America maintains a longstanding tradition of analyzing the political beliefs of its leaders. Indeed, the founders protected this inalienable right with the first amendment to the Constitution. Such examinations were viewed as essential to the preservation of freedom and democracy. This is why an examination of the career of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is necessary. His influence was and continues to be immense. Anything less constitutes a dangerous abrogation of responsibility.
That King maintained communist connections are an undisputed matter of public record. This is no less significant, I would contend, than if King had maintained Nazi connections. His actions and utterances influenced generations of Americans yet we tremble with fear over discussing his beliefs because doing so means running the risk of being smeared as a racist. The irony, lost on most, is that those hurling this dastardly charge are often themselves racist by any definition of the term. But as the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow was reported to have said to Fred Friendly, his TV producer, regarding their fear of broadcasting a segment on Joe McCarthy in 1956, “If the fear is in this room, lets do it.”
While Martin Luther King was by no means a hard-left witting participant in the international communist conspiracy, he nevertheless surrounded himself with hard-core communists and fellow travelers and embraced a philosophy that could be described as cultural Marxism. This embrace by King would influence generations of African-Americans much to their detriment.
The Kennedy Administration, including President John F. Kennedy himself, warned King to dis-associate himself from Communists. He responded by doing so publicly while continuing the relationships covertly. The belief that King was being used as a tool for communist manipulation of the civil rights movement led Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to order the F.B.I. to conduct wiretaps. These wiretaps would reveal the extremely active extramarital sex life of King, a Baptist Minister, but that is not germane to our subject. Perhaps the reluctance of the Kennedy Administration to get behind the civil rights movement was due to its concern over the possibility of communist infiltration.
King was close, both personally and professionally, to New York Lawyer Stanley D. Levison who was identified by highly placed communist informant Jack Childs as having been a chief conduit of Soviet funds to be dispersed to the Communist Party USA. Levison was involved in the financial, organizational, and public relations aspects of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. According to F.B.I. wiretaps, Levison prepared King’s May 1962 speech before the United Packing House Workers Convention, and his responses to questions from a Los Angeles radio station regarding the 1965 Los Angeles race riots.
According to David J. Garrow, in his book “The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr., published by Yale University Press, Levison assisted King in writing his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” as well as contributions to SCLC, and recruitment of SCLC employees. Levison refused King’s offer of compensation for his services writing, “The liberation struggle [i.e., the civil rights movement] is the most positive and rewarding area of work anyone could experience.”
In June 1962, Levison recommended Hunter Pitts O’Dell for executive assistant at SCLC. According to Congressional testimony, O’Dell pled the Fifth when asked if he was a member of the CPUSA in a hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on July 30, 1958. According to the FBI, O’Dell was an elected member of the National Committee of the CPUSA. It is reasonable to assume, based on conventional knowledge of the MO of the communists at the time, that Levison and O’Dell were Martin Luther King’s Soviet handlers.
Reams of documents, much of which remains classified, discuss King’s communist connections. I will end with a discussion of a speech King delivered at the Riverside Church in New York, April 4, 1967, a few days prior to the beginning of “Vietnam Week” because of the light it sheds on his philosophy. CPUSA member Bettina Aptheker, daughter of CPUSA member Herbert Aptheker, had devised “Vietnam Week” at a December 1966 conference at the University of Chicago. The HCUA found that the U of C conference “was instigated and dominated by the CPUSA and the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America,” and was described by Attorney General Katzenbach as “substantially directed, dominated and controlled by the Communist Party.”
In his speech, King portrayed U.S. troops in Vietnam as foreign conquerors and oppressors, and he compared the United States to Nazi Germany. He stated “we herd them [the South Vietnamese people] off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met…. So far we may have killed a million of them-mostly children. What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.”
King spoke of U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He portrayed the Communist dictator Ho Chi Minh as the victim of American aggression: “Perhaps only his [Ho Chi Minh’s] sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than 8,000 miles away from its shores.” King portrayed American policy in Vietnam and in general as motivated by a “need to maintain social stability for our investments” and saw “individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
Whether or not this communist agitprop was spoon fed to King by Levison or other handlers is beside the point. King said nothing against the brutal North Vietnamese or for that matter a world Communist movement that was murdering over 100 million people. Life magazine (April 21, 1967) described King’s speech as “a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” His opposition to the war was clearly not motivated by concern for the best interests of the US but by a desire for the victory of North Vietnam. His anti-capitalist sentiments and his pro-totalitarian tendencies have been destructive to African-Americans ever since.