Communist Connections of Dr. Martin Luther King

America maintains a longstanding tradition of analyzing the political beliefs of its leaders.
Indeed, the founders protected this inalienable right with the first amendment to the Constitution.
Such examinations were viewed as essential to the preservation of freedom and democracy.
This is why an examination of the career of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is necessary.
His influence was and continues to be immense.
Anything less constitutes a dangerous abrogation of responsibility.

That King maintained communist connections are an undisputed matter of public record.
This is no less significant, I would contend, than if King had maintained Nazi connections.
His actions and utterances influenced generations of Americans yet we tremble with fear over discussing his beliefs because doing so means running the risk of being smeared as a racist.
The irony, lost on most, is that those hurling this dastardly charge are often themselves racist by any definition of the term.
But as the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow was reported to have said to Fred Friendly, his TV producer, regarding their fear of broadcasting a segment on Joe McCarthy in 1956, “If the fear is in this room, lets do it.”

While Martin Luther King was by no means a hard-left witting participant in the international communist conspiracy, he nevertheless surrounded himself with hard-core communists and fellow travelers and embraced a philosophy that could be described as cultural Marxism.
This embrace by King would influence generations of African-Americans much to their detriment.

The Kennedy Administration, including President John F. Kennedy himself, warned King to dis-associate himself from Communists.
He responded by doing so publicly while continuing the relationships covertly.
The belief that King was being used as a tool for communist manipulation of the civil rights movement led Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to order the F.B.I. to conduct wiretaps.
These wiretaps would reveal the extremely active extramarital sex life of King, a Baptist Minister, but that is not germane to our subject.
Perhaps the reluctance of the Kennedy Administration to get behind the civil rights movement was due to its concern over the possibility of communist infiltration.

King was close, both personally and professionally, to New York Lawyer Stanley D. Levison who was identified by highly placed communist informant Jack Childs as having been a chief conduit of Soviet funds to be dispersed to the Communist Party USA.
Levison was involved in the financial, organizational, and public relations aspects of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
According to F.B.I. wiretaps, Levison prepared King's May 1962 speech before the United Packing House Workers Convention, and his responses to questions from a Los Angeles radio station regarding the 1965 Los Angeles race riots.

According to David J. Garrow, in his book “The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.", published by Yale University Press, Levison assisted King in writing his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” as well as contributions to SCLC, and recruitment of SCLC employees.
Levison refused King’s offer of compensation for his services writing, "The liberation struggle [i.e., the civil rights movement] is the most positive and rewarding area of work anyone could experience."

In June 1962, Levison recommended Hunter Pitts O'Dell for executive assistant at SCLC.
According to Congressional testimony, O’Dell pled the Fifth when asked if he was a member of the CPUSA in a hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on July 30, 1958.
According to the FBI, O'Dell was an elected member of the National Committee of the CPUSA.
It is reasonable to assume, based on conventional knowledge of the MO of the communists at the time, that Levison and O’Dell were Martin Luther King’s Soviet handlers.

Reams of documents, much of which remains classified, discuss King’s communist connections.
I will end with a discussion of a speech King delivered at the Riverside Church in New York, April 4, 1967, a few days prior to the beginning of "Vietnam Week" because of the light it sheds on his philosophy.
CPUSA member Bettina Aptheker, daughter of CPUSA member Herbert Aptheker, had devised “Vietnam Week” at a December 1966 conference at the University of Chicago.
The HCUA found that the U of C conference "was instigated and dominated by the CPUSA and the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America," and was described by Attorney General Katzenbach as "substantially directed, dominated and controlled by the Communist Party.”

In his speech, King portrayed U.S. troops in Vietnam as foreign conquerors and oppressors, and he compared the United States to Nazi Germany.
He stated “we herd them [the South Vietnamese people] off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met.... So far we may have killed a million of them-mostly children.
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.”

King spoke of U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
He portrayed the Communist dictator Ho Chi Minh as the victim of American aggression:
“Perhaps only his [Ho Chi Minh's] sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than 8,000 miles away from its shores.”
King portrayed American policy in Vietnam and in general as motivated by a "need to maintain social stability for our investments" and saw "individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

Whether or not this communist agitprop was spoon fed to King by Levison or other handlers is beside the point.
King said nothing against the brutal North Vietnamese or for that matter a world Communist movement that was murdering over 100 million people.
Life magazine (April 21, 1967) described King's speech as "a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."
His opposition to the war was clearly not motivated by concern for the best interests of the US but by a desire for the victory of North Vietnam.
His anti-capitalist sentiments and his pro-totalitarian tendencies have been destructive to African-Americans ever since.

