source:  lewrockwell

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

January 22, 2024

Should Martin Luther King’s birthday be a national holiday? If you ask those who say that it should be, they would probably say something like this. “King was the most important figure in the civil rights movement, and his great speech ‘I Have a Dream,’ delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, is the finest expression of the ideal of racial equality. Tragically, he was assassinated in 1968. Making his birthday a holiday shows our commitment to the sort of society he favored.”

I would argue that, on the contrary, these very “justifications” for the holiday are precisely why it should not be recognized. King’s “civil rights” activities aimed at destroying a free society. In fact, he was closely allied with the Communist Party and a number of his closest advisers were Communist Party members. Moreover, King was a disreputable character; he was a serial adulterer and plagiarist. Let’s look at the record.

The great literary critic and historian Richard M. Weaver, who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, pointed out in 1957 that the civil rights movement was Communist inspired. Instead of class warfare, the usual Communist tactic, it tried to incite racial warfare to promote revolution. Here is what Weaver said:Richard M. Weaver, Rog…Best Price: $6.84Buy New $13.31(as of 03:40 UTC – Details)

“The common people often perceive elemental things which the over-educated cannot see. That they have been right in identifying this as the opening tactic of Communism in this country now seems beyond question. We can observe in a number of areas how “racial collectivism” is being used as a crowbar to pry loose rights over private property. There was a time when ownership of property gave the owner the right to say to whom he would and would not sell and rent.

[Various Supreme Court decisions show] a steady and indeed now far advanced eroding of rights over private property following a Communist racial theory. In most of the process the Supreme Court has been the “running dog” of the Kremlin.

“Integration” and “Communization” are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In the light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the “integrating” of the facilities to the “communizing” of the facilities, if the impulse is there.”

King wanted to destroy the free enterprise system and replace it with socialism. He favored racial quotas, reparations, “set-asides”, and socialism. Marcus Epstein elaborates on these points:

“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.

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.”

As I mentioned above, King had close ties to the Communist party. The great Sam Francis did substantial research on this, and Senator Jesse Helms inserted it into the Congressional Record:

“ The late Senator Jesse Helms pointed out: “Mr. President, in light of the comments by the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Kennedy), it is important that there be such an examination of the political activities and associations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., principally from the beginning of his work in the civil rights movement in the mid 1950s until his death in 1968. Throughout this period, but especially toward the beginning and end of his career, King associated with identified members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), with persons who were former members of or close to the CPUSA, and with CPUSA front organizations. In some important respects King’s civil rights activities were strongly influenced by and dependent on these associations.

King’s patterns of associations and activities show that, at the least, he had no strong objection to Communism, that he appears to have welcomed collaboration with Communists, and that he and his principal vehicle, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were subject to influence and manipulation by Communists. The conclusion must be that Martin Luther King, Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own reputation and that of the civil rights movement for integrity and loyalty, or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile foreign power.” See this.

King’s very sympathetic biographer David Garrow acknowledged King’s Marxist connections:

“David Garrow found that in private King “made it clear to close friends that economically speaking he considered himself what he termed a Marxist.” Mr. Garrow passes along an account of a conversation C.L.R. James, a Marxist intellectual, had with King: “King leaned over to me saying, ‘I don’t say such things from the pulpit, James, but that is what I really believe.’. . . King wanted me to know that he understood and accepted, and in fact agreed with, the ideas that I was putting forward — ideas which were fundamentally Marxist-Leninist. . . . I saw him as a man whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the Left, but who, as he actually said to me, could not say such things from the pulpit. . . . King was a man with clear ideas, but whose position as a churchman, etc. imposed on him the necessity of reserve.” J. Pius Barbour, a close friend of King’s at seminary, agreed that he “was economically a Marxist.”

