I will post this article about
Martin Luther King Jr.
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MLK’s mugshot
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NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.therightperspective.org/2011/01/11/the-dark-side-of-martin-luther-king-jr/
The Dark Side Of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 11, 2011
We
are celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a holiday on January
17th of this year. Appropriately, we hear great things about this man – but is
there another side to him which is less flattering?
Martin
Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the middle
child of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King’s
father was born “Michael King”, and Martin Luther King, Jr., was originally
named “Michael King, Jr.,” until the family traveled to Europe in 1934 and
visited Germany. His father soon changed both of their names to Martin Luther
King in honor of the German Protestant reformationist Martin Luther. This was a
dubious honor, since Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a notorious anti-Semite with
On the Jews and Their Lies
(German: Von den Jüden und iren Lügen; in modern spelling Von den Juden und ihren Lügen)
(1543).
Nevertheless,
the author understands that one cannot blame a child for the mistakes of his
parents.
Contrary
to reasoning, or consistent with it, Martin Luther King, Jr. was initially a
Republican, registering in the GOP in 1956 as all great blacks of the South –
Jackie Robinson, Jessie Owens, Lionel Hampton, Edward Brooke, Frederick
Douglass, Thomas Sowell, Harriet Tubman & Pearl Bailey. MLK, Jr. changed to
the Democratic Party when the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who
opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Serious
criticism about King centers around three areas; plagiarism in his academic
career and speeches, adultery & treatment of women, and Communist
affiliations.
Plagiarism in Speeches – King’s
efforts in civil rights activism led him to the 1963 “March on Washington”,
where he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. There, he expanded American
values to include his vision of a color-blind society and established his
reputation as a great orator – but should he have this reputation?
King plagiarized the “I Have A Dream” speech from
one given at the Republican Convention in 1952 given by Archibald J. Carey,
Jr., an an African-American lawyer, judge, alderman, diplomat and clergyman
from the south side of Chicago.
Carey’s speech spun off the words of the song “My
Country ‘Tis of Thee – America”, the American patriotic song written by Samuel
Francis Smith. There are no easily obtainable copies of the audio of his speech
but the text of the ending is here:
We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans: My country ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrims’ pride From every mountainside Let freedom ring!That’s exactly what we mean – from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia–let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for the disinherited of all the earth–may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!
Plagiarism in Academic Papers – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wife,
Coretta Scott King, donated her husband’s papers to Stanford University’s
King Papers Project in 1985. As the papers were being organized and
cataloged, project staff discovered that King’s doctoral dissertation at Boston
University, A Comparison
of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson
Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written
three years earlier by another student, Jack Boozer, at the same institution.
Boston University launched its own probe and concluded the civil rights hero
plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from many other authors who
wrote on the topic, including Boozer.
“Instances
of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as
his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons
throughout his career,” writes Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers
Project at Stanford University.
According
to civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project
directing the research on King’s early life, King’s paper The Chief
Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism was taken
almost entirely from secondary sources. He writes: “Moreover, the farther King
went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of
borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in
his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established
practice.”
In
a 1991 article in The Journal
Of American History, the staff at the Martin Luther King, Jr.
Papers Project wrote that “plagiarism was a general pattern evident in nearly
all of his [King’s] academic writings,” including his doctoral dissertation.
Although
several newspapers had the story for more than a year, none published it.
Finally, in December 3, 1989, the
London Sunday Telegraph broke the news with “Martin Luther King —
Was He a Plagiarist?.” The
Wall Street Journal followed up in the States in November 9, 1990
with “To Their Dismay, King Scholars Find a Troubling Pattern.” The story was
then repeated in the Boston
Globe and the New
York Times, as well as several other newspapers with their own
stories. Newspaper editorials across America defended King, saying he was still
a great man regardless of his academic fraud.
You
try that academic fraud and find anybody to laud you.
To
this day, been no explanation of the long delay between the discovery and its
publication.
Boston
University considered revoking posthumously Dr. King’s Ph.D. but decided
against it, saying that although King acted improperly, his dissertation still
“makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.” However, a letter is now
attached to King’s dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous
passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of
sources.
Compare
this with the way the academic establishment treated Clarence Thomas who was
intellectually honest and faithful to his two wives!!!!
Ralph
Luker has questioned whether King’s professors at the Crozer Theological
Seminary held him to lower standards because he was an African-American, citing
as evidence the fact that King received lower marks (a C+ average) at the
historically black Morehouse College than at Crozer, where he was a minority
being graded mostly by white teachers and received an A- average. Boston
University has denied that King received any special treatment.
Do
you believe it????
The
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project addresses authorship issues on pp. 25-26
of Volume II of The Papers
of Martin Luther King, Jr., entitled “Rediscovering Precious
Values, July 1951–November 1955,” Clayborne Carson, Senior Editor. Following is
an excerpt from these pages: “The readers of King’s dissertation, L. Harold
DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling, a professor of systematic theology who had
recently arrived at Boston University, failed to notice King’s problematic use
of sources. After reading a draft of the dissertation, DeWolf criticized him
for failing to make explicit “presuppositions and norms employed in the
critical evaluation,” but his comments were largely positive. He commended King
for his handling of a “difficult” topic “with broad learning, impressive
ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved.” Schilling
found two problems with King’s citation practices while reading the draft. “As
was true of King’s other academic papers, the plagiaries in his dissertation
escaped detection in his lifetime. The extent of King’s plagiaries suggests he
knew that he was at least skirting academic norms”.
