Was Martin Luther King a Marxist?

Abstract

Martin Luther King, Jr., has seldom figured in the Left's pantheon of Socialist heroes. To many of his contemporaries he seemed a typical product of the 'black bourgeoisie': a middle-class preacher from a middle-class family who pursued middle-class goals. Although an eloquent and courageous crusader for racial justice, his ultimate vision as expressed for example in his famous 'I Have A Dream' oration seemed to be the integration of the Negro into the existing structure of society; capitalism was not at issue. When he talked about the need for cleanliness, godliness and thrift, he sounded like Booker T. Washington, that epitome of bourgeois values who, at the turn of the century, had exhorted blacks to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. King's own admiration for Washington, whom many blacks viewed as an arch 'Uncle Tom', was widely-known and openly advertised. By the mid-1960s, at the height of his fame and success, King struck many of his contemporaries as an essentially conservative figure. He was always 'amenable to compromise', wrote one commentator, 'with the white bourgeois political and economic Establishment'. Lawrence Reddick, King's friend and biographer, had anticipated such verdicts years earlier. 'Neither by experience nor reading is King a political radical', he wrote in 1959. 'There is not a Marxist bone in his body.' True, King adopted a much more radical stance during the last two years of his life, but he never seemed to wander very far from the political mainstream. To the student radicals of the 'New Left', as well as to the angry advocates of 'Black Power', King remained a staid, unexciting figure, the ineffectual exponent of an outdated brand of liberalism.' It seems scarcely credible, then, that King was, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained, a self-confessed Marxist. Did the FBI's ubiquitous wiretaps really record the civil rights leader saying, 'I am a Marxist', and that he