Myths about African Americans? Come and help me determine.

I was just sent an email by a friend who likes to believe unusual thing whether or not they are true(as long as there is not direct proof that it isn’t true).

Anyway, she sent a list with facts regarding Black History Month. I’m not sure if all are true or not, so let me know what you think.

*** The first established settlement in the United States was actually an
African settlement in the 1526, in what is now S. Carolina. The Africans
were escaped slaves from a failed Spanish colony.

  • The United States Federal Government was actually desegregated in the
    1860s, and no I’m not just talking about the limo drivers and the maids at
    the White House (although, they too were allowed jobs!). Abraham Lincoln
    desegregated the White House, and the National Government in the 1860s, and
    it stayed desegregated until Woodrow Wilson in the 1910s. Only after Wilson
    resegregated the Federal Government, and after the Federal Government had
    been resegregated for years did the lie get retold that the government had
    always been segregated.

  • Haitians were the first people to come to the aid of G. Washington and
    his troops who were fighting in the American Revolution. Washington repaid
    the favor by loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to French planters to
    help them supress the Haitians.

  • There were racially integrated military squadrons as early as the 1860s.
    And I don’t just mean that one regiment you see in Glory where everyone was
    black except the white officer. In fact, it was a common occurrence in the
    North, and helped to lead to a great decrease in racism in the North.
    Whites and Blacks often faught together in the Civil War, and many white
    soldiers went back home with a different attitude about black citizens in
    general.

  • Contrary to the popular myth now proported in our high school American
    history textbooks, the Civil War really was about slavery! (Sorry guys,
    but it’s true.) It was not about state’s rights. Until they lost the White
    House the states later to be known as the Confederacy had tried to use the
    Federal Government, and relied heavily upon it, to enforce and perpetuate
    slavery laws, regardless of state’s rights issues. It was only when the
    White House was no longer slavery-friendly that they succeeded.

     *Furthermore, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation
    

Proclamation, Confederacy President Jefferson Davis signed a Slavery
Proclamation reading, "On and after February 22, 1863, all free negroes
within the limits of the Southern Confederacy shall be placed on the slave
status, and be deemed to be chattels, they and their issue forever. " Davis
also declared that after the Confederacy won the war, all blacks everywhere
in America shall be enslaved, because " slavery is the corner-stone of a
Western Republic. " Davis obviously was ignoring the fact that most other
Western Republics (and yes, America was not the only Western Republic at the
time!) had already outlowed slavery.

    *Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation left slavery legal in

Union states, such as Maryland. But, in 1864 the abolitionists in Maryland
brought the issue of slavery to a vote. “The tally was narrowly against
emancipation until the large number of absentee ballots were counted. By an
enormous margin, these ballots were for freedom. Who case most of these
ballots in 1864 in Maryland? Soldiers and sailors, of course. Just as
tehse soldiers marched into battle with ‘John Brown’s Body’ upon their lips,
so their minds had changed to favor the freedom that their actions were
forging” (188). (There is other proof of the fact that it really was an
issue of slavery, but I’ll let you go ahead and read the book for yourself!)

  • Until the Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction had gone so well, that there
    was a great deal less corruption than during any period before or after
    it. When the Compromise of 1877 was struck, the southern states originally
    agreed that they would grant blacks full citizenship, but that’s when they
    then came out with grandfather clauses, et. al, and then the KKK emerged.
    After this, the propaganda machine of the South was able to completely
    change public perception of what had really happened in the South. Loewen
    calls this the “Great Southern Myth.”

  • The KKK was such an accepted part of society, especially in Indiana where
    it dominated the state government, that President Warren G. Harding was
    inducted as a member in a White House ceremony!!

  • “During the Wilson and Harding administrations, perhaps 100 race riots
    took place, more than in any other period since Reconstruction.” In 1921 in
    Tulsa, Oklahoma, “whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black
    ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes,”
    (165).

  • Woodrow Wilson was elected (as a certain President we have now was) as a
    moderate, and it was only after he was in office that his true feelings
    came out and everyone realized that he was a mysoginisitic white
    supremisist!

