A close friend and supporter of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., filed a federal lawsuit against King’s three surviving children on Tuesday, seeking ownership of three documents that King’s children say belong to his estate.
Harry Belafonte, a popular singer and civil rights activist who supported King during the 1960s, said King and his widow, Coretta Scott King, gave him three documents: an outline for a speech written in Belafonte’s apartment in 1967, a letter of condolence from President Lyndon Johnson after King’s 1968 assassination, and an envelope King had in his pocket when he was killed.
But King’s children claim that the documents were taken without permission and belong to the estate, the New York Times reports.
The papers have been held by Sotheby’s auction house since 2008, when Belafonte tried to sell them to raise money for his charity. Sotheby’s faces liability if it releases the documents to the wrong party, so Belafonte has asked a federal judge in Manhattan to declare him the rightful owner.
[NYT]