The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

the use of his image”. 106 Moreover, Dexter King was reported to be seeking finance for
a $50 million interactive museum installed with virtual reality games, the King Dream
Centre. One critic referred to this as a plan to create a theme park “I Have a
Dreamland”. 107 In the meantime, community liaison with the impoverished
community around Sweet Auburn had seemingly come to a standstill. Beneath the
surface of the seeming tranquillity of the solemn memorial landscape on Sweet
Auburn, intense struggles had unfolded between the state and the King family, and
between the demands of civic memory and those of commerce over the appropriate
management and use of King’s legacy and biography. And private, family commercial
interests claimed prior rights over the public interest. Indeed, as one commentator put
it “America may claim King as its civic saint and ‘I Have a Dream’ as a national
manifesto, but King’s words belong to his estate”. 108
As this contest continued to unfold between the National Parks Service and the King
Centre, the biographic paradigm that was promoted on both sides of Auburn Avenue
was one of veneration and the ‘Great Man’, not of revealing concealed pasts or of
critical reassessment. 109 Biographic exhibitions, tours and products focused on King’s
106 Philip Gailey, ‘King would probably have mixed feelings about hometown today’, The Atlanta
Journal‐Constitution, 21/1/02.
107 Atlanta Journal‐Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker cited in David Plotz, ‘Content is King:
Dexter King is a King for the 90s’.
108 David Plotz, ‘Content is King: Dexter King is a King for the 90s’. In 2002, a different contest was
unfolding around the same question when Malcolm X’s notebooks, letters, diaries and handwritten
drafts of his speeches, and his personal Koran came into the possession of Butterfields, an auction
house in San Francisco. While Butterfields made plans to sell the papers, preferably “the entire
collection to an institution”, Malcolm X’s relatives made it known that they had intended to place the
material in a public archive. See editorial in The New York Times, 10/3/02. See also, more generally,
Michael Eric Dyson, ‘Inventing and Interpreting Malcolm X’, in Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (eds),
The Seductions of Biography (London: Routledge, 1996) for a study of the “war of interpretation” over
Malcolm X’s meaning in the viewpoints of different biographical narrations, and in the repro‐duction
of Malcolm’s popularity through popular posters, baseball hats, rap recordings, an opera and Spike
Lee’s film biography. For Dyson these reproductions “are a function of both need and mythology” (p
44).
109 One of the latest King biographical projects in this vein that was developed with the co‐operation of
the King Centre is ‘In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’, a
Smithsonian Institution Travelling Art Exhibition (2002) created and developed by Gary Chassman
(Verve Editions), featuring 120 artworks. See the catalogue, In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (created and developed by Gary M Chassman (Atlanta: Tinwood Books,
90