PERSPECTIVE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. : A Legacy Becomes a Commodity : Making his shrine a paying tourist attraction mocks the man who railed against monetary oppression and excess.

The annual holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. should be a time for renewed reflection and discussion about poverty and racism in America. Instead, the talk this year is about the decision by the King family to “evict” the National Park Service from the King Historic District in Atlanta.

The family charges that the federal government “encroached” on and “annexed” the King legacy by attempting to control the landmark sites. This seems flimsy, given that the Park Service pays the King Center for Nonviolent Change $500,000 a year to maintain the sites for visits by the public.

Each time I visited, I found the Park Service guides to be friendly and informative. They did not try to rewrite, reinterpret or misrepresent King’s life or the civil-rights struggle.

More than 3 million people a year visit the exhibits, King’s memorial crypt, his childhood home and his church, Ebenezer Baptist. Evidently, such tourist traffic has not been lost on the King family. They have announced an ambitious plan to build and operate a high-tech, interactive museum directly across from the center. The family will reap a tidy sum from the revenues. This has many blacks asking whether the family is more concerned with protecting the King legacy or profiting from it. If King were alive, he would ask the same question.

The moral contradictions and inconsistencies between King’s public image and private lifestyle have piled up since his assassination in 1968. King has been accused of plagiarism, purveying smut and engaging in sexual escapades. But King was consistent on one thing: He abhorred personal wealth and the ownership of private property and often railed against the penchant for lavish personal spending, luxury apartments and fancy homes by some staffers in his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

For years, the King family lived in what charitably could be described as a ramshackle house. As his family grew in size, friends and family members begged him to move to a larger house. King resisted. His exasperated wife, Coretta Scott King, explained that he “felt that it was inconsistent with his philosophy” to own property. In 1965, King gave in and paid the grand sum of $10,000 for a house that was, he complained, “too big” and “elegant.”

As the civil-rights movement progressed, King increasingly incorporated anti-capitalist rhetoric in his speeches and denounced American society as greedy and materialistic. He made impassioned attacks on what he called America’s “property-centered and profit-centered” lust, and often expressed admiration for the writings of Karl Marx. On several occasions, he told friends and SCLC staffers that he believed in “democratic socialism” for America.

By 1968, King had strayed far from the goals of civil rights and moderate political change. He called America “corrupt” and demanded “a fundamental redistribution of the wealth.” He accused the government of waging an “imperialist war” of domination against Vietnamese peasants.

The red-baiters and professional King haters branded him a communist. The Lyndon Johnson White House turned hostile. Corporate and foundation supporters slowly turned off the money spigot. This left SCLC in deep financial trouble.

During his last days, King was spending much of his time fund-raising and defending his policies against critics within and without his organization. But he refused to back down. On the day of his assassination, he was in Memphis, Tenn., to support a sanitation workers’ strike.

Today, King would, I am sure, be railing against the self-indulgent grab for expensive cars, clothes and dollars by the MTV generation. He would be horrified by the get-rich-quick “gangsta” lifestyle of many young blacks.

The irony is that King did much to make that indulgent lifestyle possible. When the civil-rights movement broke the back of legal segregation, the doors of corporations, colleges and government agencies swung open to blacks. Since the 1970s, there has been a 52% increase in the number of black managers, professionals, technicians and government officials. Nearly one-third of blacks have incomes in excess of $35,000 a year. In 1994, the top 100 black businesses had gross sales of $11 billion. Nearly one out of four blacks has the cash to flee the ‘hood and live in the suburbs. In 1993, 75% percent of blacks graduated from high school and 32% attended college.

This generation has gotten a bit of the American economic pie and wants more. To them, ideology has not only come to an end, as sociologist Daniel Bell warned; it has become a dirty word. In the era of conservative revolt by angry white males, King’s relentless demand for massive government-funded programs for the poor sounds like a bad joke. The sad truth is that King was a man for his times, but not these times. If psychologist Eric Fromm is right that in a capitalist society “things are expressed as commodities,” then it was inevitable that the King legacy would be turned into a commodity to be packaged and sold to the public. It may be the American way, but, lest we forget, it wasn’t King’s way.