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A journalist visiting the center from Ohio this year wrote that [b]he was appalled by the stench in a men's restroom. "I had been greatly disappointed by the dismal and dirty circumstances I found at Dr. King's final resting place[/b] [@:D]," Mansfield B. Frazier wrote.
"The grounds of the building hadn't been properly maintained, [b]and the men's restroom was in deplorable condition[/b][@:D]," Frazier wrote.
The center is no longer active in teaching nonviolence, its original mission. Part of the problem is money. Dexter King laid off much of the staff to help erase a $600,000 debt when he took over seven years ago, declaring that the center was never meant to be a civil rights organization.
In subsequent years, tax records show, the center's income from donations and grants steadily fell. Nevertheless, [b]Dexter King pays himself a salary of $149,000,[/b] [@:D] the kind of paycheck his mother never received.
While the center languishes in Atlanta, its director lives 3,000 miles away in a beach house in Malibu, Calif., where [b]he's pursuing an acting career.[/b][@:D]
Last year, he portrayed his father in a television movie, "The Rosa Parks Story." In a story about Dexter King and his brother, Martin Luther King III, Gentleman's Quarterly reporter Matthew Teague wrote that [b]Dexter could not remember a few sentences from his father's speech to a church gathering. The director, frustrated, turned to cue cards.[/b] [@:D]
In a dressing room trailer afterward, Teague wrote, Dexter King -- who was only 2 during the march on Washington -- commented that the King Center, which he directs, teaches six principles of social nonviolence. Teague asked what those were. More than 15 minutes later, [b]King was able to recall only four[/b]. [@:D]
D. Louise Cook, a former director of the King Center archives and museum, said Coretta King once asked her to give her son Dexter a job after he left an Atlanta college in the mid-1980s. Cook put him to work transcribing one of his father's speeches. "[b]He didn't last the day,[/b]"[@:D] Cook said.
Preach rev, Preach!![@:D]