Debunked by me, umpteen times, on this website. It is frustrating to see well-intentioned FReepers repeatedly repost it. That article was written by Frances Rice and is riddled with inaccuracies with respect not only to King, but also A. Phillip Randolph. In fact, I would go on record saying the article, the title, is one of the mostly poorly researched I’ve ever come across, and is actually more harmful to Republicans to stand by it when it is very easily refutable.
I warned a prominent local Republican in boastfully posting it on his website 2 years ago that it was riddled with errors, and he refused to take it down, or respond to my comments, which I thought very unfortunate.
Now, before I post excerpts of that letter with links to previous debates here on FR, this is what we do apparently know:
#1 MLK, Jr. would’ve been eligible to register to vote in 1950 when he was 21.
#2 We do not know how he voted (or if he voted) in 1952, and we do not know which party he belonged to, since no records have been unearthed as of yet.
#3 At least one source says MLK, Jr. claims to have voted once - once - for Republican for President, in 1956. This was not unusual, because Eisenhower received a decent % of the Black vote in 1956 and prominent Democrat Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. endorsed Eisenhower in that election. Although Nixon would receive an estimated 1/4th-1/3rd of the Black vote in 1960, 1956 was the last time a Republican received a substantial chunk of the Black vote.
#4 MLK, Jr. voted for JFK in 1960 and most likely LBJ in 1964 (and probably would’ve voted for Humphrey in 1968 had he not been assassinated). To the point, he was not a Republican when it mattered.
#5 He denounced Sen. Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964 as a tool of Southern racists and basically had little use for “Conservative” politics, burnishing it in the minds of many Blacks that Conservative Republicanism = White Supremacy. It did not matter that Goldwater was pro-Civil Rights (although opposed to the Acts measures because he believed them to be an expansion of big government interference).
My letter was as follows:
Dear Sir,
I’m writing this email privately to you instead of posting in the comments section as to spare any public ridicule on your link to the Frances Rice piece on MLK, Jr’s party affiliation. As a member of Free Republic, when this article came out, many were excited to have Rev. King listed as a Republican, but upon closer historical inspection, Ms. Rice’s piece included unfortunate and not very well-researched inaccuracies regarding this claim and others, including:
“In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans.”
——I’m not sure which set of years Ms. Rice refers to, but presuming we’re talking about 1960, this would be a falsehood, unfortunately. Now it was correct that up until about 1932, Blacks were overwhelmingly Republican in both the north and the south (at least in the latter case, where the few were able to be registered to vote), but with FDR, Blacks in the north started shifting to the Democrat party (though in some cases, could support the GOP up until the 1960s, such as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a Democrat, endorsing Eisenhower in 1956), but as they became part of the overwhelmingly Democrat political machines, they were absorbed fairly heavily by the 1960s. The South was a different story, and many Blacks remained GOP until the 1960s, but just prior to the signing of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, when they, too, bolted heavily into the Democrat party (despite the fact that it took Republican support to even get those acts passed, something swiftly and now almost entirely ignored).
“And after he became president, John F. Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph who was a black Republican.”
-— Asa Phillip Randolph and his wife were, in fact, not Republicans, but prominent New York Socialists, both of whom had been candidates for Congress under the Socialist Party banner in the early part of the 20th century. Although Randolph later became more “moderate” in his views, he was still a member of the left-wing NY Liberal Party by the 1960s.
There was no indication King was registered in either party (at least in the 1960s). Although King’s father (MLK, Sr.), was a registered (or self-declared) Republican and initially supported Nixon in 1960, following his son’s arrest that resulted in the phone call by the Kennedy campaign to the jailhouse, King’s father endorsed JFK (and if MLK, Jr. cast a vote that year, it likely also was for JFK). MLK, Sr. supported Democrat candidates from then on, including most prominently for Jimmy Carter in 1976 (8 years after his son’s assassination). Quite unfortunate and shocking given Carter’s own legacy of race-baiting in his 1970 race for GA Governor.
Although many aspects of Rice’s piece are correct, the presumption King was a Republican was an erroneous one. MLK, Jr. favored extreme federal government intervention and government-based solutions to problems facing the Black community, indeed, Socialistic solutions that contributed to and exacerbated the problems of the Black community to this day.
These were the links to the discussions on the piece:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1919430/posts
...and when it was later reposted:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/1957006/posts
However, it is worth pointing out today that the niece of Rev. King, former GA State Rep. Alveda King, is a Republican and prominent pro-life activist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveda_King
P.S. The points cited about some of the Southern Democrats were correct, but that didn’t change the facts about King himself, and that he and his father DID support the party of White supremacy, without interruption beginning in 1960. Even that MLK, Sr. supported Jimmy Carter, who fashioned himself a protege of the aforementioned Lester Maddox, who ran a racist campaign for Governor in 1970 criticizing a racial moderate former Governor, Carl Sanders, who was his opponent in the primary for “shaking hands with Basketball players”, was pretty astonishing.
Thank you very much for the clarification.