  • Jackie Robinson was not the first black in major league baseball. He was
    the first black in major league baseball in the 20th century. During the
    1800s there was a time when all of baseball (and most other sports) were
    completely integrated. It wasn’t until a protest by the owner of the
    Chicago White Sox that baseball was segregated, with the Baltimore Orieols
    being the last team to have an African American on their roster in the 19th
    century.

*In 1911 “the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they wonf ifteen
of the first twenty-eight derbies” (163).

  • Woodrow Wilson personally vetoed a clause in the Covenant of the League
    of Nations that would have advocated racial equality.

  • J. Edgar Hoover was an extreme white supremicist who had Martin Luther
    King’s phone calls and conversations taped. He and the FBI even tried to
    disrupt celebrations when MLK received the Nobel Peace Prize.

  • The American society of the 1860s enjoyed much better race relations than
    we do presently. Contrary to the popular misconception presented by Gone
    With the Wind
    and our history textbooks (again … those darn high school
    history textbooks!), Reconstruction was not a time of corruption, but rather
    a time of prosperity in the South. There was less corruption in the South
    during Reconstruction than there had ever been before or has been since.

  • Former slaves were already integrated into the working society when
    Reconstruction began (what, exactly, did you think they were doing before
    they were freed? Sitting in the cotton fields playing “Leap Frog?”). The
    people who had to be integrated into the working society of the 1860s were
    former slave owners - many of whom had never done a bit of work their
    entire lives. Furthermore, Reconstruction did not fail because of
    corruption. Reconstruction failed because the government stopped trying to
    change the perceptions of white former slave owners.

  • Final fun February fact: In the 1860s, a white Senator from Hingis
    County, Mississippi married a black woman and was reelected! Do you
    really think that would happen in Hingis County, Miss, or many other
    counties acorss America now?**

There is evidence that a Spanish settlement abandoned black slaves when they abandoned a settlement in the Carolinas. However, the liklihood is that they quickly integrated with the Native American population who were laudibly free of any racial prejudice.

Claiming that they formed a ‘settlement’ is probably going beyond the facts. Additionally, the Vinland Saga and other sources suggest earlier ‘settlements’ in the North American continent. It all depends what you mean by ‘settlement’.

Most experts – and not just high school textbooks – consider it primarily a states rights issue. Slavery was the reason why states rights became an issue, but there is evidence, for instance, that the South was moving away from slavery (Virginia, for instance, nearly abolished it in the 1850s, and did not succeed from the Union until Lincoln called out the troops). The feeling in the South was quite clearly that we may or may not abolish slavery, but we’re not going to allow the Federal government to tell us what to do.

Don’t know about this one, but I do know that, toward the end of the war, Davis was seriously considering emancipating the slaves in the South to turn them into troops (and to try to get England on their side).

Baseball was far from “completely integrated” in the 19th century. There were a handful of black players, but they faced prejudice and were eventually forced out (primarily after Adrian “Cap” Anson – manager, not owner, of the White Sox – refused to take the field with them). According to The Great American Sports Book “Blacks were banned officially by the old amateur baseball association” – and that was well before Anson. Around the time of the Walker Brothers – probably the last two to play for a pro team until Robinson – the International League passed a resolution against playing with black players (this was around 1884). In 1887, 8 members of the St. Louis Brown even refused to play an exhibition game against black players.

Other sports had black athletes back then, but they were hardly integrated and any one who had any success was roundly jeered.

Still, overall the list isn’t egregiously wrong.

I think the American Indians who had large farming settlements in the Mississippi delta might disagree with this. Do a internet search for ‘mississippi indian pyramid buliders.’

**

Who is telling this ‘lie.’ It’s a well known historical fact that segregation was implimented in the 1910s. I’ve never heard anyone say otherwise.

**

Go the Great Debates and see the many discussions we’ve had about this. I don’t understand the comment about ‘western republics.’ The Western World is generally used to refer to europe and north america. It is well know that slavery was illegal in Canada. Could this be what they mean?