Communist Associations – FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had
long been suspicious about potential influence of Communists in social
movements such as labor unions and civil rights. Hoover directed the FBI to
track King, and the SCLC, in 1957.
This
was in no small part spurred by King and four others attending a May 1, 1957
meeting at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The institution,
founded in 1932 and still operating today, is billed as having “facilitated the
great change in our society” of racial integration on its website.”During the
1950s and ’60s it trained civil rights workers in law, nonviolence, community
organizing and other techniques of social change,” its website
says.
However,
the FBI correctly identified it as a Communist front which sought to bring
about a Marxist revolution in America, having been founded by Myles Horton
(Communist Party organizer for Tennessee) and Don West (Communist Party
organizer for North Carolina). In speaking at the Highlander Folk School, King
praised the school for its “noble purpose and creative work” and for having
“given the South some of its most responsible leaders in this great period of
transition.” He then predicted that, through concerted nonviolent action, “the
future is filled with vast and marvelous possibilities” and concluded, “this is
a great time to be alive.”
King
was accompanied to the Highlander Folk School by Myles Horton, Aubrey Williams,
Abner Berry and James Dumbrowski, all open and acknowledged members of the
Communist Party, USA. Their meeting laid the groundwork for initiating
demonstrations and riots across the Southern states.
In
1962, FBI investigators learned that one of King’s most trusted advisers was
New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. The FBI found Levison had been involved
with the Communist Party, USA. The FBI had observed his alienation from the
Party leadership, but it feared he had taken a low profile in order to work as
an “agent of influence” in order to manipulate King, a view it continued to
hold despite its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party. Another
King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O’Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by
sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The
Bureau received authorization to proceed with wiretapping from Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 and informed President John F. Kennedy,
both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from
Levison. Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited
wiretapping of King’s phones “on a trial basis, for a month or so”, Hoover
extended the clearance so his men were “unshackled” to look for evidence in any
areas of King’s life they deemed worthy. The Bureau placed wiretaps on
Levison’s and King’s homes and office phones, and bugged King’s rooms in hotels
and motels as he traveled across the country.
For
his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating in
a 1965 Playboy interview that, “there are as many Communists in this freedom
movement as there are Eskimos in Florida” and claiming that Hoover was
“following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South.” Hoover’s
concern about communist infiltration of the civil rights movement was meant to
“aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme
right-wing elements.” In that same interview, however, King advocated that
Blacks and other “disadvantaged” Americans be financially compensated for
“historical wrongs.” According to Wikipedia,
King set the bill at US$50 billion in 1965 dollars, and the amount be doled out
to all people who have been disadvantaged, not only African-Americans.
Hoover
did not believe King’s pledge of innocence and replied by saying the civil
rights leader was “the most notorious liar in the country.” After giving his “I
Have A Dream” speech during the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, the FBI
described King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the
country.”
In
December 1963, the FBI stated King was “knowingly, willingly and regularly
cooperating with and taking guidance from communists” whose long-term strategy
was to create a “Negro-labor” coalition detrimental to American security.
Levison did have ties with the Communist Party in the past in various business
dealings, but the FBI refused to believe its own intelligence bureau reports
that Levison was no longer associated in that capacity.
Bayard
Rustin, an African-American Quaker and avowed homosexual and advocate on behalf
of gay and lesbian causes, was a member of King’s circle and was a member of
the Young Communist League, joining in 1936. In 1941, he became disillusioned
with the CPUSA because it abandoned civil rights work in favor of trying to get
the American government to aid the Soviet Union from German Nazi invasion.
While Rustin began working with “anti-Communist Socialists” (an oxymoron) such
as A. Philip Randolph, the head of the “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters”,
he later attended the 16th annual convention of SCLC in February 1957 and
founded the SCLC with King a month later.
The
SCLC was front-loaded with Communists as well. Its vice-president the Reverend
Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also the president of an identified Communist front
known as the Southern Conference Educational Fund. That group’s field director,
Carl Braden, was simultaneously a national sponsor of the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee. The program director of the SCLC was the Reverend Andrew Young, who
went on to become Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN and mayor of Atlanta.
Young was trained at the Highlander Folk School.
Despite
all of this, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any
evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any
communist organizations.
Are
there tolerable Communists? It’s up to you.
Adultery and treatment of women – Rumors of King’s use of church
funds to feed his penchant for White prostitutes were circulating in very high
circles long before they were made public. US President Lyndon Johnson once
called King was a “hypocritical preacher.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who
signed off on the wiretaps and hotel/motel room electronic surveillance of
King, then played audio taped evidence of King’s extramarital affairs at
cocktail parties, much to the delight of brothers Jack and Ted, who convulsed
in fits of laughter upon hearing them.
Dr.
Ralph Abernathy, a close associate of King, stated in his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
that King had a “weakness for women.” In a later interview, Abernathy said he
only wrote the term “womanizing” and did not specifically say King had
extramarital sex. King’s biographer David Garrow detailed what he called King’s
“compulsive sexual athleticism,” writing about a number of extramarital
affairs, including one with a woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow,
“that relationship, rather than his marriage, increasingly became the emotional
centerpiece of King’s life, but it did not eliminate the other incidental
couplings that were a commonplace of King’s travels.” King explained his
extramarital affairs as “a form of anxiety reduction”. Garrow noted that King’s
promiscuity was the cause of “painful and overwhelming guilt feelings.”
On
January 31, 1977, United States district Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered
all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting
from the FBI’s electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held
in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.
In
closing, Dr. King seems to be an amalgam of good and bad. What the sum total
is, I wait to see in the comments section. – Philoctetes
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