There was a reason the Kennedy administration was investigating MLK, and continued to the next administration.
I remember cartoons on op-ed pages calling him a communist (by implication), op-eds that called him a rabble rouser, he was not well liked.
I KNOW it is very callous, however in this country if someone is assassinated all their flaws and extreme political agenda ideas are candy coated or removed all together.
It has been documented that MLK, Jr. did attend CPUSA meetings. I don’t know if identified specifically with that form of collectivism but the op-ed pages were more or less correct since he wanted to get rid of the free enterprise capitalist system.
“It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm