“Misled into believing” MLK was a great man: How some Republicans fought against the King holiday

[DonViejo]

These days, some conservatives embrace King. Let's revisit the fascinating battle within the GOP during the 1980s

DAVID L. CHAPPELL

Excerpted from "Waking From the Dream"

As support for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday grew, one new sponsor marked the tectonic shifts of symbolic alignments in the era. John Danforth was a new Republican senator from Missouri, a millionaire who had unseated the old liberal Democrat Stuart Symington in 1976. Danforth urged his fellow Republicans to join him in honoring King. Armed with a divinity degree, Danforth was helping to refashion the GOP as a crucible for the mixing of church and state—just as Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson were using public displays of religion to challenge the Democratic establishment. Danforth believed he was following Martin Luther King’s example.

Danforth later revealed that he had gotten to know King and King’s father when he served as a board member of King’s alma mater, Morehouse College. He did not want champions of the welfare state to have a monopoly on public claims of morality and decency. To Danforth, King’s determination in the fight for equality symbolized ―the spirit of American freedom and self-determination.” Was Danforth’s view of King’s legacy in step with the growing body of social conservatives, who were campaigning vigorously to take over the GOP and the country? That question still appeared to be open, what with much of the pro-life movement claiming King as an inspiration and model, and with at least two Republican presidential candidates (John Connally and John Anderson) making a great show of repudiating their former opposition to King and civil rights. Danforth signaled a new possibility for conservative Republicans: They could claim some affinity, even allegiance, to King’s mantle. They may not have wanted to convince many black voters, and they did not need to. White conservatives in particular recognized in King a model to emulate—notably his use of religious enthusiasm and will-to-sacrifice. Nobody better illustrated Coretta Scott King’s point that King had spoken “to us all.”

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Other conservatives got in Danforth’s way, however, with tough ideological attacks on King’s legacy. When Senator Strom Thurmond reconvened the joint hearing, opponents of the King holiday were given the most room they ever had in the record. First was Alan Stang, author of an anticommunist tract, “It’s Very Simple: The True Story of Civil Rights” (1965). Stang enumerated King’s alleged communist associations more clearly than any holiday opponent had done on the record before. He also did a better job than anyone had in spelling out the claim that King provoked violence. To people who wondered why “violence was so often a hallmark of King’s so-called nonviolent movement,” Stang answered that “violence was exactly what he wanted,” citing King’s own article in the April 3, 1964, Saturday Review. There King laid out his strategy: Nonviolent demonstrators went into the streets to exercise their rights, and racists resisted by unleashing violence against them, which led “Americans of conscience” to demand federal intervention and legislation. “So,” Stang concluded, “the violence he [King] got was not a surprise” and King “did not dislike it. He wanted it in order to pressure the Congress to enact still more totalitarian legislation.”

Thurmond called a real live communist next: Julia Brown, a self-identified “loyal American Negro,” who worked as a communist organizer beginning in 1947. At first, Brown had thought she was “joining a legitimate civil rights organization[.] Finding that I was a true member of the Communist Party[,] which advocated the overthrow of the United States Government, I decided to leave the organization, but I had to bide my time to avoid suspicion.” Soon she went to the FBI to report what she had witnessed. “In 1951, I was asked by the FBI to go back into the Communist Party as an undercover agent to report on their subversive activities.” She claimed that only party members attended the meetings she attended. She “frequently heard Martin Luther King discussed.” The communist cells she was in were “continually being asked to raise money for Martin Luther King’s activities and to support his civil rights movement by writing letters to the press and influencing local clergymen, and especially Negro clergymen that he was a good person, unselfishly working for the American Negro, and in no way connected with the Communist Party.”

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