When Judged by the Content of His Character

by Dr. Jimmy T. (Gunny) LaBaume

Introduction

In his famous “I have a dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped for a day when people would be “judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.” That is exactly what I propose to do in this essay—to discover how the speaker himself measures up against his very own yardstick.

Justification: Why this essay?

“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…The main reason is that they have created a mythical Martin Luther King Jr….constructed solely from one line in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech” (1).

On the Friday before the 2008 Martin Luther King holiday, I received an e-mail message via the faculty net at the small “State supported” (the significance of that will become self-evident as I proceed) West Texas university where I teach. The message was from a friend with whom I have engaged in several amiable debates in the past. He said, in part: “On Monday the 21^st, we celebrate the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His vision, peaceable message and ultimate sacrifice contributed heavily to the civil rights and freedoms enjoyed by all Americans today. Let us always remember the man and his lesson of humanity. He is truly one of my heroes.”

Having read enough to know the real truth about King, I was somewhat offended. I replied: “I am having a problem figuring out how a womanizing plagiarist with direct ties to the Communist party could be anybody’s hero. Personally, I plan to work Monday and take General Lee’s birthday as comp time.” (In truth, I always work both days and take no comp time for either of them.)

At first, my message was blocked by “the State’s” censor. But finally, it was delivered with the words “On behalf of” on the “From” line: Wow! Did a rather entertaining, instructive and revealing “barrage of badgering” ensue!

As is perfectly predictable, the tired old label of “racist” was the most commonly occurring charge. There were expressions of incredulity as to how anyone who is “supposed to be educated” (in the government’s schools, I would add) could possibly and so vehemently attack such an “American icon.” They never quite made it to “bed wetter,” “animal abuser” or “child molester” but I had my doubts there for a while.

Thus, the purpose for this essay is to address those charges and, hopefully, correct some of the wrong thinking and myths about King who is erroneously portrayed as someone who, if he were still alive today, would be “on our side” in fighting con men, shysters, shakedown artists and race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Materials and Methods

Any reader tempted to charge that I relied only on biased, “hater” or “right wing” sources, should consider:

Much of the information concerning King’s support for black power, reparations, affirmative action and socialism as well as his philandering and plagiarism can be found in I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King by black leftist Michael Eric Dyson (2).

Furthermore the idea that King wanted only equal rights, not special privileges and would have opposed affirmative action, quotas, and reparations is debunked in his very own books Where Do We Go from Here (3) and Why We Can’t Wait (4).

In addition, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who King called “the best friend I have in the world,” substantiates much of King’s womanizing in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (5)

Phony from the beginning

The man we know as Martin Luther King, Jr. was born with the name Michael King on Jan. 15, 1929 in Atlanta. In 1935 his father, a self ordained Baptist preacher, changed his own name to Martin Luther King presumptively assuming the mantle of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. He announced to his congregation that henceforth he was to be called Martin Luther King and his son Martin Luther King, Jr. “Daddy” King never bothered to have this act legalized in court. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and died as Michael King (6, 7).

Hypocrisy

King, the charismatic speaker, does not seem to be the committed Christian he professed to be. In fact, he said that the Bible was filled with “legends and myths” and denied that Christ was physically raised from the dead. As a seminary student King was not at all enthusiastic about Christianity. Carl Rowan wrote in Reader’s Digest (September 1967) that “the thinking of Gandhi and Thoreau was … burning inside King” (6).

Cloaked in Secrecy

Unfortunately, it is impossible for the American people to know all of the sordid details of Kings life at this time.

J. Edgar Hoover tried to make all the FBI files available to the President, Congress and all the major electronic and print media. But, on Jan. 31, 1977, Coretta Scott King obtained a federal court order sealing 845 pages of FBI records about her husband for 50 years, “because its release would destroy his reputation!” This federal judge sealed the files until the year 2027. The President and the media said nothing and the charade continues. (8) A cowardly, spineless Congress voted to make King’s birthday a national holiday. In 1983, Senator Jesse Helms appealed to the Supreme Court to release the files, so the bill to create the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday could be abolished. He was denied (7).

The FBI surveillance yielded scores of file cabinets full of damning material. According to one source, there are over 60,000 censored pages. A small amount of this material has been released under the Freedom of Information Act. However, most of it has been labeled “Obscene.” (Lest you think the surveillance was obtained by “conservatives” with designs on ruining King, know that the FBI wiretaps were approved by then Attorney General Robert Kennedy.) (6)

Plagiarism

The first public sermon that King ever gave at the EbenezerBaptistChurch (in 1947) was plagiarized from a Protestant clergyman named Harry Emerson Fosdick. The work was entitled “Life is What You Make It.” This is according to the testimony of Reverend Larry H. Williams, King’s best friend at the time (9).

