MLK guessing at his stance

I am a young pup so I was not around to see or hear Dr. King, but he seems to me to be a pretty level headed guy.

What do you more seasoned freepers think of the discernment of Kings ideals?

I'm not sure if he would "championed" the disopossessed. My guess is he would have probably advocated walking on out of an area that was about to be ravaged by a hurricane.

the discernment of the author about Kings ideals..

Look, make no mistake about it, Dr. King would have opposed the war in Iraq as he did the one in Vietnam.

As for the rest of it, I think he would have been disappointed to see so many black folk standing up for the dole, abortion and entitlement. I think that would have hurt him. Dr. King, I don't believe, lead a civil rights battle to have black folk become wards of the state. I think he would have hated that idea.

Look for every MLK day to feature racist so-called black leaders vilify white people, Republicans, Conservatives and other fellow Americans who don't agree with them politically.

Also, look for White Rats to jump on the "hate whitey" bandwagon too (Hitlery Schrillery Klinton for example).

I think MLK would have been an avid supporter of affirmative action aka continued racism. He was for slavery reparations which would make people that had never even seen an african slave pay for crimes in which they beared no responsibility.

Some of MLK's views are just and completely constitutional but some aspects are despicable.

Nobody knows what King would have thought about it - but it is a good bet he would denounce folks like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I wonder why nobody in the MSM wants to second-guess him in that venue. Oops, silly me - they know what he would think and they disagree with it; that's why they need to put false words in his dead mouth.

Of course, they don't seem to notice that all the phone-bugging and such done against King was done exclusively under Democrat administrations. From early 1961 until early 1969, there were no Republicans in the White House.

He'd be on the side of the communists as he was when alive.

Were he alive, he would probably be on the same side as the late John Paul II and the current Pope Benedict XVI: Christian pacifists, opposed not to just this war, but to war, period.

I would imagine that King's opposition to the war would be a principled, Christian one and not simply the hack politics of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Sharpton and the Pope oppose the war. Both are ministers. The difference is that Sharpton opposes the war for American political ideological reasons. The Pope opposes the war because he opposes war as anything but an absolute last resort, in all cases.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a minister. I'd imagine, or at least I would hope, that his opposition to the war would be Christian, like the Pope's, and not partisan politics, like Jackson's and Sharpton's.

If MLK had lived, what would his views be today? Of course, we can never know this with absolute certainty, but my guess is he would be on the ultra-left fringe.

He wouldn't be a Ward Connerly fighting against racial quotas, he'd be an Andrew Young pushing for them.

He wouldn't be an Alan Keyes fighting abortion and the gay agenda, he'd be a Jesse Jackson pushing for them.

He wouldn't be a Dr. Walter Williams encouraging blacks to pursue capitalism, he'd be a Maxine Waters howling for socialism.

He wouldn't be a Condi Rice or Colin Powell fighting the war against terror, he'd be a Cynthia McKinney calling President Bush a war criminal.

He wouldn't be a Michael Steele fighting corrupt government, he'd be an Al Sharpton epitomizing it.

He wouldn't be a Thomas Sowell encouraging blacks to seek educational excellence, he'd be a Sheila Jackson-Lee demanding handouts.

That's the way I see it.

Well, considering his son and wife don't blame his killer but instead the FBI, CIA, etc., I'm not sure what to think. Dr. King's family and Jesse Jackson are about the most visible people today who worked with him and knew him well.

Was King the ONLY person in that group who had his right mind? With what we know now about these people, I doubt they would have followed him if he did not believe the same as them. I would like to name one person who lives by Dr. Kings ideals but I know of NONE.

There was footage on the news last night of the crowd at the end of the march here in San Antonio. I SWEAR I saw a guy rolling a joint and handing it to somebody.

Based upon the image that liberals, media and revisionists in general have painted of King since his death, I would say that he would preach self-reliance and accountability. However, based upon the person not the persona, I would expect him to be arm in arm with Jackson, Sharpton and Farrakhan on the events surrounding Katrina. It pains me every year to see this man worshipped like the savior himself, while all along being merely an opportunist and a conman. The ideals that we "think" King espoused are righteous. How could any sane, liberty loving American not support the Constitutional rights of all men regardless of color? Constitutional rights, however weren't enough for Kings people, he wanted special rights. He wanted reparation. He wanted`revenge. I believe King was well on his way at the time of his death to forming a militant, communist black party much like the Nation of Islam, only politically relevant thanks to the pandering politicians in both parties.

While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.

King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC. Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O'Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) "A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King's SCLC. He is Jack H. O'Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana." Dr. King fired O'Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.

I quoted HIS OWN writings, and I remember one statement which I will paraphrase, "The capitalist system is economic violence to the Negro community."

This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book "Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story", in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.

"During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.

First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism's political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an 'interim' reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man's so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself."

Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93

Let us not forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, recently evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile, and King's recognition of this public attitude probably militated against a more positive appraisal of some of communism's traits than if he had written similar comments in the mid '70s or '80s. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King's life, the leftist counterculture revolution of the sixties and the liberals associated with the civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism more palatable. These attitudes were strongly evident during the last years of his life and particularly in his criticisms of the Vietnam War. I believe that he knew the true insidiousness of Marxism at all levels, but that he felt he could sup with the devil if his spoon was long enough.

While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.

The allegation that he was a Socialist, specifically a Fabian Socialist, I feel is far more accurate than communist. Given the climate of the times, I can understand why he would seek out any committed allies that he could. But even then, there was abundant evidence that Communism is, ironically, the most anti-freedom ideology of the post war era.

I am a black man who has been getting callouses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance.

King himself expresses a communist outlook in his book "Stride Toward Freedom" when he stated, "in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system"

King, unfortunately, didn't understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By "better distribution of wealth" King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for "the profit motive" was unfortunate given that African-Americans should've been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King's leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.

In "Stride Toward Freedom" Dr. King states "In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of G-d is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both."

King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had "a dialectical point of view." The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.

All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that "progress" is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assesment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the "indispensable man." Without his courage, acumen,honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.

MLK's birthday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK's association with (ironically, given MLK's emphasis on freedom) the most anti-freedom and murderous ideology (Communism)of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK's legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment, that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today's black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.

Martin Luther King was more of an American than any of the scummy dirtbags who have successfully hijacked his legacy over the last 35 years or so.

King was a very great man, despite a few imperfections.

While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.

King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC. Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O'Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) "A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King's SCLC. He is Jack H. O'Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana." Dr. King fired O'Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.

I quoted HIS OWN writings, and I remember one statement which I will paraphrase, "The capitalist system is economic violence to the Negro community."

This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book "Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story", in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.

"During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.

First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism's political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an 'interim' reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man's so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself."

Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93

Let us not forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, recently evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile, and King's recognition of this public attitude probably militated against a more positive appraisal of some of communism's traits than if he had written similar comments in the mid '70s or '80s. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King's life, the leftist counterculture revolution of the sixties and the liberals associated with the civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism more palatable. These attitudes were strongly evident during the last years of his life and particularly in his criticisms of the Vietnam War. I believe that he knew the true insidiousness of Marxism at all levels, but that he felt he could sup with the devil if his spoon was long enough.

While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.

The allegation that he was a Socialist, specifically a Fabian Socialist, I feel is far more accurate than communist. Given the climate of the times, I can understand why he would seek out any committed allies that he could. But even then, there was abundant evidence that Communism is, ironically, the most anti-freedom ideology of the post war era.

I am a black man who has been getting callouses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance.

King himself expresses a communist outlook in his book "Stride Toward Freedom" when he stated, "in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system"

King, unfortunately, didn't understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By "better distribution of wealth" King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for "the profit motive" was unfortunate given that African-Americans should've been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King's leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.

In "Stride Toward Freedom" Dr. King states "In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of G-d is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both."

King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had "a dialectical point of view." The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.

All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that "progress" is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assesment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the "indispensable man." Without his courage, acumen,honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.

MLK's birthday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK's association with (ironically, given MLK's emphasis on freedom) the most anti-freedom and murderous ideology (Communism)of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK's legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment, that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today's black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.

There is much to admire about Dr. King. It would not be inaccurate to say that he may have been the "indispensable man" of the civil rights movement. But ANY historical figure MUST be subjected to the sort of legitimate analysis that is critical to establishing context and perspective. For instance, it is my opinion that the greatest political philosophers of liberty in the history of mankind were those men that this nation was blessed to have at its inception, the Founding Fathers. Notwithstanding this opinion, I am constantly being exhorted by leftist deconstructionists to never forget that many of them were slaveowners, sexist, and slaughterers of innocent Indians. None of this changes the totality of my opinion of them in the great good they accomplished by founding this nation.

I simply say that a similar yardstick should be applied to Martin Luther King in assesing the impact that his legacy has on the modern-day civil rights movement.

A new factor has been introduced into modern-day discourse and that is what has become the intellectual scouge of our time, political correctness. This leftist attempt to stifle honest intellectual inquiry does serve to obsfucate and shield those counterproductive aspects of Martin Luther King's legacy and so prevent us from seeing what we need to retain and to reject of it, so that we might move forward to a full realization of the blessings of liberty that this great nation offers for all of its citizens.

It doesnt matter who does the guessing, its not worth the time it takes to read it. King is frozen in the 60s, he would have been shaped and reshaped by events many times over. Its damn near impossible to be a living icon, guys like MLK and JFK can carry that sort of legend because they never had a chance to move on. I'm sure King would have gone in and out of favor amongst different circles. Even men as surely great as Churchill and Washington were often viewed unfavorably in their later years. Those of you speculating are revealing more about your worldviews than anything about King, some play up the Christian side, some the commie angle. For my money I thought last week's episode of "The Boondocks" about King waking up from a coma in the present day was pretty spot on.