**

I can’t think of any way to measure government corruption. Our modern government is much much large than the government was during reconstruction so it would be common sense that there is more corruption. Loewen has been soundly attacked here in past threads. Basically Loewen is a leftist version of Rush Limbaugh. He tells lies and half-truths to promote his agenda, which does a diservice to the left.

**

Yes the state of Indiana was once controlled by the KKK, notice this is a NORTHERN state. I have no information about Harding.

**

There was a large race riot in Tulsa, it was very bad. Worse than you think. PBS recently ran a documentary about this riot. The story about airplanes is not believed by serious historians. IIRC this was addressed in teh documentary.

**

Wilson (a republican) was elected with almost 100% of the black vote because he promised to support federal anti-lynching legislation. After he was elected he turned his back on his black supporters, but he probably relised that supporting such legislation would cost his much in the the House and Senate. Blacks haven’t voted Republican since!

**

Again impossible to measure.

**
So running a business is not work? Only manual labor counts as work? I think many lawyers, accounts, computer programmers, writers, …would disagree.

Open your eyes, there are interracial couples everywhere. Hell I live in the deep rural south and am part of one.

Otherwise, how would I get my history?

So…blacks were living on stolen land before Indians? Of course, this doesn’t say there was any hostility between the escaped slaves and the natives, but what exactly is the point of this one?

Call me an intellectual elitist, but I cast a doubtful eye on Civil War history from a source that doesn’t know the difference between “succeeding” and “seceding.” The South seceded, but they didn’t succeed.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by labdude *
**

Wilson was a Democrat.

[bump]

Suddenly, my deluded friend has the deeply rooted desire to attack sources. Her main source is this book by Loewen

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0684818868/customer-

What do we know about this book? Also, what myths do we know about history that fall against the conservative side. It is very convenient that every myth she listed was liberal, as if all errors were made against the left.

  • Jackie Robinson was not the first black in major league baseball. He was
    the first black in major league baseball in the 20th century. During the
    1800s there was a time when all of baseball (and most other sports) were
    completely integrated. It wasn’t until a protest by the owner of the
    Chicago White Sox that baseball was segregated, with the Baltimore Orieols
    being the last team to have an African American on their roster in the 19th
    century.

That is correct, although not exaclty intergrated, there were some. The first was a man named Fleetwood Walker. After the protest, there was actually one more, but I forgot his name. He pretended to be Native American, but he was they found out later, hope that helped a little. Also, Warren Harding was in the KKK and the ceremony was done in the White House.

St. Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565, so if the 1526 date is correct, it would be the oldest non-native settlement in what is now the US. Still, the story sounds fishy; wouldn’t the Spanish colony they escaped from have to be older? Unless they canoed all the way from Hispaniola or somewhere . . .

**

I think this is correct.

**

I’ve never heard of this, and it sounds absurd. Haiti wasn’t independent yet during the Revolution, so I don’t know how the Haitians could possibly have helped Washington. The part about Washington lending money to the French would at least make sense, given all the help the French gave America during the Revolution, but I’ve never heard of it.

**

Not that I’m aware of. The 54th Mass. Regiment, which appears in Glory, was not integrated, of course. Officers and men did not share quarters.

**

Secession was clearly provoked by the slavery issue; whether the ensuing war was about slavery is a matter of interpretation. See the Great Debates threads.

**

Pure nonsense. The KKK was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. See here. It had mostly been stamped out by 1871 and played no major role in American culture again until its re-founding at Stone Mountain in 1915. Linking its emergence to the year 1877 is an egregious error.

**

Don’t know about Indiana government, but I believe the part about Harding being a Klansman is correct. I’ve read it in several sources and have never seen it contested. Truman was also invited to join the Klan some years before he became vice-president, but is said to have promptly resigned his membership after his first meeting.

**

I believe everything RealityChuck said about this is correct, with only one minor exception; I think Anson played-managed for the Chicago White Stockings, the ancestor of the Cubs, rather than the White Sox, which did not exist then (no American League yet). Still, even though the “completely integrated” claim is mistaken, it is true that Robinson was not the first black man to play in the majors.

**

The part about taping King’s calls and conversations is correct. I don’t know about the rest; Hoover wrongly suspected King of being a Communist agent, so he had other motives besides racism to spy on him. That doesn’t mean Hoover wasn’t a white supremacist, I just don’t know of any evidence that he was.

