The Truth About Martin Luther King, Jr.

Spencer J. Quinn, Counter-Currents, 15 January 2018

In November of 2017, President Trump instructed the National Archives to release hundreds of previously-sealed documents which pertained to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Included among these documents were two FBI files which, curiously enough, have little to do with the Kennedy assassination but could have great bearing on the current struggles of the Dissident Right. In Part 1 of this series, we covered the May 1967 FBI report entitled “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer.”

Now I will discuss the second document, “Martin Luther King, Jr., an Analysis,” which was dated March 12, 1968, just three weeks before King’s assassination.

It always hurts to see one’s icons destroyed. Those icons are really what link a person to a greater humanity and whatever lies beyond it. It’s as if through an icon a person can channel an identity which signifies something much greater than himself. Icons can pull people into their orbits and inspire love and awe. People derive meaning and self-worth through them. Icons can also compete. Different groups may share an icon, or their incompatible icons may prevent them from coexisting. But in all cases, serious epigones prostrate themselves before their icons. It’s sort of like kissing the ring of a mafia boss. It’s done for protection. If you’re going to get to me, first you have to get through him.

In releasing the FBI’s 20-page analysis of Martin Luther King, President Trump recently took a serious swing at one of the Left’s most precious icons. The information in it is quite damning, and it hits King’s legacy from several directions. If people on the Right take up where Trump left off by internalizing the document and by going on the offensive with it against the Left, King’s potency as an icon will be greatly reduced. It sort of reminds me of how Sean Hannity would often mention Chappaquiddick whenever the topic of Ted Kennedy came up on his show. It was his way of shaming his opponents for supporting an icon that was not only all too human, but at times even less than that.

For students of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI’s analysis may not reveal very much new information about King (although there is some). King’s heyday is still well within living memory, and contemporaneous knowledge and rumor surrounding the man has had a way of trickling up to the present day, especially within conservative and rightist circles. The major knocks against him are that he plagiarized his doctoral thesis in systematic theology at Boston University in the mid-1950s, that he frequently engaged in extramarital sex, and that he was closely linked to the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). The FBI file addresses these last two issues, in some cases down to niggling detail, and leads one to conclude that Martin Luther King was little more than a sex addict and a shill for the Communist Party.

The sexual indiscretions harm King’s legacy, of course, but in the near-fifty years since his death, King’s friends and admirers have successfully whitewashed a good deal of it. Have a look at this Wikipedia article, which I believe sticks to the leftist party line on King. In the section entitled “Adultery,” the article’s authors and their various sources refer blandly to King’s “affairs,” “liaisons,” “infidelities,” and (best of all) “incidental couplings.” King colleague and eventual successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ralph Abernathy wrote of King’s “weakness for women,” and claimed he had a “difficult time with temptation.” Another writer describes King’s promiscuity as “a form of anxiety reduction” which caused him a great deal of “painful and at times overwhelming guilt.”

The whitewashing of King’s prodigious sexual appetites goes on to this day. For example, CNN called the document’s frank disclosures of King’s conduct as “insinuations and assertions about King’s personal life” and describes King’s behavior as “extramarital affairs and other sexual improprieties.” CNN then quotes the current director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute who accuses the authors of the document (or perhaps Trump himself) of attempting to “damage Martin Luther King’s reputation.”

So, basically, in the eyes of the Left, Martin Luther King, Jr. is a victim who is as innocent as he could possibly be and still be guilty. Given the Left’s overall tolerance of sexual promiscuity and deviancy, this means he’s not really guilty at all. At least not until the National Archives releases the FBI surveillance tapes and transcripts to the public in 2027.

So what did the FBI disclose? In the report’s final section, entitled “King’s Personal Conduct,” it states that in February 1968, while running a “workshop” on urban leadership in Miami, King hired prostitutes with funds from the Ford Foundation. He then engaged in binge drinking and group sex acts which the FBI describes as “deviating from the normal.” The FBI also relates how King participated in another “drunken sex orgy” in Washington, DC back in 1964. The sex acts were both “natural and unnatural” according to the FBI and were performed “for the entertainment of onlookers.”

In the 1960s, this was the pattern for King, who, according to the FBI, “has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.”

Read the rest at Counter-Currents.