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Myths of Martin Luther King

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By Marcus Epstein
January 18, 2003

There is probably no greater sacred cow in America than Martin 
Luther King Jr. The slightest criticism of him or even 
suggesting that he isn't deserving of a national holiday leads 
to the usual accusations of racist, fascism, and the rest of the 
usual left-wing epithets not only from liberals, but also from 
many ostensible conservatives and libertarians.

This is amazing because during the 50s and 60s, the Right almost 
unanimously opposed the civil rights movement. Contrary to the 
claims of many neocons, the opposition was not limited to the 
John Birch Society and southern conservatives. It was made by 
politicians like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, and in the 
pages of Modern Age, Human Events, National Review, and the 
Freeman.

Today, the official conservative and libertarian movement 
portrays King as someone on our side who would be fighting Jesse 
Jackson and Al Sharpton if he were alive. Most all conservative 
publications and websites have articles around this time of the 
year praising King and discussing how today's civil rights 
leaders are betraying his legacy. Jim Powell's otherwise 
excellent The Triumph of Liberty rates King next to Ludwig von 
Mises and Albert J. Nock as a libertarian hero. Attend any IHS 
seminar, and you'll read "A letter from a Birmingham Jail" as a 
great piece of anti-statist wisdom. The Heritage Foundation 
regularly has lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. There 
are nearly a half dozen neocon and left-libertarian think tanks 
and legal foundations with names such as "The Center for Equal 
Opportunity" and the "American Civil Rights Institute" which 
claim to model themselves after King.

Why is a man once reviled by the Right now celebrated by it as a 
hero? The answer partly lies in the fact that the mainstream 
Right has gradually moved to the left since King's death. The 
influx of many neoconservative intellectuals, many of whom were 
involved in the civil rights movement, into the conservative 
movement also contributes to the King phenomenon. This does not 
fully explain the picture, because on many issues King was far 
to the left of even the neoconservatives, and many King admirers 
even claim to adhere to principles like freedom of association 
and federalism. The main reason is that they have created a 
mythical Martin Luther King Jr., that they constructed solely 
from one line in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

In this article, I will try to dispel the major myths that the 
conservative movement has about King. I found a good deal of the 
information for this piece in I May Not Get There With You: The 
True Martin Luther King by black leftist Michael Eric Dyson. 
Dyson shows that King supported black power, reparations, 
affirmative action, and socialism. He believes this made King 
even more admirable. He also deals frankly with King's 
philandering and plagiarism, though he excuses them. If you 
don't mind reading his long discussions about gangsta rap and 
the like, I strongly recommend this book.

Myth #1: King wanted only equal rights, not special privileges 
and would have opposed affirmative action, quotas, reparations, 
and the other policies pursued by today's civil rights 
leadership.

This is probably the most repeated myth about King. Writing on 
National Review Online, There Heritage Foundation's Matthew 
Spalding wrote a piece entitled "Martin Luther King's 
Conservative Mind," where he wrote, "An agenda that advocates 
quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from 
King’s vision."

The problem with this view is that King openly advocated quotas 
and racial set-asides. He wrote that the "Negro today is not 
struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete 
improvement in his way of life." When equal opportunity laws 
failed to achieve this, King looked for other ways. In his book 
Where Do We Go From Here, he suggested that "A society that has 
done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years 
must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete 
on a just and equal basis." To do this he expressed support for 
quotas. In a 1968 Playboy interview, he said, “If a city has a 
30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes 
should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, 
and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.” 
King was more than just talk in this regard. Working through his 
Operation Breadbasket, King threatened boycotts of businesses 
that did not hire blacks in proportion to their population.

King was even an early proponent of reparations. In his 1964 
book, Why We Can't Wait, he wrote,

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the 
exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down 
through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. 
The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the 
appropriation of a the labor of one human being by another. This 
law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment 
should be in the form of a massive program by the government of 
special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a 
settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common 
law.

Predicting that critics would note that many whites were equally 
disadvantaged, King claimed that his program, which he called 
the "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged" would help poor 
whites as well. This is because once the blacks received 
reparations, the poor whites would realize that their real enemy 
was rich whites.

