Socialist Saint

[Achilles]

Socialist "Saint"
By: William Norman Grigg
February 11, 2002

Fifty years ago, a black preacher’s speech captured the dream of a nation from which racial turmoil had been abolished. “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 mountain side, let freedom ring!”

“That’s exactly what we mean,” continued the preacher as he built to a dramatic climax. “From every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and the 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 Great Smokies of Tennessee and from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia — let it ring.”

Pastor Archibald Carey spoke these words during the 1952 Republican National Convention. Eleven years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. appropriated Carey’s summation as part of his “I Have A Dream” speech on the Washington Mall. King kept the theme and cadences of Carey’s speech, while altering some of the details. This was in keeping with King’s previous practice of plagiarism, particularly his plundering of a doctoral dissertation by a scholar named Jack Boozer.

Spurious Scholarship
As Theodore Pappas documents in his study Plagiarism and the Culture War, King’s dissertation abounds in passages taken without citation from Boozer’s work, including errors in grammar and punctuation. King’s theft of another scholar’s work, comments Pappas, “was an indefensible act that should warrant the revocation of his Ph.D.” Liberal author Gary Wills made the same point — albeit in an endnote — in his 1994 book Certain Trumpets.

Boston University’s posthumous revocation of King’s doctoral degree would address a long-standing academic outrage. But it would be much more worthwhile — and far more difficult — to revoke King’s status as a civic demigod. Every year Americans are required to pay homage to King as an exemplar of tolerance, courage, and virtue. He is the only American to be honored with his own holiday — and his chief claim to such saintly status is the plagiarized “I Have a Dream” speech.

In April of 1993, Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania cosponsored a measure entitled the “King Holiday and Service Act,” the purpose of which was to “encourage” Americans to devote Martin Luther King Day to acts of “community service.” In his speech introducing that legislation, Senator Wofford recalled the words spoken by Christ over the Last Supper: “This do in remembrance of me.” In what can only be considered an act of conscious blasphemy, Wofford asked his Senate colleagues: “What should we do in remembrance of Martin?”

According to Wofford, King’s public utterances bear the mark of divinity. “Words — Martin’s words — will always be part of what we celebrate,” Wofford reverently declared. Republican Senator Dave Durenberger piously seconded Wofford’s view: “Never before has it been more important for our young people to hear Dr. King’s words.” Such pronouncements provide bitter humor to those who understand that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s career was propelled by political opportunism and adorned with pilfered eloquence.

Credentials for Canonization?
Some of King’s defenders insist that he was working within a tradition called “voice merging,” in which black preachers would freely share sermons without attribution. While this might explain why King felt free to help himself to the work of Pastor Carey — with whom he maintained a correspondence — it would not justify violating established scholarly guidelines for writing a doctoral dissertation. Besides, if plagiarism can be dismissed as “voice merging,” adultery could be dismissed as “spouse merging” — and as it happens, King indulged in that vice as well.

In his 1983 book The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. — which was in many ways a favorable treatment of King — investigative author David Garrow describes the findings compiled by the FBI’s investigation of the civil rights leader. That investigation was ordered by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was concerned about King’s habit of consorting with Communists. According to Garrow, the FBI learned that King was also involved in “embezzlement, employing prostitutes, alienating wives’ affections from their husbands, and violation of the Mann Act” (by taking women across state lines for immoral purposes). In 1989, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, published a memoir disclosing that King spent the night before he was killed in a sexual liaison with a female friend.

Hypocritically, while King felt free to steal from other scholars and preachers, he took great care to protect his own work from similar treatment. Pappas points out that “King took, copyrighted, and later defended his legal right to the words and thoughts” of Pastor Carey. In January 1997, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which is headed by King’s son Dexter, struck a marketing deal with Time-Warner. The media conglomerate agreed to produce and market books and other products using King’s writings, thereby netting the King estate an estimated $30-50 million over five years.

As Pappas reports: “At the heart of the deal is aggressive enforcement of the hundreds of copyrights that King placed on ‘his’ writings and on his most famous speeches in particular. Most disturbing … has been the King family’s aggressive profiteering toward those wanting to praise King by quoting the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. For instance, the King estate sued USA Today demanding a $1,700 licensing fee plus legal costs after the paper quoted the speech in praise of King.”

Apostle of Socialism
In 1997, Professor Larry Hofford of St. Mary’s University lamented: “Naming a national holiday after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has proven to be a mistake.” Professor Hofford, a self-described “progressive,” complained that King’s image “has been so watered down that the picture of him is that of a ‘mainstream reformer’ who led a movement to end legal segregation. The result is that no person in a position of authority in the United States could possibly experience any discomfort with this image.”

Hofford continued: “What is missing from most of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations is any discussion of the radical King … [who] put forth a philosophy and theology stressing the need to balance individual will with community will.” Hofford recalls that King was a strident opponent of capitalism, a Marxist liberation theologian who preached that “‘the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together.’” King sought not only an end to legally enforced racial segregation, but also a radical restructuring of American society.

In a September 1967 speech in Atlanta, King condemned capitalism as an inherently unjust economic system and declared that his movement was devoted to “restructuring the whole of American society.” In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, a book published in that same year, King endorsed the time-honored socialist demand for a guaranteed minimum annual wage, which would be “pegged to the median income of society” and would “automatically increase as the total social income grows.” In this particular example of literary “borrowing,” King was merging his voice with that of Karl Marx, who coined the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

King also bared his socialist inclinations in a lengthy interview he granted to Playboy, a strange pulpit for a man of God to employ. In the porn magazine’s January 1965 issue, King moralized that “all of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his [sic] centuries of exploitation and humiliation.” Anticipating the contemporary movement demanding “reparations” for slavery, he insisted that black Americans be given preferential economic treatment. Of course, this would provoke similar demands from “the disadvantaged of all races” — a prospect King welcomed: “I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro.... We must develop a federal program of public works, retraining and jobs for all....”

Asked about the role of Communists in his entourage, King quipped: “There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.” The real issue, of course, was not the number of Communists involved in King’s movement, but their influence. Martin Luther King’s long-term advisor — and occasional speechwriter — was New York attorney Stanley Levison, whom federal investigators identified as a Communist agent. Levison arranged for King to hire Hunter Pitts O’Dell, a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, as his executive assistant. In 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy warned King that Communist agents were manipulating King. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy reiterated this warning, offering a personal appeal to King to sever his ties to Levison and O’Dell: “They’re Communists. You’ve got to get rid of them.”

In a 1979 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, black civil rights activist Julia Brown testified of extensive connections between King and the Communist Party. Like other Americans concerned about race relations, Brown had joined a “civil rights” group — only to learn that it was a Communist front. After she took her concerns to the FBI, Brown was asked to work within the Party as an undercover operative. In her 1979 testimony, Brown recalled: “The [Communist] cells that I was associated with in Cleveland were continually being asked to raise money for Martin Luther King’s activities and to support his movement.... [W]hile I was in the Communist Party … I knew Martin Luther King to be closely connected with the Communist Party.”

Regarding the proposal for a King holiday, Brown declared: “If this measure is passed honoring Martin Luther King, we may as well take down the stars and stripes that flies over this building and replace it with a red flag.” In light of the Establishment’s success in canonizing King, Brown’s words are sobering indeed.