Posted on 12/30/2002 12:07:11 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
In 1983, shortly after Congress approved the bill which would create a national holiday honoring the late civil rights activist Martin Luther King, former New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson sent a letter to his old friend Ronald Reagan, urging the President not to sign the bill for a holiday honoring "the memory of a man of immoral character whose frequent associations with leading agents of communism is well established."
In response to Thomson, the President wrote: "On the national holiday you mentioned, I have the reservations you have, but here the perception of too many people is based on an image, not reality. Indeed, to them the perception is reality." (Emphasis in original.) In other words, Mr. Reagan knew that Martin Luther King was, in reality, unworthy of national adulation. Nonetheless, on November 2, 1983, he put his signature on the bill and the holiday became law.
Communist Connections
Since, as Mr. Reagan candidly observed, the perception of King had become the reality, it makes sense to go back and look at the stark reality of the man J. Edgar Hoover once dubbed "the most notorious liar in the country." During the Kennedy Administration, King’s connections with Communists were well known to both JFK and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In fact, Bobby Kennedy — with his liberal credentials overflowing — directed the FBI to institute surveillance of King, including wiretaps of telephone calls. While much of the information gathered by the FBI remains sealed by court order until 2027, some of it has come to light.
On December 8, 1975, for instance, the Washington Post pinpointed New York attorney Stanley Levinson as the "important secret member of the Communist Party" who was discovered by the FBI to have been King’s mentor, financier, and confidante for 12 years. The Levinson relationship began during King’s meteoric rise to national prominence. In her memoirs, King’s widow described Levinson’s contributions to her husband’s work as "indispensable." Levinson even wrote speeches for King.
In 1957, perhaps stimulated by Levinson, King attended and taught at a training school in Tennessee where he was photographed with Communists Carl and Anne Braden, Abner Berry, and Aubrey Williams.
In 1960, King hired one Hunter Pitts O’Dell to his staff. When O’Dell’s position as a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party was revealed in 1961, King supposedly fired him. But it turned out that rather than discharging this key Red, he had transferred and promoted O’Dell to a higher post within King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When O’Dell was again exposed, King went through the same routine of announcing his dismissal. But a check by United Press International found him still employed by King’s organization.
Stumping for Hanoi
On April 4, 1967, King demonstrated the influence Communists in his organization (such as "principal aide" Fred Shuttlesworth) had enjoyed when he savaged U.S. policy in Vietnam during a fiery speech at Riverside Church in New York. King went so far as to liken the conduct of U.S. forces in Vietnam to that of the "Germans … in the concentration camps of Europe." Life magazine characterized the speech as "a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." Syndicated black columnist Carl Rowan wrote that King "has alienated many of the Negro’s friends and armed the Negro’s foes." Leftist John Roche of Americans for Democratic Action fame claimed that the speech showed that King had "thrown in with the commies." The Washington Post commented that the speech "had diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people."
But not everyone was appalled by King’s inflammatory rhetoric. Writing in the Communist Party’s Political Affairs, Party public relations chief Arnold Johnson enthusiastically quoted King as describing the U.S. as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The Communist press had earlier extolled King’s violence-producing marches and demonstrations, events that customarily led to property damage and loss of life in black neighborhoods.
In October 1988, J.A. Parker of the Washington-based Lincoln Institute, an organization of Black conservatives, refused to buy into the phony image of King and pointed to evidence showing that King had been "under communist discipline." Parker insisted that the "King holiday is an insult to all Americans — black or white." And he launched a drive to have Congress repeal it. A Congress representing truth and the interests of all Americans would do exactly that.
this is the kind of hagiographic statement that Reagan perceptively dscribed. It is an illusion based on the conflation of one man with the whole civil rights movement of the 1960s ... the truth is far different: the Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, set in motion most of the changes in the 50s and 60s wrt race relations, because the promise of equal rights for blacks HAD ALREADY BEEN MADE IN 1869 IN THE 14TH AMENDMENT - by the Republicans of that era who pushed through the 14th Amendment. It took 90 years for a Court to properly intepret it. Even before MLK was a force in politics, James Meridith took his stand in mississippi, Jackie Robinson in the major leagues. it was MLK joining the brave Rosa Parks in Selma that made his name.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enforced 14th amendment and rights of blacks further via Congressional action, and most Congressional Republicans voted for it.
MLK had some influence on the latter, but not much, and certainly far less than, for example, LBJ and Republicans like Everett Dirksen. With or without MLK, the civil rights of blacks would have been expanded. some things might have been different. You are buying and selling MLK the myth, not MLK the man.
Was he one of this country's greatest heroes? YES! Compared with who? Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas Edision, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson? What about henry Clay? the Wright Brothers? Henry Ford? Cotton Mather? Gene Autrey? Katherine Hepburn? Roy Kroc? Ulysses S. Grant? Davy Crockett? Sam Houston? ... or for that matter compared with Ralph Abernathy, Booker T Washington, and Frederick Douglass?
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