Thanks! I have great respect for Alveda King and I’m willing to take her word on this.
But I still don’t see why anyone thinks it’s effective to tell today’s leftist Democrats that MLK was a Republican. He clearly wasn’t a conservative, no matter how he was registered. Coretta King was a regular presence at Democrat conventions for many years. Other than Alveda, who seems to be something of a maverick within the King family, the rest of the family members seem to be hardcore leftists who support pro-infanticide Obama. Surely MLK would be supporting Obama if he were alive today.
I think we’d do a lot better to highlight today’s black conservatives (including Michael Steele, who’d be a great VP choice) instead of claiming a legacy with a past leftist who may have been technically registered as a Republican, but agreed with the Dems 98% of the time.
Explaining that MLK was a Republican is important, because most people these days have forgotten, or never knew, the history of civil rights, or how blacks ended up being 90 percent Democrat for the past few decades. Explaining the history is helpful to convincing them to consider where their interests really lie, and to help put to an end the lie that Republicans are racists.
After the Civil War, all blacks were essentially Republican, and remained so until the New Deal. After northern troops left, Southern Dems instituted Jim Crow and enforced segregation through a reign of terror. During the New Deal, the Democrat party won over northern Blacks by essentially lying to them about civil rights while at the same time promising welfare and jobs. Northern blacks joined the Democrat coalition, and gave the Democrats the margin to overtake the GOP in national elections, given the existence of the "Solid South".
In the south, in most places, blacks couldn't vote. Those that did affiliate with a party would have naturally been with the GOP, because the people perpetuating segregation and second class status were Democrats, even after the New Deal.
What blacks need to know is that the GOP was always the party that was in favor of civil rights. No party was perfect on that score, but the worst that the GOP did might be characterized as benign neglect of the issue for most of the post-reconstruction issue. When serious problems arose, as with the wave of lynchings in the 1920s, the GOP did act, passing anti-lynching laws. In the 1950s, it was a Republican president who enforced civil rights, against a Democrat governor. Republicans in general favored civil rights, whereas southern Dems were universally against it, and Northern Dems (many of whom were blue collar laborers and competed with blacks) were split.
So, when the civil rights laws were passed in the 60s, it was with a smattering of northern Dems and nearly unanimous support of Republicans. Dems, then as now, controlled the media, and so, because it was passed with the support of a Dem President, somehow, Dems got credit for it. Republicans are not the Stupid Party for nothing.
Your introduction of conservatism is largely irrelevant to this history, because conservatism was not a part of the lexicon of Republican policy until Buckley, Goldwater and then Reagan. It was not a majority of the GOP until Reagan in the 80s, until then, it was just a wing. In the 50s, when King became politically active, the GOP was pretty liberal. They did not want to reverse the New Deal, just stop its advance, or slow it down. They were caretakers of FDR's legacy. There were liberals and moderates and a very few of what we could call in today's terms conservatives in the party. So MLK could have found himself quite comfortably in the GOP in the 1950s, and the 1960s for that matter, in spite of being a liberal. Communism, no--unlike the Dems, there was no communist wing to the GOP.
When I was a kid, there was a black Republican Senator from Massachussetts. He was a legacy of that earlier time when all blacks were Republicans because all Dems wanted blacks kept in their place.
Blacks and the GOP split over the Great Society for the most part, and because black leaders became very leftist in the 60s--anti war, anti-American, liberal on social policies, taxes. Black leaders wanted to extend their gains to include quotas, and when that proved difficult to sell, to "affirmative action". Republicans never accepted that, and the media spun that to portray Republicans as racist.
Blacks were, in the 50s and 60s, essentially conservative, except when it came to race. They, as a demographic, were pro-family, religious and desirous of advancing the standing of their families. Dem policies since then have helped to destroy the black family and have caused blacks to move leftward as a group ever since, but those blacks who come from 2 parent families and who hold jobs are well integrated into the mainstream of American society and would do well to consider whether their place is really on the Democrat plantation. Spreading knowledge of this history, including that MLK was a Republican, should be a part of the strategy to convince blacks that their interests lie with Republicans, who WANT them to succeed, not with Dems, who want them to stay as a permanent, Democrat, underclass.