It was from 1956, he would be talking about the upcoming 1956 election, but MLK tried to appear no-partisan generally, so if we look at the letter, he plays neutral on the surface, but with a strong “vote democrat” message.
“I am of the impression that
the Negro voter will go largely for the Democratic Party. I haven’t fully decided which candidate I will vote for. In the past I have always voted the Democratic
ticket.”
Either way, as you point out, he clearly states that he has always voted democrat, and he only has 3 elections to vote following this letter, and JFK and Lyndon Johnson clearly won his vote, so the 1956 election by itself doesn’t mean a whole lot, regardless of how he voted,
I don’t see how anyone can claim that MLK was a Republican.
It was that source article that made the erroneous claim and was replete with other egregious errors (such as mentioning an individual who had been a Socialist candidate for Congress from NY as a “Republican”, A. Phillip Randolph).
Besides these errors made by the author, it should’ve been posed as a question, “How could Blacks be Democrats ?”, yet these individuals were and favored heavy federal government intervention for the simple fact that most Blacks (especially in the South) had to have their rights enabled and defended by the federal government (why States’ Rights has often left a sour taste in their mouths).
Unfortunately, their reliance and faith upon government, which helped in a few instances (abolition of slavery, passage of civil rights laws) has been their undoing under the weight of more than a half-century of dependence upon the welfare state, precipitating the crack-up of the Black family unit and the moral and spiritual turpitude that is the end result. MLK, Jr. must bear the responsibility for leading his people down that primrose path, and he contrasts greatly with Booker T. Washington, whom actually was a Republican, and urged a far different course of action that would’ve left the Black community in a far different and better state today.