Historic Martin Luther King Home To Become A National Landmark
Photo Credit: Flip Schulke / Corbis
Photo Credit: Flip Schulke/Corbis
An FBI analysis centered around the assassination of John F. Kennedy was recently-released by Donald Trump. Included in it is a 20-page document that falsely describes Martin Luther King Jr. as a "whole-hearted" communist who followed a "Marxist-Leninist line."
READ: Atlanta Unveils Martin Luther King Jr. Statue
In a report from the Washington Post, the document alleges that King's "political ideologies and the creation of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were heavily influenced by communists, specifically the Communist Party USA." The document then claims that Stanley Levison, one of King's most trust advisers as well as a top financier for the Communist Party prior to meeting King, influenced the civil right activist's activities as he became a more prominent figure in the movement.
However, historian David Garrow disagrees with the document's claims.
"The number one thing I've learned in 40 years of doing this, is just because you see it in a top-secret document, just because someone had said it to the FBI, doesn't mean it's all accurate," Garrow, who has written extensively about King, said.
Garrow also acknowledged how the document reveals then-FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover's hostility toward King, which would ultimately come to a high in 1964 when the latter said the FBI was "completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the Deep South."
Even though King would ultimately distance himself from Communism the FBI still continued to link him with it, the document revealing that the FBI "continued to distribute utterly misleading reports that declared just the opposite."
Source: washingtonpost.com
