reports that the once-cordial relationship between the King family and Belafonte went wrong after the death of Mrs Scott King in 2006. Belafonte was asked to give the eulogy at her funeral but later was uninvited.

King's children have been at odds with each other over the estate's assets and have filed lawsuits against each other. In 2006, the King estate put 10,000 items from its collection up for public auction but withdrew them after a last-minute bid of 32 million dollars from the City of Atlanta to keep them at Morehouse College, King's alma mater.

This is really sad, that after the blood, sweat, tears, jail time and lives given in pursuit of their father's dream, that the King children are carrying on this way. I'm not saying that they don't have a right to protect their father's image and control his property, but they can't control everything. And the manner in which they're attempting to control these things just comes across as a greedy attempt to gain financially from their father's importance without regard for the tarnish they're bringing to the King name. King's legacy to our society is priceless and can never be bought or sold. I wish that the King children could see that.