Martin Luther King, Jr. never legitimately earned the title of “Dr.” because he plagiarized his way through BostonUniversity and Crozer Theological Seminary.

After graduation from college, King received a degree from the Seminary and then a Ph.D. from BostonUniversity. Forty years later it became widely known that King plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation (6).

This documented and verifiable fact was revealed by those who were closest to him. David J. Garrow (a leftist academic who was sympathetic to King) said that King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who also served as his secretary, was an accomplice in King’s repeated cheating (9).

No one less than the four senior editors of “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.” stated that his writings at both the university and the seminary, “when judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship” were “tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism” (10). Plagiarism is particularly apparent in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology…only 49 per cent of sentences in the section on Tillich (in his doctoral dissertation) contain five or more words that were King’s own….'” (9).

In 1989 in the British Sunday Telegraph, Ralph Luker, associate editor of the King Papers Project noted that “M.L. King has plagiarized the thesis of Jack Boozer, a fellow Boston University theology student and later Professor of Religion at Emory University” (11).

King’s plagiarism was widely discussed in 1990 at the Southern Intellectual History Circle at Chapel Hill, N.C. This was chronicled by the Rutherford Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities was informed of the Plagiarism. The Wall Street Journal carried front line stories of the plagiarism (11).

In 1991, a Boston University committee reported that “45% of the first half and 21% of the second half of King’s thesis was plagiarized. Boston University… concludes that the thesis was academically dishonest” (7, 8, 9, 11).

According to the New York Times, BostonUniversity officials eventually admitted, “There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation.” Even so, they concluded that, “No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree, (because such action) would serve no purpose” (7, 8, 9, 11).

King never outgrew his obsession for stealing the intellectual work of others. According to documentation assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow, “The first book that King wrote, Stride Toward Freedom, was plagiarized from numerous unattributed sources (9). Furthermore, over his life, most of his papers, speeches, and “sermons” were copied word for word from Dr. Jack Boozer, Edgar S. Brightman, and Paul Tillich. As a matter of fact, he lifted whole sections of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech from a sermon by Archibald Carey, a popular black preacher in the 1950’s (7, 8, 9, 11).

Womanizing

King led a bizarre sex life which included acts of shocking perversion.

Soon after getting used to his new name, Martin Jr. realized he had a flair for dramatic oratory. And soon after that, he realized he had a flair for seducing women. A King biography notes the young man “would scout the schools… to find the best looking…girls.” King is quoted as saying “we wreck girls…we wreck up all the women” (6).

The FBI had King’s offices and hotel rooms under electronic surveillance from 1963 to 1968. (Lest one jump to the conclusion that this was some sort of “right wing conspiracy,” this surveillance was on the order of none other than Attorney General Bobby Kennedy). The primary intent of (and legal justification for) the tapes was to record King’s transactions with communist agents. By chance, it also recorded wild interracial sex orgies including acts of perversion (7).

The Jan 19, 1998 issue of Newsweek reports that “FBI bugs picked up 14 hours of party chatter, the clinking of glasses and sounds of illicit sex”, all the while, Martin Luther King was shouting profanities and obscenities (11).

It was also found that King’s aids used tax exempt money donated to his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to hire White prostitutes to perform sexual acts with him. He often used two prostitutes at the same time.

On January 31, 1977 U.S. Federal Judge John Smith Jr. ordered these shocking tapes sealed for 50 years—i.e. all the sordid details will not be available to the public until the year 2027. Led by the late Rep. Larry McDonald, some 90 Congressmen pressured Congress to find out what was on these tapes before they approved the disgraceful King Holiday Bill. A cowardly and spineless Congress voted 338 to 90 approving the King Holiday.

Never-the-less, many of the shocking incidents recorded in the tapes have become known. For example, in Washington’s old WillardHotel, King forced White women to drink “black Russian” and perform sexual acts with him. In Las Vegas King’s aids paid $100 each to prostitutes to join him in orgies. In New York city King got drunk and threatened a young White girl working for civil rights to submit to his strange sexual tastes or he would jump from the 13th floor window. During King’s trip to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize, he was filmed and stopped by police while naked and chasing a woman down the hotel corridor. In Los Angeles a dentist supporter of King was outraged when he discovered his wife engaged in weird sexual acts with the civil rights leader. King was forced to flee the city after the dentist threatened to kill him. This escapade was taped on February 20, 1968—only about 2 months before he was assassinated (6).