Myth # 2: King was an American patriot, who tried to get 
Americans to live up to their founding ideals.

In National Review, Roger Clegg wrote that "There may have been 
a brief moment when there existed something of a national 
consensus – a shared vision eloquently articulated in Martin 
Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, with deep roots in 
the American Creed, distilled in our national motto, E pluribus 
unum. Most Americans still share it, but by no means all." Many 
other conservatives have embraced this idea of an American Creed 
that built upon Jefferson and Lincoln, and was then fulfilled by 
King and libertarians like Clint Bolick and neocons like Bill 
Bennett.

Despite his constant invocations of the Declaration of 
Independence, King did not have much pride in America's 
founding. He believed "our nation was born in genocide," and 
claimed that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution 
were meaningless for blacks because they were written by slave 
owners.

Myth # 3: King was a Christian activist whose struggle for civil 
rights is similar to the battles fought by the Christian Right 
today.

Ralph Reed claims that King's "indispensable genius" provided 
"the vision and leadership that renewed and made crystal clear 
the vital connection between religion and politics." He proudly 
admitted that the Christian Coalition "adopted many elements of 
King's style and tactics." The pro-life group, Operation Rescue, 
often compared their struggle against abortion to King's 
struggle against segregation. In a speech entitled The 
Conservative Virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King, Bill Bennet 
described King, as "not primarily a social activist, he was 
primarily a minister of the Christian faith, whose faith 
informed and directed his political beliefs."

Both King's public stands and personal behavior makes the 
comparison between King and the Religious Right questionable.

FBI surveillance showed that King had dozens of extramarital 
affairs. Although many of the pertinent records are sealed, 
several agents who watched observed him engage in many 
questionable acts including buying prostitutes with SCLC money. 
Ralph Abernathy, who King called "the best friend I have in the 
world," substantiated many of these charges in his 
autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. It is true that 
a man's private life is mostly his business. However, most 
conservatives vehemently condemned Jesse Jackson when news of 
his illegitimate son came out, and claimed he was unfit to be a 
minister.

King also took stands that most in the Christian Right would 
disagree with. When asked about the Supreme Court's decision to 
ban school prayer, King responded,

I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have 
said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in god. In a 
pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what 
prayer shall be spoken and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or 
otherwise, the state certainly has no such right.

While King died before the Roe vs. Wade decision, and, to the 
best of my knowledge, made no comments on abortion, he was an 
ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood. He even won their 
Margaret Sanger Award in 1966 and had his wife give a speech 
entitled Family Planning – A Special and Urgent Concern which he 
wrote. In the speech, he did not compare the civil rights 
movement to the struggle of Christian Conservatives, but he did 
say "there is a striking kinship between our movement and 
Margaret Sanger’s early efforts."

Myth # 4: King was an anti-communist.

In another article about Martin Luther King, Roger Clegg of 
National Review applauds King for speaking out against the 
"oppression of communism!" To gain the support of many liberal 
whites, in the early years, King did make a few mild 
denunciations of communism. He also claimed in a 1965 Playboy 
that there "are as many Communists in this freedom movement as 
there are Eskimos in Florida." This was a bald-faced lie. Though 
King was never a Communist and was always critical of the Soviet 
Union, he had knowingly surrounded himself with Communists. His 
closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist, as was his 
assistant Jack O'Dell. Robert and later John F. Kennedy 
repeatedly warned him to stop associating himself with such 
subversives, but he never did. He frequently spoke before 
Communist front groups such as the National Lawyers Guild and 
Lawyers for Democratic Action. King even attended seminars at 
The Highlander Folk School, another Communist front, which 
taught Communist tactics, which he later employed.

King's sympathy for communism may have contributed to his 
opposition to the Vietnam War, which he characterized as a 
racist, imperialistic, and unjust war. King claimed that America 
"had committed more war crimes than any nation in the world." 
While he acknowledged the NLF "may not be paragons of virtue," 
he never criticized them. However, he was rather harsh on Diem 
and the South. He denied that the NLF was communist, and 
believed that Ho Chi Minh should have been the legitimate ruler 
of Vietnam. As a committed globalist, he believed that “our 
loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our 
nation. This means we must develop a world perspective.”