**

This is obvious nonsense. The terrorist activities of the Klan alone in the 1860s demonstrate the difference.

**

Of course it could. We have a Supreme Court justice right now married to a white woman. We just elected a white president who is married to a Hispanic woman. Obviously, America could use a lot more interracial tolerance and cooperation than it has right now, but to paint the 1860s as a time of comparatively superior racial amity is truly bizarre.

I don’t get it either, but they can’t mean Canada. Canada was a Crown dominion, not a republic. Slavery, of course, was illegal throughout the British monarchy.

Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is a good critique of American History as presented by the bland, lowest-common-denominator text books that are foisted off on high school students in the U.S.

It is not a good history book. However, his major thesis is that kids should be given better access to original sources, so his work does not have to be great history to be effective. (It does lean to the left a bit and it could have been better. However, most of the mush in the text books is so lacking in substance that any criticism is going to appear either left- or right-leaning.)

The major problems with Lies My Teacher Told Me are the ones that are visible, here. American mythology allowed the Reconstruction to be demonized for years, with stuff like the cartoons of Thomas Nast and the movie Birth of a Nation portraying the post-Civil War governments of the South as corrupt tools of evil Northern carpetbaggers playing their “darkie” legislators as puppets to oppress the white populace.

History, of course, is never that clear cut. A number of the blacks elected to the Southern Legislatures were very capable statesmen who did, indeed, pass progressive legislation that improved the lot of both blacks and whites in the South. The “evil” Northern carpetbaggers were, generally, simply investors who saw an opportunity to spend their money in a place where it would get a good return. Without that investment, the South could not have recovered from the War as fast as it did.

When looking at the myth of the evil Reconstruction, a number of people that Loewen quotes have turned the period into one of great leaps in civilization and lawmaking.

Both sides exaggerate. There was a lot of remarkably good legislation passed–much of it overturned simply to spite its proponents after 1877. There was also a lot of graft and corruption–the normal state of affairs when a society is in ruins.

Following Loewen’s instructions instead of his text, one should go look up the primary sources to identify what really went on.

(As one who has felt for more than 30 years that Woodrow Wilson was an overrated blight on our history, I will note, for example, that Loewen blithely quotes Wilson as having seen Birth of a Nation and described it as totally accurate and as “truth blazed in lightning” (or some such). Loewen, however, does not mention that the source of the Wilson quote did not make it into print until Wilson had been dead for 11 years and that the scene described by the source of that quote is in disagreement with the diary of Wilson’s personal secretary who described Wilson going off to bed without making any comment.
Similarly, the decision to fire all the blacks in management at the Post Office appears in Loewen’s book almost as if Wilson ordered it. Wilson should be held accountable for not stopping it, but it was ordered on the private initiative of Wilson’s Postmaster General.)

As I noted above, the best idea is to follow Loewen’s suggestion and go find as many original sources as possible. (Loewen does have a good bibliography and each of those works will also have bibliographies.)

Mahaloth, it’s beginning to look like your friend’s e-mail, like so many others of its ilk, is a fascinating mishmash of slightly slanted half-truths.

I decided to take on the 1526 South Carolina settlement thing, just for the heck of it, and the very first Google hit, for “South Carolina 1526 settlement”, that popped up was this.

The second hit was this.
http://www.sctrails.net/Trails/Trailguides/historic.html

Hit #3.
http://officialcitysites.org/state.php3?st=SC

Hit #4.

http://school.discovery.com/homeworkhelp/worldbook/atozgeography/s/521100.html

So, in 1526 there was a colony, and there presumably were black slaves with them, but the colony itself was not founded by escaped black slaves.

