This thread is abhorrent.
First of all, I could list about a thousand "communists" from that era. It's call McCarthyism. And guess who was behind it moreso even than McCarthy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#J._Edgar_Hoover_and_the_FBIIn Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Schrecker calls the FBI "the single most important component of the anti-communist crusade" and writes: "Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau's files, 'McCarthyism' would probably be called 'Hooverism.'"[18] FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of the nation's most fervent anti-communists, and one of the most powerful.
Secondly:
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.aspAlthough the FBI did conduct surveillance on Martin Luther King and two Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) associates who were former Communist party members (Stanley D. Levison and Jack O'Dell), the Bureau was unable to uncover any credible evidence of active participation or funding between the Communist party and the SCLC. As David Garrow chronicled in his exhaustive study of Martin Luther King and the SCLC:
While King continued his criticism of the [Kennedy] administration, the Kennedys were in private consternation about FBI reports that American Communist party leaders were claiming that old ally Stanley Levison was the number one advisor to Martin Luther King. In fact, the reports said, word in the party had it that Levison was writing many of King's most important speeches. Though the FBI's informants had no dependable information that Levison was still loyal to the party's commands, they did know that he continued to give it modest financial support even after severing direct ties. The FBI suspected that Levison's 1955 departure from party activity might have been a cover, and that Levison's friendship with King might be a secret assignment undertaken at the behest of American Communists and their Soviet sponsors.
The FBI's assertions provoked fear in [Attorney General] Robert Kennedy and his closest assistants. Within several weeks time, two courses of action were decided upon. First, electronic surveillance of Levison would be instituted to monitor both his advice to King and any telephone contacts with Soviet or Communist agents. Second, those in the Kennedy administration who had some personal acquaintance with King all would warn the civil rights leader that he ought to end his relationship with Levison immediately. King would also be warned about Jack O'Dell, the man Levison had brought in manage the SCLC's New York office. O'Dell had been involved with the Communist party throughout the 1950s, and his public record of such associations could be used against King and SCLC.
On several occasions during the spring, Robert Kennedy and his assistants warned King about Levison and O'Dell, without being specific about the allegations. Each time the warnings were voiced to King, he listened quietly, thanked the speaker for his concern, and said that he was not one to question the motives of people in the movement, certainly not one so selfless as Stanley Levison. As King explained, how could he give credence to such vague allegations, coming from who knew where, when Levison had a proven track record of five years of honest counsel? If the administration had anything more specific to offer, King would gladly listen, but until then, he would not doubt one of his closest friends.
The FBI kept up its round-the-clock surveillance of Stanley Levison throughout the spring and summer. The wiretaps detected no contacts with Communist agents. Though his ties to the party were now in the past, such evidence of his final disengagement did not persuade FBI officials, who continued to suspect that Stanley Levison might be a Soviet agent exerting substantial influence on the civil rights movement through his close friendship with Martin King.
Late in October serious controversy broke when several conservative newspapers ran almost identical front-page stories detailing the Communist party ties of SCLC staff member Jack O'Dell. The FBI-planted stories reported that the thirty-nine-year-old O'Dell not only had a public record of past association with the "CP," but in fact still served as a "concealed member" of the party's national committee. The Bureau hoped that this exposé would so embarrass King that the supposed Communist mole would be purged.
After several days, King issued a statement saying that O'Dell had resigned from the SCLC. While King's statement carefully noted that the SCLC had accepted the resignation, "pending further inquiry and clarification," those in the know, including the FBI, were aware that O'Dell remained with SCLC as head of its New York office. The FBI reasoned that King's deceptiveness in retaining O'Dell indicated that the civil rights leader was insensitive to the dangers of Communist subversion, as well as dishonest.
At King's request, O'Dell prepared a private letter explaining his political past. O'Dell stated in the letter that while he had previously supported the Communist party program, "quite awhile before" joining SCLC, he had concluded that his prior belief that "democratic reformation of the South required a Communist movement in the South" was incorrect and "mistaken. I no longer hold such a viewpoint, and neither do I have any Communist affiliation," O'Dell told King. Satisfied with that statement, [attorney Clarence] Jones advised King that O'Dell's supposed "interim resignation" could be set aside, and that O'Dell could remain with SCLC because he "has no present communist affiliation whatsoever."
On the morning of June 30 [1963], the Birmingham News, relying upon information leaked by the FBI, revealed that Jack O'Dell was still on SCLC's payroll and working in its New York office despite King's claim that O'Dell had resigned. [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights] Burke Marshall again pressed King to cut all ties with O'Dell and Levison. Reluctantly, King gave in and acted on the first request. He wrote to O'Dell, in a letter primarily intended for Marshall's consumption, that the "temporary resignation" of the preceding November now was being made permanent. Although SCLC had not discovered "any present connections with the Communist party on your part," the continuing allegation that O'Dell was a secret member of the the CP's national committee was a damaging one, and "in these critical times we cannot afford to risk any such impressions."
Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the SCLC after the latter's assassination in 1968, also disclaimed ties between the SCLC and the Communist party in his autobiography:
We assumed that, though filled with malice toward us, [FBI director J. Edgar Hoover] was a rational man who was merely misinformed about our ultimate aims. If we could disabuse him of his belief that we were Communists or else willing pawns of the international Communist conspiracy, perhaps he would call off his dogs.
The idea that we could reason with such people was naive. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed the best course of action to follow. So, while Martin kept an appointment in Baltimore, Andy Young and I flew to Washington to meet with Hoover's representative, Deke DeLoach, to see if we couldn't explain our aims and achieve some sort of truce.
It was a waste of time and money. DeLoach was not a man who could really speak for Hoover, and we spent most of our time trying to answer charges he was unwilling to admit the FBI had made. We assured him that Martin was not a Communist, that Communists did not control the SCLC and that we had no desire to tear down American society. We pointed out that even in the SCLC's constitution it states very clearly that "No member of this organization shall be a communist nor a communist sympathizer." All we wanted, we said, was equal protection under the law; the right to enjoy the full privileges of American citizenship.
Toward the end of the interview we realized that he was playing an elaborate and patronizing game with us, treating us with a strict courtesy that barely hid his contempt. We left more frustrated than when we had arrived. Not only would the FBI not cease and desist, they would not even talk to us about the matter.
Essentially
one dude in the SCLC, not named Martin Luther, was accused of being a
former advocate of the Communist party.
If one dude peripherally associated with King being vaguely formerly associated with a form of government other than capitalism in your mind negates anything positive derived from desegregation and equal treatment of African Americans as human beings as a whole...you're an asshole.
A more coherent version of the story than anything said in this thread so far:
(I can't find the clip of the entire segment, but as a side note, this show is great.)
Anyway, all that said, before this thread went off the rails, I agreed. Robert E. Lee as a political figure is not inherently racist, and any protest or "compromise" is stupid and whitewashing American history.
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