Many of King's conservative admirers have no problem calling 
anyone who questions American foreign policy a "fifth 
columnist." While I personally agree with King on some of his 
stands on Vietnam, it is hypocritical for those who are still 
trying to get Jane Fonda tried for sedition to applaud King.

Myth # 5: King supported the free market.

OK, you don't hear this too often, but it happens. For example, 
Father Robert A. Sirico delivered a paper to the Acton Institute 
entitled Civil Rights and Social Cooperation. In it, he wrote,

A freer economy would take us closer to the ideals of the 
pioneers in this country’s civil rights movement. Martin Luther 
King, Jr. recognized this when he wrote: "With the growth of 
industry the folkways of white supremacy will gradually pass 
away," and he predicted that such growth would "Increase the 
purchasing power of the Negro [which in turn] will result in 
improved medical care, greater educational opportunities, and 
more adequate housing. Each of these developments will result in 
a further weakening of segregation."

King of course was a great opponent of the free economy. In a 
speech in front of his staff in 1966 he said,

You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro 
without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about 
ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out 
of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous 
ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing 
with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading 
in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying 
that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better 
distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a 
Democratic Socialism.

King called for "totally restructuring the system" in a way that 
was not capitalist or "the antithesis of communist." For more 
information on King's economic views, see Lew Rockwell's The 
Economics of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Myth # 6: King was a conservative.

As all the previous myths show, King's views were hardly 
conservative. If this was not enough, it is worth noting what 
King said about the two most prominent postwar American 
conservative politicians, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.

King accused Barry Goldwater of "Hitlerism." He believed that 
Goldwater advocated a "narrow nationalism, a crippling 
isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude." On domestic issues 
he felt that "Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic 
conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of 
the twentieth century." King said that Goldwater's positions on 
civil rights were "morally indefensible and socially suicidal."

King said of Reagan, "When a Hollywood performer, lacking 
distinction even as an actor, can become a leading war hawk 
candidate for the presidency, only the irrationalities induced 
by war psychosis can explain such a turn of events."

Despite King's harsh criticisms of those men, both supported the 
King holiday. Goldwater even fought to keep King's FBI files, 
which contained information about his adulterous sex life and 
Communist connections, sealed.

Myth # 7: King wasn't a plagiarist.

OK, even most of the neocons won't deny this, but it is still 
worth bringing up, because they all ignore it. King started 
plagiarizing as an undergraduate. When Boston University founded 
a commission to look into it, they found that that 45 percent of 
the first part and 21 percent of the second part of his 
dissertation was stolen, but they insisted that "no thought 
should be given to revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree." In 
addition to his dissertation many of his major speeches, such as 
"I Have a Dream," were plagiarized, as were many of his books 
and writings. For more information on King's plagiarism, The 
Martin Luther King Plagiarism Page and Theodore Pappas' 
Plagiarism and the Culture War are excellent resources.

When faced with these facts, most of King's conservative and 
libertarian fans either say they weren't part of his main 
philosophy, or usually they simply ignore them. Slightly before 
the King Holiday was signed into law, Governor Meldrim Thompson 
of New Hampshire wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan expressing 
concerns about King's morality and Communist connections. Ronald 
Reagan responded, "I have the reservations you have, but here 
the perception of too many people is based on an image, not 
reality. Indeed, to them the perception is reality.”

Far too many on the Right are worshipping that perception. 
Rather than face the truth about King's views, they create a man 
based upon a few lines about judging men "by the content of 
their character rather than the color of their skin" – something 
we are not supposed to do in his case, of course – while 
ignoring everything else he said and did. If King is truly an 
admirable figure, they are doing his legacy a disservice by 
using his name to promote an agenda he clearly would not have 
supported.

January 18, 2003

Marcus Epstein [send him mail] is an undergraduate at the 
College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where he is 
president of the college libertarians and editor of the 
conservative newspaper, The Remnant. A selection of his articles 
can be seen here.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/01/marcus-epstein/myths-of-
martin-luther-king/
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