Was Martin Luther King a Communist?

This writer does not question that the late, great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was deservedly one of the most monumental and pivotal figures of the 20th century. King's inspirational leadership, oratory, and profession of non-violence may have very well saved this nation from a race war. I am grateful that the Rev. Dr. King emerged as the most visible and influential leader of the civil rights movement as opposed to an advocate of violence such as Malcolm X or a radical communist.

No, the Rev. Dr. King was not a communist, however, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. While this is a delicate subject to broach, especially given the martyrdom and lionization of Dr. King to virtual sainthood status, the subject must nevertheless be broached for a better understanding of some of the darker forces that infiltrated and sabotaged an organically pro American, conservative, and Christian civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by Dr. King, also had as its vice president Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who also sponsored the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted as a member Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy. Dr. King maintained correspondence with Carl Braden. Also on the board of SCLC was Bayard Rustin, a known communist.

In 1957, Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. which was originally called Commonwealth College until it was sited by the House Committee on un-American Activities as being a communist front (April 27, 1949). The committee found that Commonwealth, later the Highlander Folk School, was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing the texts of the New Testament to those of Karl Marx. Dr. King knew many of the known communists associated with the Highlander school.

In 1960, Dr. King hired Hunter Pitts O'Dell, a communist official to work at SCLC. According to the St. Louis Globe Democrat (Oct. 26, 1962) "A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King's SCLC. He is Jack H. O'Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana." Dr. King fired O'Dell when this information emerged but rehired him as head of the SCLC New York office.

Dr. King was praised by communists and promoted by fellow travelers. Communist official Benjamin J. Davis, in the Worker (Nov. 10, 1963) describes Dr. King as "a brilliant and practical leader who articulates the philosophy of the Negro people, for direct non-violent mass action." The Worker article goes on to describe Dr. King as "The foremost advocate of the solution of social problems through nonviolent methods of mass action."

In his own words, Martin Luther King expresses a communist outlook in his book "Stride Toward Freedom" He states that "in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system…"

It's strikes me as sad that Dr. King, the most influential leader of the civil rights movement wasn't an advocate of the capitalism that was already leading to such great economic strides amongst African-Americans in his day. By advocating a "better distribution of wealth" he meant state control over the economy. He sneered at "the profit motive" without explaining why African-Americans shouldn't seek to profit to the best of their ability. These ideas would later on open the floodgates to radical African-American leaders such as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, and the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of welfare programs, the perpetuation of poverty, the destruction of the African-American family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.

In "Stride Toward Freedom" Dr. King states that "In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers – from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no…My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise…The Kingdom of G-d is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both."

By stating that he views things "from a dialectical point of view" Dr. King is thinking like communists such as Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. The dialectic always and can only lead to authoritarianism. Man cannot, for example, be half free and half slave, either he is free or he is a slave. Dr. King's imperious stand toward his own people would stand in contrast to an advocacy of genuine freedom, the development of self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital resulting from achievement. Dr. King was not advocating the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.

Much remains to be said regarding the communist infiltration of the civil rights movement as a whole. The communists sought to use African-Americans as cannon fodder in their revolution by stoking hatred and racial division. Much blood and suffering is on the hands of these communist agitators. The story of how the left-wing predominantly white establishment promoted communists in the African-American community as a means of continuing an informal system of oppression also cries out to be told.

As to the "Highlander is a Communist training school" the FBI was not, I repeat not, able to find any evidence to back up that claim. See footnote 37 in the following article by David Horowitz who also rejects this smear:

http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/american_quarterly/48.1horowitz.html

You're a little bit loose with the rhetoric.

First, this is an article by "Daniel" Horowitz, not David.

About this Horowitz: Daniel Horowitz is a professor of American studies and history at Smith College. His most recent book is Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994).
[I'm suspicious already.]

Second, what Horowitz wrote is much more revealing than what's in footnote 37:

In the fall of her junior year, Friedan took an economics course taught by Dorothy W. Douglas, Theories and Movements for Social Reconstruction. Douglas was well known at the time for her radicalism. ³⁵ In what she wrote for Douglas, and with youthful enthusiasm characteristic of many members of her generation, Friedan sympathetically responded to the Marxist critique of capitalism as a cultural, economic, and political force. ³⁶