Chuck Morse Is the author of the upcoming book “The Difference between Us and Them” www.chuckmorse.com

Honoring a Socialist "Saint"
Hello and welcome to Review of the News Online. I’m William Norman Grigg, Senior Editor for The New American magazine – an affiliated publication of The John Birch Society.
Fifty years ago a black preacher’s speech captured the dream of a nation from which racial turmoil had been abolished. "We, Negro-Americans, sing with all loyal Americans: My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims' pride. From every mountain side, let freedom ring!"
"That's exactly what we mean," continued the preacher as he built to a dramatic climax. "From every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and the White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Great Smokies of Tennessee and from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia--let it ring."
Pastor Archibald Carey spoke these words during the 1952 Republican National Convention. Eleven years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. appropriated Carey’s summation as part of his "I Have A Dream" speech on the Washington Mall. King kept the theme and cadences of Carey’s speech, while altering some of the details. This was in keeping with King’s previous practice of plagiarism, particularly his plundering of a doctoral dissertation by a scholar named Jack Boozer.
As Theodore Pappas documents in his study Plagiarism and the Culture War, King’s dissertation abounds in passages taken without citation from Boozer’s work, including errors in grammar and punctuation. King’s theft of another scholar’s work, comments Pappas, "was an indefensible act that should warrant the revocation of his Ph.D."
The posthumous revocation of King’s doctoral degree by Boston University would address a long-standing academic outrage. But it would be much more worthwhile – and infinitely more difficult – to revoke King’s status as a civic demigod. Every year Americans are required to pay homage to King as an exemplar of tolerance, courage, and virtue. He is the only American to be honored with his own holiday – and his chief claim to such saintly status is the plagiarized "I Have a Dream" speech.
In April of 1993, Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania co-sponsored a measure entitled the "King Holiday and Service Act," the purpose of which was to "encourage" Americans to devote Martin Luther King Day to acts of "community service." As he introduced the bill, Senator Wofford compared King to Jesus Christ.
Wofford justified this blasphemy by insisting that King’s public utterances bear the mark of divinity. "Words -- Martin's words -- will always be part of what we celebrate," Wofford reverently declared. Republican Senator Dave Durenberger piously seconded Wofford’s view: "Never before has it been more important for our young people to hear Dr. King's words." Such pronouncements provide bitter humor to those who understand that Martin Luther King Jr.'s career was propelled by political opportunism and adorned with pilfered eloquence.
King’s defenders insist that he was working within a tradition called "voice merging," in which black preachers would freely share sermons without attribution. While this might explain why King felt free to help himself to the work of Pastor Carey – with whom he maintained a correspondence – it would not justify his violation of established scholarly guidelines for writing a doctoral dissertation. Besides, if plagiarism can be dismissed as "voice merging," adultery could be dismissed as "spouse merging" – and as it happens, King indulged in that vice as well.
It’s worth noting that while King felt free to steal from other scholars and preachers, he took great care to protect his own work from similar treatment. Pappas points out that "King took, copyrighted, and later defended his legal right to the words and thoughts" of Pastor Carey.
In January 1997, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which is headed by King’s son Dexter, struck a marketing deal with Time-Warner. The media conglomerate agreed to produce and market books and other products using King’s writings, thereby netting the King estate an estimated $30-50 million over five years.
As Pappas reports: "At the heart of the deal is aggressive enforcement of the hundreds of copyrights that King placed on ‘his’ writings and on his most famous speeches in particular. Most disturbing … has been the King family’s aggressive profiteering toward those wanting to praise King by quoting the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. For instance, the King estate sued USA Today demanding a $1,700 licensing fee plus legal costs after the paper quoted the speech in praise of King."
In this matter, King and the custodians of his estate have followed the socialist maxim, "What’s mine is `mine’; what’s ‘yours’ is ours." This is entirely in keeping with the true mission and vision of Martin Luther King – the subversion of our constitutional republic into a socialist total state.
In 1997, Professor Larry Hofford of St. Mary’s University lamented: "Naming a national holiday after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has proven to be a mistake." Professor Hofford, a self-described "progressive," complained that King's image "has been so watered down that the picture of him is that of a 'mainstream reformer' who led a movement to end legal segregation. The result is that no person in a position of authority in the United States could possibly experience any discomfort with this image."
Hofford continued: "What is missing from most of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations is any discussion of the radical King … [who] put forth a philosophy and theology stressing the need to balance individual will with community will." Hofford recalls that King was a strident opponent of capitalism, a Marxist liberation theologian who preached that "'the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together.'" King sought not only an end to legally enforced racial segregation, but also a radical restructuring of American society.
Martin Luther King's long-term advisor – and occasional speechwriter -- was New York attorney Stanley Levison, who was identified by federal investigators as a Communist agent. Levison arranged for King to hire Hunter Pitts O’Dell, a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, as his executive assistant. In 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy warned King that he was being manipulated by Communist agents. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy reiterated this warning, offering a personal appeal to King to sever his ties to Levison and O’Dell: "They're Communists. You've got to get rid of them."
In a 1979 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, black civil rights activist Julia Brown testified of extensive connections between King and the Communist Party. Like other Americans concerned about race relations, Brown had joined a "civil rights" group – only to learn that it was a Communist front. After she took her concerns to the FBI, Brown was asked to work within the Party as an undercover operative. In her 1979 testimony, Brown recalled: "The [Communist] cells that I was associated with in Cleveland were continually being asked to raise money for Martin Luther King's activities and to support his movement ... while I was in the Communist Party … I knew Martin Luther King to be closely connected with the Communist Party."
Referring to the proposal to create a holiday honoring King, Brown declared: "If this measure is passed honoring Martin Luther King, we may as well take down the stars and stripes that flies over this building and replace it with a red flag." This sobering observation is worth remembering during celebrations of the Feast of St. Martin.

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