A dispiriting family dispute
Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is too enormous and enduring to be tarnished by the petty skirmishes of his descendants, but it’s nonetheless dispiriting to see his three children duke it out over his property.
At issue for the last couple of years has been a traveling Bible King used, and a Nobel Peace Prize medal he was awarded in 1964. King’s two sons, Dexter and Martin III, wanted to sell the items, even though the Bible was used by President Obama during his second inaugural in 2013, and would be just about beyond price even if it hadn’t been used by America’s first black president to take the oath of office.
A Nobel Peace Prize medal? It doesn’t require corrective lenses to see why you would want to keep that in the family, as King’s daughter, Bernice, wants to see happen with both artifacts.
The tiff was apparently so intense former President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgian who knows a thing or two about interceding in sticky disputes, was called in to mediate.
The squabble came to an ambigious end Monday, as an Atlanta judge signed an order saying the items had to be handed over to Martin III, in his capacity as the chairman of his father’s estate. There was no direction, however, on what should be done with them from there.
Whatever the fate of these two invaluable relics, we can only hope they end up in good hands, whether they stay within the King family or go on display in some museum, and the King children can find a small measure of the peace and reconciliation their father spent his all-too-brief life promoting.