How Martin Luther King Jr's descendants are carrying on his legacy, 50 years after his death

In the 50 years since his death, the descendants of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr have fought to carry on his legacy – but also fought with each other.

Martin Luther King II, Bernice King, and Dexter King have each championed different social causes – and different ideas about what to do with their father’s estate. In some cases, the squabbles have led to legal action.

In a recent interview, however, King’s three living children came together for a “mediation” which they said former president Jimmy Carter had suggested to them. They told CBS News they would be stepping back from their father’s business and focusing on other initiatives instead.

Meanwhile, Mr King’s granddaughter Yolanda made a splash at a recent gun control rally, leading some to think she may be the next King to pick up the torch of justice.

Read on for more about what some of Martin Luther King Jr’s descendants are doing to carry on his legacy.

Bernice King, the youngest child of King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, is perhaps the most visible of the minister’s descendants. The 55-year-old – who was just five when her father died – has served as CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr Centre for Nonviolent Social Change since 2012.

The centre is charged with educating the public on King’s message of nonviolence. Ms King regularly touts what the centre now calls “Nonviolence 365”, which she described in a recent editorial for The Atlantic as “a programme of Kingian nonviolence [that] strongly and strategically facilitates change, both of systems and of hearts”.

Like her father, Ms King is an ordained minister who became an activist a young age. She was arrested several times in her youth for protesting, including at an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African Embassy in Washington DC, where she was arrested alongside her mother and brother Martin.

Still, more than two decades later, Ms King told an audience at the annual 100 Black Men of America conference that she felt she should do more to carry on her father’s legacy.

“I haven’t done as much as I should be doing in the last few years of my life,” she said at the 2006 conference, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“My desire is not to be a hypocrite,” she added. “I want to make sure my life is not a contradiction when I take a platform.”

King’s oldest son, who was 10 years old when his father died, has frequently turned to politics as a means to get his message across.

The 60-year-old was elected as a county commission member in Fulton County, Georgia in 1987. He was defeated in his 1993 re-election bid, but went on to work on voter registration campaigns and give speeches for political candidates like Barack Obama.

In a 2008 address to the Democratic National Committee, which he gave in honour of the 45th anniversary of his father’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” Mr King said his father would be “proud of Barack Obama, proud of the party that nominated him, and proud of the America that will elect him”.

Mr King and his sister also spoke out against President Donald Trump when he was a candidate, and again after the president reportedly referred to some African nations as “s***hole countries”.

Still, Mr King agreed to meet with Mr Trump on MLK Day last year, and said he had an “extraordinarily constructive conversation” with the president about voting rights.

Mr King also serves as the founding president and CEO of Realising the Dream, Inc, a nonprofit he founded to work on issues such as eliminating poverty and building community.

Yolanda, King’s nine-year-old granddaughter, made headlines just last month with her rousing speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington. The event was planned by survivors of the shooting at at a Parkland, Florida high school, and was billed as a rally for stricter gun control.

King took the microphone as a surprise guest after Parkland high school student Jaclyn Corin. Addressing the thousands of people gathered, she harkened back to her grandfather’s most famous speech.

“My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character,” she said. “I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period.”

Her father later told CNN that she had been passionate about gun control for years before the Parkland shooting. When King visited Mr Obama in the White House in 2016, her father said, her first question for the leader was: “Mr President, what are you gonna do about these guns?”