Son of Martin Luther King Jr clashed with siblings in fight for control of illustrious father’s legacy

The youngest son of Martin Luther King clashed with his siblings as they jostled for control of their father’s legacy.

Dexter King with assassin James Earl Ray in 1997.

In 1997 Dexter King visited a prison in Tennessee to meet the man convicted of murdering his father nearly 30 years before.

“Did you kill my father?” asked the youngest son of civil right leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr in a widely publicised meeting.

James Earl Ray answered that he did not. “I believe you and my family believes you,” said King, promising to do everything in his power to make sure “justice will prevail”.

Ray had pleaded guilty a year after King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Several days later he recanted, explaining that his lawyers had coerced him, and in 1997 the King family called for a retrial, lobbying president Bill Clinton for an investigation. It found in 2000 that Ray had acted alone, but in a TV interview Dexter argued that Lyndon Johnson, who was president in 1968, had been part of a military and governmental conspiracy to kill his father.

It was about the only thing the family did agree on but, like most of King’s endeavours to keep his father’s flame alive, it drew criticism. “Nothing connected to Martin Luther King Jr is beyond Dexter King’s thirst for exploitation,” wrote American journalist Cynthia Tucker. “Even if it means helping his father’s killer go free.”

At the time he was president of the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the King Centre, which was set up by his mother, Coretta Scott King, a few months after the assassination. Coretta announced in 1989 that Dexter would replace her as president, but four months later he resigned after they fought.

Dexter King with his mother Coretta Scott King during the 2003 King Holiday observance in Atlanta.

He returned in 1994 when the centre was in disarray and proceeded to make drastic cuts and sought alternative sources of income.

The family were wrought with conflict almost from the moment of King’s assassination; the trauma, Dexter said, had left them defensive and wary. “We weren’t kidders any more,” he wrote in his memoir, Growing Up King (2003), the publication of which irked his siblings. “All of us developed this caution, this reserve, that affected our closest interpersonal relationships.”

Dexter Scott King was born in 1961 in an area of northeast Atlanta dubbed Vine City and known as a “negro enclave” in the era of segregation. The family had moved there from Montgomery, Alabama, where the civil rights leader was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, after which his youngest son, and third child of four, was named.

Although Dexter’s early years were roiled in uncertainty and the threat of violence, he said: “We didn’t know we were ‘negroes’, or if we did, we didn’t know exactly what that meant.”

And though they discerned that their parents were doing something “important”, it was not until Dexter was seven that the reality hit. On April 4, 1968, he was watching TV with his 10-year-old brother, Martin III, when a news alert flashed their father’s face across the screen. They ran into the kitchen, where their mother was on the phone. “It was a very chaotic and traumatic period,” said Dexter, who recalled seeing his father’s coffin on the floor of an aircraft when his body was returned from Memphis to Atlanta. “I asked my mom, ‘What’s that?’,” he said. “She explained, ‘Your dad is going to be sleeping when you see him and he won’t be able to speak with you. He’s gone home to be with God’.”

Coretta founded King Inc to allow the family control over King’s estate, which was worth millions of dollars, and the King Centre, located in the shadow of his old church in Atlanta. Dexter would play a key role in both organisations. After studying at his father’s alma mater, Morehouse College (he left before graduating) he became a lawyer. In 1995 the family signed an agreement that transferred control of their intellectual property to King Inc, but Dexter was accused of breaching it when he received $US200,000 in royalties for his memoir.

He wanted to use his position to address poverty, racism and violence, but his aspirations were overshadowed by court cases. In the 1990s he led a lawsuit against CBS News when it used excerpts from his father’s 1963 I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and he fought the National Park Service over plans to construct a welcome centre adjacent to the King Centre, on a site where he envisioned building a multimedia theme park (mocked as “I Have a Dreamland” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

When Coretta died in 2006 and Yolanda, the eldest child, a year later, the siblings’ relations further deteriorated. In 2008 Bernice and Martin sued Dexter over mishandling the estate and the division of a $US32m sale of their father’s archives. Dexter, who had stepped down from the King Centre in 2003, counter-sued Bernice, who ran Coretta’s estate and had refused to provide a biographer with a collection of her photos and letters, despite a $US1.4m book deal Dexter had brokered.

Later in life, he said he never saw himself as a natural “leader” like his father or his siblings – Bernice became a preacher and Martin a noted civil rights leader. They survive him as do Dexter’s wife, Leah (nee Weber).

Having moved to California, he played his father in the 2002 TV film The Rosa Parks Story. In the 1980s he had released a pop song with such lines as: “He had a dream/ Now it’s up to me/ To see it through/ To make it come true”.

Dexter King. Son of Martin Luther King Jr. Born January 30, 1961. Died January 22, 2024, of prostate cancer. Aged 61.

The Times