Friedan also gained an education as a radical in the summer of 1941 when, following Douglas's suggestion, she participated in a writers' workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an institution active in helping the CIO organize in the South. The school offered a series of summer institutes for fledgling journalists which, for 1939 and 1940 (but not 1941), the communist-led League of American Writers helped sponsor. For three years beginning in the fall of 1939, opponents of Highlander had sustained a vicious redbaiting attack, but a FBI investigator found no evidence of subversive activity. ³⁷ In good Popular Front language, Friedan praised Highlander as a truly American institution that was attempting to help America to fulfill its democratic ideals. She explored the contradictions of her social position as a Jewish girl from a well-to-do family who had grown up in a class-divided Peoria, gave evidence of her hostility to the way her parents fought over issues of debt and extravagance, and described the baneful influence of the mass media on American life. Though she also acknowledged that her Smith education did "not lead to much action," she portrayed herself as someone whose radical consciousness relied on the American labor movement as the bulwark against fascism. ³⁸ [Emphasis added]

Now let's see if there are any "Red flags" in these excerpts:

Dorothy W. Douglas?

35. In 1955 Douglas took the Fifth Amendment before HUAC as she was redbaited, accused of having been a member of a communist teachers union in the late 1930s.

Betty Friedan?

Friedan sympathetically responded to the Marxist critique of capitalism as a cultural, economic, and political force.

Friedan educated as a radical?

Friedan also gained an education as a radical in the summer of 1941 when, following Douglas's suggestion, she participated in a writers' workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an institution active in helping the CIO organize in the South. The school offered a series of summer institutes for fledgling journalists which, for 1939 and 1940 (but not 1941), the communist-led League of American Writers helped sponsor.

Popular Front?

In good Popular Front language, Friedan praised Highlander as a truly American institution that was attempting to help America to fulfill its democratic ideals.
And what might that Popular Front be?
POPULAR FRONT: Stalinist idea developed in the 1930/40's. After the idea of the "Third Period" (a period of capitalist crisis in which every non-Stalin leftist was labeled a "social fascist") proved an utter failure, Stalin's Comintern created the Popular Front.
http://www.red-encyclopedia.org/vocab.html

Redbaiting?

Whenever I hear a college professor, especially from an institution like Smith College, go into a snit using this term I know a Communist, or a nest of the same, has just been exposed.

Class-divided Peoria?

Yeah right.

The term "FBI" appears in only one place in the footnotes of this article (not #37) and in that instance has nothing to do with the FBI declaring the Highlander Folk School free of Communist control. There is no identification of "a FBI investigator" as Horowitz wrote.

Please try to get your stuff together before posting again -- or take it over to DU where it belongs.

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?

Thanks for the correction on Horowitz. I am glad to finally meet someone who never makes mistakes!

Why are you bothering to use Friedan as an example? She was a commie scumbag and I have no intention of defending her. I guess you are throwing as much you can in my direction and seeing what sticks, is that it?

Highlander was a leftwing, often naive, organization and, in the early, years proably had communist who were involved on some levels (so did the AFL and CIO and numberless other organizations and agencies).

Jumping from this, do the laughable claim that it was "Communist training school" does not wash. I would be interested in your thoughts of the references in footnote 37. Did you read them, if so, what are your *specific* objections to the information contained in these references. That was, after all, the whole point of my message to you.

BTW, did you even read the King quote. What is your opinion on that? Just a commie trick? If so, he makes a better case against communism than most freepers! That sly dog eh?

Thanks for the correction on Horowitz. I am glad to finally meet someone who never makes mistakes!

The misidentification of Horowitz was the least of your "mistakes." Accepting what this leftist schmuck writes as truth is beyond mistake -- it's blindingly stupid. As I mentioned, he offers no proof of his claim that "a FBI investigator" cleared the Highlander School of Communist control -- yet you accept it.

Why are you bothering to use Friedan as an example?

Obviously I used what was written about her because you referred me to the fawning propaganda piece in the first place.

The fact that writing courses were taught there by "communist-led" organizations is enough for me, or didn't you read that in your own proffered article?

I would be interested in your thoughts of the references in footnote 37.

Footnote 37 has this to say:

37. John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932-1962 (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 47-69. I am grateful to Professor Glen for a letter in which he clarified the timing of the League's sponsorship. Meltzer, Friedan, 20 says that Friedan's economics professor pointed her to Highlander but identifies that professor as a male; since the only economics course Friedan took was from Douglas, I am assuming that it was she who urged her student to attend the workshop. Meltzer thinks that is a reasonable assumption: Milton Meltzer, phone conversation with Daniel Horowitz, 24 Sept. 1995.

So Glen gives Friedan an out -- the League wasn't there in 1941 when Friedan was. (The Reds had only been there the two previous years.) And Meltzer clarifies what gender Friedan's professor was. So?

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?

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