Where Martin Luther King's Children Are Today
Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister, activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who became America’s best-known civil rights movement leader in the 1950s and 60s, left behind four children who became activists in their own right. On the federal holiday celebrating the life of their father, President-elect Donald Trump met with the eldest among them, Martin Luther King III.
The eldest son and second oldest child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King III walked into Trump Tower in Manhattan Monday afternoon to discuss “voting, bringing more people into the system, the legacy of Dr. King and how we can continue to pursue that under the Trump administration,” Trump’s soon-to-be White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told the Today Show.
King told the press the meeting with Trump had been "constructive," and he noted that he disagreed with the president-elect's characterization of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis as "all talk... no action."
Lewis "demonstrated that he is action," King said.
The civil rights icon’s first son has followed in his father’s footsteps, presiding over the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization his father founded, which under his direction launched a successful campaign to change the Georgia state flag, which had previously featured a Confederate cross.
More recently, the 59-year-old MLK III led a rally in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a black man who was unarmed at the time, by white police officer Darren Wilson.
The Kings’ eldest child, Yolanda, died in May 2007 of congestive heart failure after years as an actor, playwright and motivational speaker.
Dexter Scott King, 55, took over his mother’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta as chairman in the late 80s, while the youngest of the Kings, Bernice, a reverend, serves as its chief executive officer.
The siblings haven’t been without rivalry, however, as a feud over the King Center’s direction and ownership led Martin and Bernice to sue Dexter in 2008. The second and youngest children accused the third child of improperly funneling money from the estate of their mother, who died in 2006, into a company he controlled, the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr. Inc., and alleged that that he “misapplied or wasted” the company's assets and kept the company’s finances secret from his siblings, according to a 2008 report from the Los Angeles Times.
The three remaining siblings’ estate battles didn’t end with that lawsuit’s settlement in 2009. Just last August, the Kings finally ended a years-long legal fight over the ownership of their father’s Nobel Peace Prize and his traveling Bible.
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