FBI tapes and the agents who monitored King are not the only sources of documentation for King’s sordid behavior. According to Congressman William Dickinson (R, Alabama), “Drunkenness and sex orgies” occurred during civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery. In a story in the Atlanta Journal, dated March 31, 1965, Dickinson is quoted as saying “all night sessions of debauchery” took place in a CHURCH! (6).

Furthermore, one of King’s closest friends, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, wrote a book in 1989 (And the Walls Came Tumbling Down) in which he talked about King’s obsession with prostitutes. One source quotes Abernathy as saying, “Martin Luther King had a sexual orgy with three white women, one of whom he brutally beat, the night before he was killed.” King would often use church donations to have drunken sex parties, where he would hire two to three white prostitutes, occasionally beating them brutally (11).

As mentioned above, the FBI uncovered King’s habit of using SCLC money to hire prostitutes to keep him entertained during the civil rights tours. According to witness who worked in local hospitals, many of these prostitutes would end up in the emergency room after being physically abused by King (8).

The American people do not have direct access to the surveillance files on King. But, according to Assistant FBI Director Sullivan, King embezzled or misapplied large sums of money contributed to the “civil rights” movement. “He used SCLC funds to pay for liquor and numerous prostitutes, both Black and White, who were brought to his hotel rooms, often two at a time, for drunken sex parties which sometimes lasted for several days” (12).

The last night Martin Luther King spent on earth was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis having sex with two prostitutes and physically beating a third. “Retired FBI Assistant Director William C. Sullivan describes himself as a liberal and said that he was initially ‘One hundred percent for King…’ until he learned the truth during the investigation.” Sullivan said that, over 30 years with the FBI, “King was one of only seven people he had ever encountered who was such a total degenerate” (8).

It should be kept in mind that King was married with four children while this was going on.

King was a Marxist with Communist Party Connections and Affiliations

The Augusta Courier reported (in 1957) that Martin Luther King attended the HighlanderFolkSchool, a communist training school in Monteagle, Tennessee. The school was founded by Myles Horton and Don West, both members of the Communist Party U.S.A. The agenda at many of these meetings was to plan tours of the Southern states to initiate demonstrations and riots. The school was abolished after being charged with being a subversive organization (8, 11).

Along with Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin, King went on to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Levison , a lawyer, was identified as a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, USA. Bayard Rustin was well known as a homosexual and a Communist (6).

This organization was staffed and funded by other Communist individuals and front groups. King accepted money from the organizations to fund his movements. In return, he appointed communist leaders to run certain districts of the organization (8).

The known Communist, Stanley Levison, was King’s “handler.” Levison had been in charge of secret funneling of Soviet funds to the Communist Party, USA for years. He was King’s mentor and the real brains behind many of King’s shenanigans. He edited King’s book, Stride Toward Freedom and arranged for a publisher. He even prepared King’s income tax returns. It was Levison who wrote many of King’s speeches and King called him one of his “closest friends.” It was he who was actually in control of the fund-raising and agitation activities of the SCLC (12, 13).

The SCLC had no Christian underpinnings. It existed purely as a political front and King was the front’s front man. After a long probe, the Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities for the State of Louisiana determined that both the SCLC and Dr. King were “substantially under the control of the Communist Party” (6).

According to a U.S. Government Memorandum from W.C. Sullivan to A.H. Belmont dated August 30, 1963: “We must mark him now…. as the most dangerous Negro in the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security” (12).

From the October 3^rd 1983 Congressional Record: “The conclusion must be that Martin Luther King, Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own reputation…., or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile foreign power” (12).

According to David J. Garrow, a sympathetic King biographer, “King privately described himself as a Marxist.” In The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., (1981) Garrow quotes King as saying in SCLC staff meetings, “…we have moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…. The whole structure of American life must be changed…. We are engaged in the class struggle'” (12).

The Communist influence in the civil rights movement was noted by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover who said “The Communist Party strives to exploit what are often legitimate…complaints and grievances for the advancement of Communist objectives”….Martin Luther King Jr. was a dupe who was used to advance an agenda and, having been elevated to martyrdom, is STILL being used after his death (6, 11).

