Needless to say, permission was denied.
Bkmrk.
King would be condemned by today’s progressives.
bkmk
The letter was an outright challenge to the state atheism of the Soviet Union.
In February 1962, Hoover told Attorney General Robert Kennedy that Stanley Levison, one of King’s closest advisors, was “a secret member of the Communist Party” (Hoover, 14 February 1962). In the following months, Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963.
Hoover responded to King’s criticisms of the Bureau’s performance in civil rights cases by announcing at a press conference in November 1964, that King was the “most notorious liar in the country” (Herbers, “Dr. King Rebuts Hoover”). Surprised by the accusation, King replied that he could only have sympathy for Hoover as he must be “under extreme pressure” to make such a statement (Herbers, “Dr. King Rebuts Hoover”). King asked an intermediary to set up a meeting between himself and Hoover to understand what had led to the comment. Andrew Young, a King aide who was present at the meeting, recalled that there was “not even an attitude of hostility” between the two, but at about this same time, the FBI anonymously sent King a compromising tape recording of him carousing in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, along with an anonymous letter that SCLC staff interpreted as encouraging King to commit suicide to avoid public embarrassment (Senate Select Committee, 167).
King,in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist 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
I think that it is pertinent to note that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppression’s of the Soviet Union were painfully evident, 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. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
Initially he was always listed as the Rev. Dr. MLK. The molders of popular culture did away with the Reverend part of the title, leaving just the Dr. But people asked what kind of doctor? When learned Doctor of Divinity, then that title had to go as well. Or so it seems to me as I remember.
Ping to this above thread from yesterday featuring MLK’s request to visit the Soviet Union.
MLK was many things, good and bad, and he had severe reservations about unfettered capitalism. But communist and Russian colluder he was not. Please do your research instead of abiding by the James Comey type takes on history. Thanks.
The Rockefellers— were all Baptists, especially the vile serpent John D. Rockefeller (murderer and mega thief of the wealth and freedom of All Americans, who sang hymns to assuage his “holy work” to make as much money however he could, as “God’s wish”). An evil tyrannical shite, and all of his minions, Flagler, Aldrich, JP Morgan and the institutions they created to both prop up and cover up their continuing graft and theft.
Ask descendants of Titusville, PA oil pioneers whose kin were murdered in cold blood to take their legitimate claims. The days of Oil and Steel, and latter day Barons. Then take a look at a VP... Nelson Rockefeller, and examine that “wing” of the repub party, which Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, and yes, Donald Trump labored to detach from our true Party. They, the Rockefeller wing— are founders of the Deep State, who have made trillions off the suffering of the Real Americans as their pawns, in globalism and in ever expanding “social justice” victim groups of socialism.