Dorothy Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr

A closer look

The cynical queen of the Algonquin Round Table had a surprisingly righteous final act. Despite never actually meeting him, Dorothy Parker left her entire estate and literary copyrights to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when she died in 1967. After King was assassinated less than a year later, the rights legally passed to the NAACP, meaning that the royalties from some of the sharpest, wittiest poetry of the 1920s have been silently funding civil rights for decades.