Keeper of the Legacy : After a ‘Journey of Self-Discovery,’ Dexter King Fights to Keep His Father’s Memory Alive

The resemblance is most pronounced when he is at rest. Leaning back in his leather chair, his head cocked to one side as he listens quietly, Dexter King, the youngest son of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., suddenly, miraculously, becomes the spitting image of his father.

The almond eyes, the black mustache, the pensive air--they all are familiar from countless pieces of mostly black-and-white documentary footage. It takes only a gesture and a few words in his rumbling voice, and it is as if a piece of old film has sprung to life, and in color.

It is an unexpected transformation because a few minutes earlier Dexter King had seemed too lean, too finely chiseled to evoke more than a casual resemblance to his father, and because his public profile--what there is of it--has lacked the sense of gravity, the seriousness of purpose, for such a comparison.

The elder King, after all, was 34--his son’s age--when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. By then he had already led the Montgomery bus boycott that thrust him into prominence, had already helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and served as its president, and had led countless marches in the face of threats and violence. In two years, he would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

To grow up in the shadow of such a man--who would have turned 66 Sunday--could be daunting. But if Dexter King feels intimidated, if he frets over measuring up, he does not let on.

As he assumes leadership of the social service organization that bears his father’s name--taking control at a tumultuous time when the local press, community leaders and even former friends of his father are openly critical of his family over a proposed King memorial--he carries himself with an air of calm assurance.

King says he has already undergone his “journey of self-discovery,” his long, dark night of the soul. He has emerged his own man, at peace with himself, he says. This all was prompted by an earlier crisis in 1989 when he was appointed president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change--the organization his mother founded to carry on his father’s legacy--and resigned four months later.

It was a painful time. He was widely viewed as having failed in some way to live up to the task. Worse, he had failed himself. The center had not in his view been operating at its full potential.

But once he realized he was powerless to reshape it, he says, “I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life, whether I could live with the fact that my legacy--my father’s legacy--was being carried out in a way I was not necessarily happy with.”

He dug deep inside himself. “It put me in touch with Dexter. I became very comfortable with Dexter.” He was able to step aside quietly and not speak out publicly about the organization’s troubles.

Looking back, he says, “I think maybe I was moving faster than they were ready to go.” He realizes now that, with the way the center’s leadership was structured, with him fitting in as part of a triumvirate that included his mother and the center’s chief operating officer, he was in no real position to affect change.

Now, things are different. On Dec. 30 Dexter King was placed fully in charge of a center whose operations he describes as still chaotic. After having been baptized by fire, he says, he’s better equipped to deal with the new, perhaps more daunting crisis he now faces.

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Dexter King was 7 when his father died. People who knew him then remember him as the quiet child. Most of what he knows about the civil rights leader has come secondhand. Yet, he says he feels a kinship, especially in one regard.

“He never asked to be pulled into (leadership of the civil rights movement),” he says of his father. “When he went to Montgomery, he had no idea he would be leading the bus boycott, but he ended up doing it.”

Similarly, of Martin and Coretta Scott King’s four children, it was decided early that when Coretta was ready to step aside, Dexter was the one who would take over the King Center.

Bernice, the youngest, was the one who inherited Martin’s moving style of oratory and became a minister. Martin Jr., a former county commissioner, was the one who felt drawn to a life of public service. But it was Dexter who was seen as having the business acumen, organizational abilities and temperament to take over the center.

Like his sister Yolanda, an actress, he wanted to pursue an arts-related career. In 1986 he had produced a “We Are the World”-type recording commemorating his father that featured a large cast of performers, from Whitney Houston to Run-DMC. He later launched a career as a music producer. “I’m really an entrepreneur at heart with a love for the arts,” he says.

His twin attraction to music and business was evident early. At Morehouse College, where he majored in business administration but did not graduate, he worked as a disc jockey at fraternity parties.

“We called him ‘Count’ because being a deejay you have to be able to stay up late hours, and Count Dracula always did his thing at night,” says Georgia state Sen. Ralph David Abernathy III, a lifelong friend and son of the close King associate. “I think that a lot of people assumed he was a party animal because he was always mixing (music) at the parties.”

The party-goer image stuck. In 1989, when Dexter King was appointed to the King Center, news stories labeled him the “unsettled” King child, the ladies’ man who had yet to find himself.

He disagrees with the characterization. Still single, he admits that he loves music and likes going to clubs. “But because of who I am, it was magnified to the tenth power,” he says.

