Legal News

Squabble Over MLK Love Letters Heads to Atlanta Court

By Dan Slater

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is welcomed with a kiss by his wife Coretta after leaving court in Montgomery, Ala., March 22, 1956. King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city buses in a campaign to desegregate the bus system, but a judge suspended his $500 fine pending appeal. (AP Photo/Gene Herrick)

For those of you who found unseemly the family feud over Leona Helmsley’s dog, we have something more substantive for you. The son and daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are battling against each other in court over a stack of love letters that Dr. King wrote to his wife, Coretta. Mrs. King, who died in 2006, kept the letters under her bed, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a blue, Samsonite suitcase.

But today, writes the AJC, those letters and other “intimate correspondence” are expected to be in a far less private place: Fulton County Superior Court.

The son, Dexter King, heads the corporation that handles the rights to his father’s works. In May, he negotiated a $1.4 million contract to publish a biography of his mother. On the other side is Dexter sister, Bernice King, who has refused to hand over the correspondence for use in the biography. She says the correspondence belongs to Mrs. King’s estate, which she controls. The publisher, Penguin Group, has reportedly threatened to pull out of the contract should Bernice King fail to hand over the papers by Friday.

Craig Frankel, an attorney for Dexter, said the Penguin deal is the best way for the family to have control over what is being written about their mother. The children would have a say in which letters should be published and which shouldn’t, Frankel said.

But Jock Smith, an attorney representing Bernice and brother Martin Luther King III, said it’s Dexter King who would have the control.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 14, 2008 (boomark / email).