Some of King’s most influential advisors were Communists with direct ties to the Soviet Union. One was Stanley Levison, whom Mr. Garrow called King’s “most important political counselor” and “at Martin Luther King’s elbow.” He organized fundraisers for King, counseled him on tax issues and political strategy, wrote fundraising letters and his United Packinghouse Workers Convention speech, edited parts of his books, advised him on his first major national address, and prepped King for questions from the media. Coretta Scott King said of Levison that he was “[a]lways working in the background, his contribution has been indispensable,” and Mr. Garrow says the association with Levison was “without a doubt King’s closest friendship with a white person.”

What were Levison’s political views? John Barron is the author of Operation SOLO, which is about “the most vital intelligence operation the FBI ever had sustained against the Soviet Union.” Part of its work was to track Levison who, according to Mr. Barron, “gained admission into the inner circle of the communist underground” in the US. Mr. Garrow, a strong defender of King, admits that Levison was “one of the two top financiers” of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which received about one million dollars a year from the Soviet Union. Mr. Garrow found that Levison was “directly involved in the Communist Party’s most sensitive financial dealings,” and acknowledged there was first-hand evidence of Levison’s “financial link to the Soviet Union.”

Hunter Pitts O’Dell, who was elected in 1959 to the national committee, the governing body for the CPUSA, was another party member who worked for King. According to FBI reports, Levison installed O’Dell as the head of King’s New York office, and later recommended that O’Dell be made King’s executive assistant in Atlanta.

King knew his associates were Communists. President Kennedy himself gave an “explicit personal order” to King advising against his “shocking association with Stanley Levison.” Once when he was walking privately with King in the White House Rose Garden, Kennedy also named O’Dell and said to King: “They’re Communists. You’ve got to get rid of them.” See this.

Moreover, as I mentioned above, King was a disreputable person.  Should we honor someone whose sexual conduct was of this sort?

“King lived a double life. During the day, he would speak to large crowds, quoting Scripture and invoking God’s will, and at night he frequently had sex with women from the audience. “King’s habits of sexual adventure had been well established by the time he was married,” says Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University, a King admirer. He notes that King often “told lewd jokes,” “shared women with friends,” and was “sexually reckless.” According to King biographer Taylor Branch, during a long party on the night of January 6 and 7, 1964, an FBI bugging device recorded King’s “distinctive voice ring out above others with pulsating abandon, saying, “˜I’m f***ing for God!’”David J. GarrowBuy New $34.96(as of 04:52 UTC – Details)

Sex with single and married women continued after King married, and on the night before his death, King had two adulterous trysts. His first rendezvous was at a woman’s house, the second in a hotel room. The source for this was his best friend and second-in-command, Ralph Abernathy, who noted that the second woman was “a member of the Kentucky legislature,” now known to be Georgia Davis Powers.

Abernathy went on to say that a third woman was also looking for King that same night, but found his bed empty. She knew his habits and was angry when they met later that morning. In response, writes Abernathy, King “lost his temper” and “knocked her across the bed. . . . She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were engaged in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.” A few hours later, King ate lunch with Abernathy and discussed the importance of nonviolence for their movement.

To other colleagues, King justified his adultery this way: “I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month. F***ing’s a form of anxiety reduction.” King had many one-night stands but also grew close to one of his girlfriends in a relationship that became, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Garrow, “the emotional centerpiece of King’s life.” Still, sex with other women remained “a commonplace of King’s travels.”

In private, King could be extremely crude. On one FBI recording, King said to Abernathy in what was no doubt a teasing remark, “Come on over here, you big black motherf*er, and let me suck your dk.” FBI sources told Taylor Branch about a surveillance tape of King watching a televised rerun of the Kennedy funeral. When he saw the famous moment when Jacqueline Kennedy knelt with her children before her dead husband’s coffin, King reportedly sneered, “Look at her. Sucking him off one last time.”

King was also a plagiarist. His doctoral dissertation was written by someone else:

“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.”

Let’s do everything we can to end this  farce. Let’s get rid of the phony MLK “holiday.”