What Martin Luther King Did (Chuck Norris: How To Live Your Dreams Alert)

I wish the name of the holiday would be changed to "Civil Rights Day". This is much more inclusive. None of our other holidays are named after one person. Why should this one?

Not a bad idea.

MLK was no more virtuous than RWR, and in my opinion RWR was the better man, and far more influential on the world stage.

I heard MLK give his "I Have a Dream" speech in Chicago a few months after he had given it in Washington, DC. It was not the same speech.

Dr. King had modified the speech and expanded the part dealing with his vision of the future. He spoke of his dreams for the nation, for the civil rights movement and for the time past the cause.

In the speech Dr. King alluded to the feeling that he wouldn't make it to the end of the struggle - almost as if he had a foreshadowing of his own death. People in the audience were crying. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

A few years back I saw the Washington, DC speech on TV and was stunned at how inadequate it was compared to the later dream speech in Chicago.

he was also a communist that j edgar hoover wanted dead.

And our secular (secular?) Saint associated with Stalinists.

You are talking about J Edgar Hoover ... the Bastion of Conservitive Morality?

That J. Edgar Hoover... right?

That quote (about finding God help) is from a sermon he gave to college students. For some reason, Coretta edited it out of the later editions of "Strength to Love". It is his most evangelical sermon, I think. I have the 1964 edition.

Actaully if you read what he says, unlike the Black Panthers he rejected communism directly. He was socialist in terms of getting the goernment to give away stuff to the poor.

MLK Day: Why I won't be celebrating

by Frank Of Queens

Now that MLK day is upon us, we will be inundated with a plethora of testimonies as to his greatness. In fact there is now the unspoken eleventh commandment:"Thou shalt not criticize Martin Luther King!"

He has taken on deity status. No one dares to look critically at his politics or life. Instead many believe that he is the most perfect being that ever existed. Yes, it's true! Why you can smear the Founding Fathers, you can even put Our Lord Jesus in a vat of urine upside down and call it art. But heaven forbid that you should say a bad word about MLK. King was a public figure, and now an historical one. Therefore he should be open to examination of his beliefs and politics. There exists though the belief that if you should begin to question and examine them that somehow that makes you a "racist". Tell me, if you raise historical inquiry about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Adams, etc. does that make you a traitor, or subversive? Of course not! Why in today's Orwellian America, they are just reduced to slave holders and "old dead White guys". I have heard them referred to as "the founding robbers". Jefferson is reduced to a calumny that he was just a randy country squire who had sex with his slave. Jesus, why you can deconstruct His life, and it is not offending to Christians we are told, it is just historical inquiry. The same with the Founding Fathers, or for that matter any other figure in our society. Yet, when it comes to King, there is no deconstruction, nor is there real inquiry, or debate. We are just given some clips of speeches that create this image of a non-violent Ghandi figure who out Jesus', Jesus!

King is depicted as the martyr for the sins of White America, sacrificed upon the altar of America's hatred and bigotry. Because of the senseless crime of killing him, all White people are guilty by birth. It is a religion, and all White people are guilty of the original sin of racism. Affirmative action became a form of penance. Generations unborn must

pay the price for this act of collective sin. Just as Jews were held responsible for the death of Jesus as a group, so all Whites are guilty of this act of murder. It has even spawned a new form of penance, reparations. Drawn up into King's murder is the U.S.government. J.Edgar Hoover is blamed for this. But why did Hoover have such antipathy towards King? Simply because Hoover who wasn't against the Civil Rights movement, saw rightfully, that communists were infiltrating the movement and would as they have always done, subvert it. It is fact, not his paranoia that confirms this. Whether it was Spain during the Spanish Civil war, Cuba under Battista, the left has always used the popular front and noble causes to gain power, and then get rid of any opposition. King had known communists in his movement. Which brings me to my main question.

