MLK rolling in his grave?

If you were the children of a famous, widely beloved person, and a group wanted to raise $120 million to build a memorial in their honor, how would you react? I don't know about you, but I'd be greatly honored and would ask how I could help. But the children of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a different reaction. They wanted money, and lots of it, in order to allow the use of their father's words and image. The cost of a proposed King monument, which is to be constructed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is being financed almost entirely by donations that, so far, have added up to about $104 million. That includes $10 million in taxpayers' money. And the tribute payment to the King family: $800,000. I think that's disgusting, and so does Cambridge University historian David Garrow, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of King. "I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family ... I don't think any other group of family ancestors has been paid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," Garrow told the AP. "One would think any family would be so thrilled to have their forefather celebrated and memorialized in D.C. that it would never dawn on them to ask for a penny." Clearly, Garrow hasn't spent much time around the King children. They've become a running joke over the years, squabbling among themselves, hiring locksmiths to keep one another out of the King Center in Atlanta and suing one another over the money they've accumulated by feasting on their father's good name. A few years back, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a series of articles about the King Center finances, reporting that even though the center was in need of repairs, cut back its civil rights programming and spent more money than it took in most years, MLK son Dexter King was paid a salary of $180,000, and his brother, Martin III, took in $150,000. That doesn't count millions the center gave to a for-profit company run by Dexter King, according to the paper. It's all an unseemly mess, made worse by the appearance that the King children are willing to do anything for the almighty dollar. I hesitate to suggest this, mainly out of fear that they'll act on it, but I wonder how much the King kids would charge to have a set of Golden Arches erected over their parent's graves? It's all about the Benjamins, right?