King’s economic leanings were blatantly Marxist. Lew Rockwell addresses these in The Economics of Martin Luther King, Jr. by quoting directly from King himself (14). Rockwell leaves no doubt as to King’s Marxist views on economic matters.

Slavery is, by definition, forcing someone to work for less than he would otherwise voluntarily accept on the market. The welfare state requires taxation. (The government does not have anything to give to anyone that it hasn’t previously taken from someone else—at the point of a gun.) Taxation is, by definition, slavery. Thus, the welfare state is a slave state.

Marxism is an ideology that is, by necessity, based on violence. In fact, it is probably the most violent of all the political ideologies devised by man. Worldwide it has been responsible for the death of more people than all the other tyrannies of history combine—including those of Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot.

As stated above, King was (and continues to be) a dupe for the Marxists, fitting very well the definition of what Engles called a “useful idiot.” (15)

Non-violent policy of violence: Another example of King’s Hypocrisy

King publicly advocated peace and non-violence. But privately, he encouraged violent acts—i.e. he incited violence while preaching nonviolence (7). He was a master of the art of “double-talk” and, wherever he went, violence erupted. He incited riots in Birmingham, Montgomery, St. Augustine, Cleveland, Chicago, Albany and many others.

He actually explained the strategy himself in an article in the Saturday Review (April 3, 1965) where he set forth the four steps of his technique:

Non-violent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights.
Racists resist by unleashing violence against them.
Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation.
The administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation (16).

The next several paragraphs are examples of his double-talk technique.

On July 28, 1967 King said: “I can’t recommend burning down Cleveland. We end up getting killed more than anyone else and our businesses get burned.” Notice how he does not condemn violence. His only justification for constraint is that “they might get killed!”

In Birmingham, May 4, 1963, King stated: “I have a deep commitment to nonviolence. It took police and fire hoses to quell rioting blacks.”

King wrote: “The purpose of our direct action programs (is) to create a crisis packed situation. We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.”

In August of that year he said: “Negroes will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage.”

Riots broke out in Chicago when King marched his mobs into an all White neighborhood. He explained that this brought out the hatred in Whites for the world to see. That night he spoke before the West Side Club under a sign which read: Burn Baby Burn – Boycott Baby Boycott.” That night roving bands of blacks broke windows, looted stores and stoned police cars.

According to the FBI, many of Kings “nonviolent” marches were in reality “carefully crafted public image appearances that were usually accompanied by the violent demonstrations of his followers” (8)

The Legacy

After years of racial tensions, the flames of which were enthusiastically fanned by the media, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. After that came the “War on Poverty.” The ruinous results are easily seen today. The country is heavily in debt as a result of all sorts of welfare programs.

As every day passes, more and more people (Blacks and Whites) believe that the state is obligated to provide for their every need. The more dependent people are on the nanny state, the more control government has over them. No Black leader has the fortitude to point out “the plight of the Negro” is worse than ever (6).

The Welfare State has made slaves of us all—Black and White. To reiterate a statement made above—the government does not have anything to give to anybody that it has not already taken from someone else. Affirmative action is racist. Lew Rockwell put it mildly when he said, “Race-based public policies create social conflict” (14).

All such policies are, by necessity, implemented through force, violence (and/or the threat thereof). Allegedly in this case, “force” is applied to achieve “racial harmony.” Examine that sentence logically. How is it possible for “force” to achieve any kind of “harmony?” The two concepts are polar opposites.

The fact of the matter is that the initiation of force by one group against another creates disharmony. That explains why racial hatred is more deeply embedded in society today than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. The open racial tension that existed during the 1960s is dwarfed by the level of racial tension that seethes beneath the surface today. And, of course, at least part of that must be attributed to the content of Martin Luther King, Jr’s. character and his legacy.

As this is being written, there are those who would like to solicit the awesome force of government to silence me. Indeed, the government is powerful enough to shut me up. It can lock me away in one of its Gulags (like Guantanamo). It can even murder me with impunity–a crime that it commits daily and on a massive scale (and calls it “war”). Neither of those would change the truth. But, knowing that does little to increase “harmony” or reduce “tension.”

In sum, King’s legacy is one of racism and violence.

Conclusion

No matter what nits you may want to pick (for example, one reviewer insists that Abernathy did not mention King’s obsession with “White” prostitutes), the preponderance of the evidence is overwhelmingly clear. Carmeron L. Horne sums it up very well: When judged by the content of his character, Michael King was a “thoroughly despicable hypocrite, a violent and immoral degenerate,
a worthless charlatan, and a Marxist” (8).

