Mrs. King Spars With Park Service Over Memorial Site : Civil rights: Critics allege she is arrogant in her fight over plans to improve Atlanta area. She says only the family has right to interpret husband’s legacy.

Since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down in 1968, his widow, Coretta Scott King, has jealously guarded his legacy as champion of the disenfranchised. But now she is in a fight with the National Park Service for control of a memorial honoring her late husband.

The struggle is laced with irony: It pits the King family not only against the Park Service but also against a substantial portion of the poor, black neighborhood in which the memorial sits.

This city reveres King. But, as the controversy is making clear, a good portion of black Atlanta has never known quite what to make of his widow, who has always come off as somewhat aloof.

“It’s like a monarchy,” said Mtamanika Youngblood, executive director of the Historic District Development Corp., a neighborhood organization that supports the Park Service in the battle. “She’s a queen and Dexter (her youngest son) is a prince.”

Many residents of the area now are angry that the King family’s challenge to the Park Service might derail plans for $11.8 million in improvements to the area that they hoped would rejuvenate the struggling community.

The King family said in press conference Thursday that the dispute with the Park Service is over principle--they alone should have the right to interpret King’s legacy. Park Service officials say it’s over money.

Others, including Mayor Bill Campbell, simply scratch their heads in bafflement as the city scrambles to limit what damage the family’s opposition might inflict on a project they had hoped would spruce up the city’s biggest tourist attraction in time for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

*

More than 3 million people visit the King Historic Site yearly. Included in the 23-acre area are King’s crypt, his birth home, the church he pastored and the family run King Center that opened in 1980 to preserve his legacy and advance his social goals.

The Park Service, which took over operation of the historic site in 1983, had planned to build a visitors center, parking facilities and a pedestrian promenade in the area.

In addition, it has arranged to lease the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had been pastor. It would operate the church as a museum. Meanwhile, a new $7-million church is being planned next to the visitors center.

Explaining how the plans came about, Troy Lissimore, the Park Service site superintendent, said a small exhibit on King’s life at the family run King Center does not do justice to the civil rights leader. Since the family did not come forward to develop an adequate exhibit, he said, “it fell on the shoulders of the Park Service to design it. And we designed it with the cooperation of the King Center.”

Others who participated in the process agree that the King family was involved from the beginning. But now the family, describing the Park Service as an “evil” force that was trying to usurp the family’s rightful role, is trying to stop the project.

They want to build a high-tech, interactive, virtual reality center to commemorate the slain civil rights figure on the site where the visitors center and new church are planned. But financing has not yet been secured for the ambitious family project, while work on the Park Service project has already begun.

“They want the Park Service construction money to be used to finance their own facility--I think that’s probably pretty clear,” said Rick McCollough, the Park Service’s project manager for facility design at the site.

In a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt dated Nov. 3, 1994, and in her press conference, Mrs. King accused the Park Service of cutting “back-room deals” to acquire historic King-related property and asked that the Park Service be removed from the historic district. Dexter King said Thursday that the Park Service had gone so far as to suggest buying King’s crypt, an allegation Park Service officials deny.

They further charged that government officials and community organizations had been misled into thinking that the King family supported the Park Service’s plans when they had really long opposed them.

But Mayor Campbell, in a letter to Babbitt this month, said he was “surprised” and “disappointed” by Coretta King’s assertions. “. . . The King Center and its representatives have been involved in the discussions from the outset,” he wrote. “For Mrs. King or anyone connected with the King Center to suggest otherwise is simply inaccurate.”

*

The family’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change sits in a once-thriving neighborhood that long ago fell into decay.

The people who live and work along struggling Auburn Avenue are the kind of people for whom Dr. King gave his life in the civil rights struggle. But ask them about the center in their midst that bears his name and you will likely get a blank stare.

“I don’t know what the King Center does,” said Youngblood. “I don’t know what they do and I live three blocks from it. Everybody wonders.”

Such grumbling about the King heirs is not new. But the intensity and outspokenness of the current attacks seem unprecedented.

Dismissing the center as “no more than a 10-minute stop for tourists,” a columnist in the Atlanta Constitution blasted the family this week, accusing them of wanting to turn King’s dream into a “money-making scheme.”

“The center shows little inclination to delve seriously into the problems that confront America,” wrote editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker. “It shows little interest in the poverty of its own neighborhood, a rundown area of Atlanta.”

It was this attack that apparently led to Thursday’s unusual press conference, in which all four King children participated, along with an array of civil rights and labor leaders.

“Never, not even for a moment, has personal enrichment been a motivation for me or my children,” said Mrs. King at the press conference, which often took on the appearance of a Baptist church service, with scattered shouts of “amen” and “tell it!” from supporters.

“The same evil forces that killed Martin Luther King Jr. are now trying to destroy his family,” she said. “We stand before you today more determined than ever that those who slew the dreamer will not slay the dream.”

Dexter King said: “The legacy of Martin Luther King belongs to everyone spiritually but to his heirs legally.” He seemed particularly bothered by what he called unwarranted attacks on his mother.

*

Comparing his mother to Jackie Kennedy, who he said was never criticized for not carrying on the work of her husband, he said: “My mother never remarried. She was dedicated to the legacy of my father.”

As for criticism that the King children in general and he in particular have not lived up to their father’s name, Dexter King, who resembles his father and has a similar rumbling baritone voice, named a long list of African American leaders, such as Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, who, he said, collectively could not fill his father’s shoes.

He asked: “How can you expect me to fill his shoes?”

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.