February 5, 2018

Dodge Freaked Out When Someone Made a Video of What MLK Really Thought About Capitalism

Chrysler promptly had the video taken down.

During last night’s Super Bowl, Dodge aired a commercial that used an excerpt of a powerful Martin Luther King Jr. speech over images of working Americans to, you know, sell trucks.  

 

Within hours, Current Affairs, a politics magazine, reedited the video overlaid with a different excerpt from the same speech.

“We are so often taken by advertisers,” King says. “Those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of get you in a bind.”

The Twitter outrage has Dodge irked. “You get so crucified, so fast,” Susan Credle, chief creative officer of FCB, told the New York Times. In a statement to the Times, Dodge said that it “worked closely with the representatives of the Martin Luther King Jr. estate to receive the necessary approvals.” 

By the morning, YouTube had taken down the Current Affairs video at Chrysler’s request.

Interestingly, King’s speech is not in the public domain, and Chrysler had to license it from the King estate, which, somewhat controversially, keeps a tight grip on MLK’s words and images. “Critics, including civil rights icon Julian Bond,” former Mother Jones editor Lauren Williams wrote in 2013, “bristle over the fact that “I Have a Dream” is kept under strict watch in the name of controlling King’s image at the same time it’s licensed by rich companies for use in TV commercials.”

Indeed, this is not even the first time they’ve been licensed to sell cars. 

Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University’s School of Law, says she respects the right of King’s family to maintain their father’s legacy. “[But] EMI Publishing—they have a raison d’être, which is to exploit copyrighted works,” she says. “And that goal may be somewhat at odds with what King would have wanted people to do with his speech.”

The King Center and Bernice King both distanced themselves from the ad, which was agreed to by Intellectual Properties Management, a licensing business set up by the King estate.

Read the rest of Mother Jones‘ 2013 story on the rights to MLK’s speeches here.

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From the desk of Mother Jones CEO, Monika Bauerlein...

Newsrooms can be funded in many ways. One of the most controversial (and volatile) ways is by a for-profit corporation or a billionaire owner. We see it across the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

When Mother Jones first started publishing 50 years ago, our founders made a critical decision: to be a reader-supported nonprofit. They knew that no corporate owner would be interested in a muckraking newsroom; they also knew that no muckraking newsroom would be interested in following the agenda of a corporate owner.

And so, we’ve been reader-funded for half a century. We rely on contributions from our readers—readers like you—whether it’s $50, or $15 a month, or whatever fits your budget. People give what they can, and every donation makes a difference for our newsroom, which has grown tremendously—in size and reach and renown—since its inception in 1976.

You may be wondering: What does it take to publish an investigation? And what does my donation actually fund? The answers are one and the same: It takes people, resources, and time. And that’s what your donation funds directly.

Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled because of our $50,000 match. So when you make a donation—$5, $50, any amount—it’ll go twice as far.

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