If King was for civil rights, then why did this man who proclaimed that he was for non-violence employ in his movement people whose philosophy suppressed liberty, and was the most violent movement in history? King knew that he had communists in his movement, yet he never got rid of them. He said he didn't care if they were communists, as long as they helped him achieve his goals. Well then, is this the statement of some who believed in civil rights? Someone who is ignorant, or someone who himself believed in their ideology? Didn't he know what was happening in Russia to Soviet Jews who were being deprived of their civil and religious rights. Jews who were imprisoned for wanting to go to Israel? Deprived of the right to practice their faith? Or how about Eastern Europe, where Christians were tortured, murdered and suppressed for their love of Christ? Didn't he know about the millions who died under the Communists in Russia and Europe? How about China under Mao, the worst mass murderer in history? You mean this Reverend didn't know this? This individual who said that the undeveloped nations looked to communism, not America, didn't know about the repression, murder, and brutality of that system? Instead he excoriated America, our foreign policy, and our economic system. He compared it to Nazi Germany, and yet he didn't know what the communists were doing and had done since Lenin's coup in 1917? If some had Nazis in their political movement in America, do you think that it would be tolerated, given what they had done? Yet King saw nothing wrong with having people whose ideology cause the greatest suffering in history? He defamed the heroes of WW2 by comparing this nation to Nazi Germany. If it was like Nazi Germany, do you think there would have been a voting rights act of 1965? Do you think that there would have been any civil rights movement to begin with? King was critical of our economic system. He wanted to redistribute the wealth, and install a guaranteed national income. Didn't he see how people lived under the "wonders of Marxist Leninist" economics"? This criticism coming from someone who never held a job, never ran a business, and had no experience whatsoever in the field of commerce! How can I honor a man whose whole life was spent on defending America's enemies? As for the calumny that J.Edgar Hoover was somehow behind his death, let's use some commonsense. Would he want to create a martyr out of a man whose political star was waning? If Hoover was this racist, as depicted by the left, then why did he break the KKK? Hoover loved his country, and sought to protect it from elements that were harmful to the common good. Given the record of communism at that time, should he have been tolerant of an intolerant ideology? He had asked King to get rid of the communists in his movement, King refused. Hoover rightly felt that he had to move to protect this nation from those who would use the civil rights movement to subvert and harm our nation. Instead of congratulations, he is smeared with lies and calumnies! King was against racism, yet he embraced an ideology that that was intolerant of those who disagreed politically. He was a reverend, yet he stood by those whose ideology punished those who wanted practice their religion! He accused America of being the number one perpetrator of war crimes in S.E.Asia, yet said nothing about what the communists were doing not only there, but also all over the world. If the one thing that history teaches us, it is that thirty years is far too short to make judgements on a public or political individual. The rush to deify King was a mistake, and those who question it are always attacked.

For this among other reasons, I won't be celebrating MLK Day.

ANY historical figure MUST be subjected to the sort of legitimate analysis that is critical to establishing context and perspective. For instance, it is my opinion that the greatest political philosophers of liberty in the history of mankind were those men that this nation was blessed to have at its inception, the Founding Fathers. Notwithstanding this opinion, I am constantly being exhorted by leftist deconstructionists to never forget that many of them were slaveowners, sexist, and slaughterers of innocent Indians. None of this changes the totality of my opinion of them in the great good they accomplished by founding this nation.

I simply say that a similar yardstick should be applied to Martin Luther King in assesing the impact that his legacy has on the modern-day civil rights movement.

I wish to make it clear that I think that Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect that profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far has its promise of justice for all is concerned.

This does not mean however that his legacy to the Civil Rights movement has been one of unalloyed good. I believe much of his bequeathment resulted in an over reliance on big government statist solutions to problems within the black community that require individual initiatives to correct. Martin Luther King's frequent references to this nation's founding documents are well known. His reflections on Communism are much less well known and undoubtedly contributed to his general philosophy. We owe it to ourselves to examine the effects of this legacy and contextualize it so has to solve the problems facing the black community today.

While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. I think that he thought he could sup with the devil if his spoon was long enough. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.

King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President 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 was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.

Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O'Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (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 became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.

King himself expresses a communist outlook in his book "Stride Toward Freedom" when he stated, "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"

King, unfortunately, didn't understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By "better distribution of wealth" King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for "the profit motive" was unfortunate given that African-Americans should've been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King's leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.

In "Stride Toward Freedom" Dr. King states "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."

King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had "a dialectical point of view." The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate 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.

All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that "progress" is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.

This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, gay against straight, ad nauseam.

This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book "Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story", in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.

"During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.

First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism's political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an 'interim' reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man's so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself."
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93

Let us not forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King's life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism far more generally palatable.

While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.

The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.

I am a black man who has been getting callouses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaquing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assesment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the "indispensable man." Without his courage, acumen,honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.

MLK's birthday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK's association with the most anti-freedom ideaology (Communism)of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK's legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment, that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today's black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.

A well thought out commentary that is worthwhile reading.

I always look back at the 60's and realize that the conflict
changed a bad situation for non-white people in our country.

I see God's hand at work alongside the evil one and his minions.

We need to bring balance back now and let states have freedom to make their own decisions instead of dictating policy from the federal level in the "civil rights" way.

Some want to keep the spirit of conflict alive under slogans like "diversity" and "tolerance," extending the conflict to illegal immigrants and gays as the new victims.

Jack O'Dell, living in Canada, spoke a few years ago saying Dr. King would be advocating gay marriage if he were alive today.

Thank you for your insight. Context is tremendously important regarding Dr. King whose ideas have led many people astray into creating conflict through non-violent means as a prelude to violence. (This is what happened in the 1960's by the way)

This idea of Dr. King being a Christian motivated by moral reasons has been used to create conflict at abortion clinics in more recent times by well-meaning people.

I've read David Limbaugh in regards to the Judge Moore Ten Commandments controversy a few years ago noting that non-violent defiance of bad law leads to disrespect of all law. What do you do when force is applied to enforce the bad law like removing the 10 Commandments mounument from the court building?

Non-violent disobeying of law (Rosa Parks, lunch counters, etc.) was the prelude to violence (Watts, Detroit, Newark riots etc.).

Well, I'm always pulled up short when I think for one MINUTE I can do anything without Him! ;) Thanks again.

yes

i don't have to read it i was alive through all of the whole schrade and most of his memory is a lie.by the way most history is a lie based upon what the gov.says.i've seen history made and rewritten enough to know.i'm not trying to be a smart ass it's just fact.