The price of MLK's words

I'M SO frustrated I could cry.

Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and I'd hoped to commemorate it by staging a reading of King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

I imagined city leaders, school kids, moms, dads - folks from every walk of life - reading the speech one line at a time. They'd perform for an audience stirred anew by the slain civil-rights leader's seminal call to action in the name of equality and humanity.

I'd then live-stream the reading on Philly.com for all to savor.

But no one at the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King Jr. Center responded to my calls and emails asking for their blessing of such an event. Yes, if you want to recite King's words in public, you need permission from the King Center - i.e., his heirs - to do so. Then, in most cases, you must pay them for the honor.

This is so, so wrong.

King was a public figure, but not an elected one. So his work is not in the public domain, the way the works of, say, John F. Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt are.

Legally, then, King's words belong to his descendants.

But morally?

They belong to all of us.

King's words changed the course of American history by forcing us to honor the ones written by our forefathers 150 years before King was born.

I have a dream that, one day, no barrier will keep us from King's prose or from hearing it delivered by the man himself in original footage created during King's brief 39 years on Earth.

We need King's brave clarity as badly today as we did when he spoke of freedom in front of the Lincoln Memorial; of forgiveness from the pulpit in Birmingham; of love on the front porch of his bombed-out home, when he refused to hate those who had acted so violently against him.

But King's heirs steward his legacy with such a tight grip, it's being squandered one petty decision at a time.

In the 2014 movie Selma, for example, director Ava DuVernay couldn't use King's actual words in the dialogue spoken by actor David Oyelowo, who portrayed MLK. The King Center had already licensed the words to DreamWorks and Warner Bros. for a film yet to be made.

So Selma paraphrased King's powerful rhetoric into something so much less potent, thanks to his "evil, greedy family," as the King kin have been characterized by David J. Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer.

Speaking of greed, the foundation that created the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington in 2011 actually had to pay the King Center over $800,000 to use MLK's likeness in the monument.

At least in both instances, the center's decision-makers could pretend to be protecting MLK's image and dignity if anyone accused them of an unseemly padding of their own pockets.

Not so with the center's sale of King's image to Mercedes-Benz in 2010 for a commercial promoting the $175,000 SLS AMG coupe. It was grotesque to see the visage of King, champion of economic justice for the poor, associated with sales of a luxury vehicle.

Forget "I have a dream." If King had foreseen how his kids would profiteer his memory, he'd have had a nightmare.

I'm not the only one who believes King's words - or, at the very least, his most timeless speeches - should be free to all. King biographer Taylor Branch told the Washington Post that he has spoken with King's family about putting "I Have a Dream" in the public domain, but they have refused.

"They are making a mistake," Branch said.

Locally, Todd Bernstein, cofounder of the Martin Luther King Day of Service, also wishes King's children were more generous with their father's work.

"King is the quintessential example of someone who turns concerns into actions, and we're lacking role models today of people who do that," says Bernstein, whose Day of Service this year will put 140,000 volunteers to work on community projects. That's 5,000 more volunteers, by the way, than helped in 2014, and is indicative of how deeply King's message still resonates, 48 years after his assassination.

How much bigger might that number grow, if more people could hear, present, and recite King's original texts without fear of being hit with a copyright infringement suit for doing so?

Since I was unable to organize a public reading of King's speech, I plan instead to visit Eastern State Penitentiary this holiday weekend, where two actors will take turns reading aloud King's extraordinary "Letter From Birmingham Jail" on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. If you've never read King's 7,000-word response to eight white religious leaders from the South who implored him to choose patience over protest, it's a work of passion and elegance, respect and decency.

To hear it read by Dax Richardson and Terrell Green will be a treat; a panel discussion will follow, moderated by Temple scholars Jess Curtis and Sam Davis. (To learn more, go to www.easternstate.org.)

The readings aren't authorized by the King Center, says Eastern State's Sean Kelley, senior vice president of programming, because he never bothered to ask for permission.

"But it's free and we're not making money on it," he shrugs.

I dare the Kings to go after Eastern State. If anything should be free at last, it should be access to prose from King like this:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

The more we hear words this beautiful, the better off we'll be.

Email: polaner@phillynews.com

Phone: 215-854-2217

On Twitter: @RonniePhilly