Now Dexter wants to meld his serious interest in entertainment with his appointed role as keeper of his father’s legacy. Whether he ultimately succeeds might depend on what happens in the next few weeks. His vision for the King Center is pinned on the creation of a high-tech interactive museum that would blend computer technology, music, video and holography.

The problem is that he wants to build the museum across the street from the King crypt--on the same property that the U.S. Park Service has already designated as the site of its new $11.8 million visitors center. In the past, the King family and the Park Service have enjoyed a cordial relationship and until recently the family seemed to support the Park Service’s plan.

But when the Kings came out with their own development proposal, they shocked the city’s political leadership and much of the impoverished neighborhood surrounding the site, which supports the Park Service plan. U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a former associate of King’s father, has come out against Coretta and Dexter King, as has Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell.

But Dexter King maintains the family was misled by the size and scope of the Park Service project. He accuses Park Service officials of being interlopers who want to “colonize” the neighborhood and wrest control from the family.

Park rangers have helped develop the federally recognized historic site and conducted tours since 1980, but the Kings last month ordered them off a portion of the property owned by the family. (The Park Service also owns land on the 23-acre site.) It all is heading for a showdown on Saturday when Lewis will attempt to mediate what will likely be the first in a series of meetings between the parties.

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Much of the criticism directed at the Kings has had to do with their perceived aloofness from the poor African American community that surrounds the center and with a perception that they are seeking to profit from the slain civil rights leader’s name.

Dexter King says the family has not tooted its own horn enough about its contributions to the community, but he adds, “How can you be an administrator of an institution, travel around the country raising money so you can build the institution and then meet with everyone in the community? It’s almost as if they expect us to be sitting in their living rooms several times a year. It’s impossible to do.”

The second criticism--that they are profiteers--is more problematic. Dexter King, saying that his father left behind “intellectual properties” such as his writings rather than money or real estate, sees nothing wrong with the family receiving earnings from licensing fees. His father’s legacy, he says, belongs to everyone spiritually but to the family legally.

He stresses, though, that his plans for the museum and other ventures are not for profit. He wants to generate income which would then be reinvested to create a “living legacy” for his father. Some of the money would go into the King Center to finance its activities, including workshops and training in the techniques of nonviolent conflict resolution and an archive. But the center also would invest money in other community organizations that are carrying on his father’s work.

The family’s cause hasn’t been helped by unproven allegations that family members in the past have demanded payment for interviews from some news organizations or the disclosure last week that Coretta Scott King, according to Internal Revenue Service filings, received $114,922 in compensation from the center last year while claiming publicly that she did not draw a salary.

Dexter King says the money was paid to her bodyguards and personal staff.

“She genuinely has tried to do what my father would’ve wanted her to do and what he did,” he says, noting that his father had always refused to take money from the movement. When he was alive, the family lived on his royalties, honorariums, a small salary he received as church pastor and contributions friends made to help pay for his personal staff.

The salary controversy came about innocently, he says. “Mistakes were made, not intentionally or out of a need to get over. If anything, it’s ignorance. Nobody volunteered to come in and show us how to set this thing up the way it ought to be set up.”

A big part of his job as the new chairman, he says, will be reorganizing the center and getting its internal affairs in order. “I’m a very organized person,” he says. “I can’t deal with chaos--I don’t have a lot of tolerance for it.”

He also plans to use aggressive marketing and cutting-edge technology to reach out to a new generation. He often sees children who are brought to visit his father’s crypt. The experience seems to hold no meaning for them. “It’s almost as if they’re bored,” he says.

Some of his ideas are likely to stir up controversy. He says he has met with representatives of Elvis Presley’s estate to study their operations and the administration of Presley’s Graceland mansion. “I don’t think we’re looking to be as commercial in the same way,” he says. “You’re talking about an entertainer versus a man who had an alternative message.”

He adds though, that Presley’s estate is well managed and has valuable lessons to teach. “What you need to do is find out how to package King in a way that you don’t lose the intensity and the reverence that people place on it.”

He also is considering packaging a biography of his father, an animated TV special and a multimedia CD-ROM.

“I see things in very holistic manner,” he says. He acknowledges that many people, who insist on viewing the center as a civil rights organization--which it was never conceived to be--might be offended by the new direction.

But he notes that in his last years his father had begun to stress economic empowerment for black people.

“When the Pope writes a book that hits the top of the bestseller charts or does a CD of the rosary, is that commercialization of the Vatican?” he asks.

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this report.