Was Martin Luther King a Communist?

sierratimes.com ^ | 01.20.02 | By Chuck Morse

[aristeides]

Perhaps the King bashers had been unable to find evidence of secret party membership, because no such evidence exists.

Odd, then, that King's defenders don't say they have tried to find it, and it doesn't exist.

Mind you, I'm not saying it does exist. I suspect it does not. But I also suspect nobody has tried to find it, so that they can make the same denial that the Chaplin biographer makes, for the reason I surmised earlier: even asking the question can be a career-ender.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Chaplin may, or may not, have been a party member but he the nearest closest thing: an outright apologist for Stalin.

King, by contrast, often criticized Communism *as a philosophy and as applied." Chaplin never did. In fact, King powerful anti-Communist quotation which I posted many, many, times here is a more effective indictment of the philosophical basis of Communism than any penned by most freepers.

Unfortunately, every time I post this quote (taken from original sources not secondary hatchet jobs), it is greeted with total silence by the King bashers. They don't even want to consider that they have misjudged the man.

As I have said many times, King had his flaws and politically went off the deep end in the late 1960s. The claim that he was a communist, however, is pure fantasy.

[JCG]

Horowitz a leftist? Is there anyone who is not part of the grand communist conspiracy, other than you, of course?

A leftist is not necessarily a communist. Sometimes it's difficult to tell however. Who would want to bet Pete Seeger isn't one?

As to fn 37, let me try again and frame the question another way. Have you read the Glen book and, if so, what is your response to his evidence that Highlander was not a Communist training school?

I don't normally run to Barnes & Noble to purchase a $25 book just to argue with someone who has an "obscure-professor" fetish. The Web is a better resource. For example, consider the testimony of a real leftist which I found at trumanlibrary.com. Here's what one-time US congressman (1949-1983) and a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Richard W. Bolling, had to say:

Well, for some reason, I've forgotten why, I guess the year between my graduation in '37 and the beginning of my masters, which was in English literature--I got my bachelor's in French literature and my masters in English--I went to a Quaker school, a Quaker camp, at a place called the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School was famous in those days for being dominated by the Stalinists. But there were also people like the Friends; the camp was a Friends camp at this school. I got exposed to all of that. I had a couple of people that are relatively well-known in Washington, one that was there, and we each remember the other as relatively sympathetic to their anti-Stalinist view. They were the ones that were most interested in the anti-Stalinist view. The guy I'm talking about is Adam Yarmalinsky, an intellectual with considerable potency.

JOHNSON: This Quaker school would be inherently anti-Stalinist, would it not, since they do not believe in dictatorship?

BOLLING: They didn't believe in it, but they were at the same school.

JOHNSON: They were at the same school--or on the same grounds?

BOLLING: No, they were there as guests of and paying their way at Highlander. In those days there was a large amount of infiltration into liberal groups that didn't know they were infiltrated.

[Emphasis added] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/bolling.htm

Funny how terms like "dominated by the Stalinists" and "infiltration into liberal groups" and "communist-led" makes one wonder if there might just be just the slightest outside chance that the Highlander School was a "Communist training school" -- even, maybe, part of the "grand communist conspiracy?"

And, remember, I didn't say it. Two leftists did.

America's Fifth Column ... watch Steve Emerson/PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
New Link: Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)

Who is Steve Emerson?

[sweetliberty]

Bump.

[river rat]

"What would this tell us except that communists can sometimes do righteous things?"

Perhaps...

But supporting civil rights in America - wasn't a demonstration of their righteousness or "humanity", it was a wedge issue they attempted to hammer into a schism in America....

"Civil Rights" and HUMAN RIGHTS were unknown in much of the good ole "Soviet Union" of the big guy -- Joseph Stalin....

One can apply lipstick on a pig -- but on Communist pigs - it doesn't make them anything but a silly looking pig.

Even a broken clock - is correct twice a day...
The Communists couldn't even come close to matching that standard.

Semper Fi

[Grut]

I've known a few communists and they were very nice people, if a bit fixed in their opinions. It isn't necessarily true that communists leap out of bed every morning with a cry of "Evil, I take thee for my good!" although I'm inclined to agree with you that Party support of the civil rights movement was cynical.

The main thing is that MLK had plenty of reasons to act as he did without our imputing dark motives to him. What the communists did they did for their own reasons.

Incidentally, in the military a stopped clock is right only once a day. ;^)