Those who would level the charge of “racism” should note that the preceding description made no reference to race. That is because it was not King’s race that made him these things. It was the content of his character as manifest through his behavior.

Recommended Solution

Somewhere during the course of the “barrage of badgering” an individual protested that “The very police state you oppose had dogged MLK. I suspect much of the negative press about the man may have been the result of this government effort.”

It is highly likely that the author of this statement does not realize that it holds the key to the resolution of the entire mess.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and men like him play a useful role in the continuation and aggrandizement of the State—i.e. they are useful to the state.

Government and liberty are at opposite ends of the spectrum. It is a zero sum game: More government = Less Liberty. In a truly free world (a stateless society) there would be no such thing as a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. That is because men like Martin Luther King would not exist. That, in turn, is because they would be of no use or value to anyone.

Footnotes

1. Epstein, Marcus. Myths of Martin Luther King. LewRockwell.com.

2. Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King

3. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here

4. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait

5. Abernathy, Rev. Ralph. 1989. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, a biography of Martin Luther King.

6. Starrett, Mary. How a Marxist Came to be an American Hero. NewsWithViews.com Jan 16, 2004 Quoted within that article: King, A Critical Biography by David Lewis; Martin Luther King, The Man Behind The Myth, by Des Griffin and the National Observer, 1963.

7. Steele, Edgar J. The Perfect American Holiday.

8. Horne, Cadrmeron L. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ROBERT E. LEE or Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr.?

9. Hoffman, Michael. 1992. Holiday for a Cheater. Wiswell Ruffin House, Dresden, New York.

10. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Official publication of the M.L. King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc.

11. Montgomery, Victor M. Letter to the Editor. Greenville, NC newspaper of record.

12. Strom, Kevin Alfred. The Beast As Saint: The Truth About Martin Luther King.

13. Morse, Chuck. Was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. a Communist? (Link no longer active at the time of this writing.) http://www.chuckmorse.com/was_mlk_a_communist.html

14. Rockwell, Lew. The Economics of Martin Luther King, Jr. All King quotes are from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by J.M. Washington [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986], in particular his “A Time for Hope” (1968), “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967), and Playboy interview (1968).

15. Thinking about King’s connections to the Communist party is particularly painful for me as it elicits many unpleasant memories. During these same years, I and about 40% of the other military aged males of my generation were killing and being killed by communists in South East Asia. Most of us thought (mainly as the result of the State’s propaganda) that we were “doing the right thing”—that they were “a threat to our way of life.” In the meantime, King et al (especially the New Totalitarian “boomer elite” that occupied the university campuses during those years) were orchestrating a Marxist revolution right here at home. And said revolution was a success. Marxists and fellow travelers (democratic socialists) are currently in firm control of all of our major social institutions.

16. Stang, Alan. 2004. Martin Luther King, Jr.—Communist Fraud.

17. This essay addresses only half of the equation. In a subsequent paper I will use the same yardstick (the content of his character) to judge one of the greatest, and most honorable, Americans to have ever lived—General Robert Edward Lee.

Supplemental Reading

Obviously, the issue addressed in this essay has its roots in what the victor (who always writes the history books) erroneously calls the “civil war.” It was not a civil war. By definition, a civil war is a war between two opposing factions for control of one central government. This war was fought between two sovereign states. To its victims (those of us who continue, to this day, to suffer the oppression of the occupation) the most descriptive name would be “The War for Southern Independence.” Personally, I prefer “The War of Yankee Aggression.”

The occupier’s fairy tails (aka history text books) insist that this terrible and totally unnecessary mass murder was all about slavery. It was not. The primary motivation for the Yankee aggression was the enrichment of northern industrialists being taken out of the hides of Southern agriculturalists. It was also about the lust of history’s most heinous serial killer (aka “Honest” Abe) for continental empire.

The following books set the record straight by meticulously documenting the truth with impeccable scholarship.

Adams, Charles. 2000. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession. Rowman & Littlefield.

Gutzman, Kevin R.C. The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Constitution. 2007. Regnery.

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. 2002. Forum.

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. 2006. Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe. Forum.

Kennedy, James R. and Walter D. 1994. The South Was Right! Pelican Publishing Company. Gretna, LA.

Woods, Thomas E. 2004. The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History. Regnery.

The Betrayed: On Warriors, Cowboys and Other Misfits. by Dr Jimmy T (Gunny) LaBaume. Click here to buy the paperback version from the FlyoverPress aStore.