So I will add “African” to Search Within Results. Nothing helpful or relevant comes up.
I try “African slave revolt 1526”

http://users.rcn.com/wovoka/Pmchap1-02.htm

And, FINALLY, the presumed source of the factoid emerges from the primal Internet darkness (bolding mine).
http://www.africana.com/tt_268.htm

And here’s another source for it. “black slave revolt 1526”.
http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/seminoles.htm

Just because something is posted on the Web doesn’t mean it’s Gospel. This is nothing but pure speculation. None of the official South Carolina history sources mention this; are we to believe it’s all a gigantic conspiracy to keep American Blacks from receiving their due as the “first settlers”? It sounds to me like the settlement collapsed, the few Spanish survivors went back to Haiti, and any black slaves who were left behind went to live with the Indians. Even if some of them didn’t, if they did start some kind of “settlement”, it certainly didn’t endure long enough to make it into any of the history books. Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon gets all the credit. Is this a white conspiracy, or is it just the truth?

I think we may take it that the rest of the e-mail is probably similarly suspect.

Okay, here’s another interestingly slanted half-truth.

http://www.worldrover.com/history/haiti_history.html

(This sentence is widely repeated on the Web.) Okay, but read the rest of the Web page and put the chronology in perspective.

So, the Haitians who “assisted the American Revolution” were the white Spanish and French slaveholding landowners on the plantations, not the black slaves, who didn’t revolt until 1791. Their black slaves didn’t have the option of choosing to assist the Americans. They were slaves.

Then there’s this, also widely repeated.
http://www.traveldocs.com/ht/history.htm

They are referred to as “volunteers”.

However, this comes from a Black History website that also goes into painful detail talking about the ghastly conditions slaves in 18th Century Haiti had to endure. I am therefore assuming that when the slaveowners asked for “volunteers” to step forward and go fight in America, there was probably no shortage of people anxious to get out and get away, anything would be better than this. The simple fact that “Haitians fought alongside Americans at the Battle of Savannah” is only half the story.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by kawliga *
**

Hell, I’ve made a mistake. Can anyone remember the president I’m thinking of?

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by labdude *
**

Taft?

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Mahaloth
**

This is true, but the veto was aimed more at the Chinese in California and the PNW than at the African-Americans. Japan wanted a racial equality clause in the charter of the League of Nations and Wilson was afraid that this would mean that the repressive laws against the Chinese would have to be lifted, making him a very unpopular candidate out west the next election.

Unless I’m mistaken, you’re thinking of Jeb Bush, Governor of the Swamp District, who is married to a Hispanic woman. If George W’s wife Laura is Hispanic, then ich bin ein Berliner.

All right, please continue. The history is fascinating.

Cripes, I goofed. Another reason we need a blush smiley.

So then this whole paragraph:

**
–becomes even more slanted. “Oh, gee, all those nice Haitians came and helped us in the War of Independence, and how did we repay them? By contributing to their oppression.”

That’s a VAST oversimplification. It’s not helped any by the fact that the two events are separated in time by at least 7 years.

In 1791, when the Haitian revolution began, American slave owners, including George Washington, were appalled. They saw it as an extension of the excesses of the French Revolution. “Where will it all end?” they wondered. So they initially tried to help the French put down what they saw as just another slave revolt.

http://home.inreach.com/usm/chron_1790_1829.html

However, by 1798, the Americans had realized two things. One, this was no mere slave revolt but a full-blown War of Independence. And second, and probably more importantly, they realized that there was big money at stake, and that they could benefit more by supporting the revolutionaries than by supporting the French.

Haiti was producing sugar cane for molasses for rum, and also table sugar, which was rapidly becoming a staple instead of a luxury. The U.S. saw a chance to get better prices, if they could get rid of France and deal directly with the revolutionary government.

So suddenly the United States was very favorable to Toussaint L’Ouverture (not the first time a government has done a 180).

(Also, it might be noted that by this time the Americans were rather discouraged by the ongoing soap opera that was the French Revolution. “What in the world are they doing over there?” They’d spent 1797 watching Napoleon charging around Europe with his armies, and now in 1798 he was heading for Egypt. “Whatever happened to the Republican Ideals?” they wondered.)

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/revolution/revolution3.htm

**

Some people dislike Bad Astronomy; I dislike Bad History.

Since this thread seems to be about verifying or debunking a specific group of alleged “facts” involving African-Americans, I wonder if anyone has in the past taken a close look at this screed devoted to a specific African-American – which I stumbled upon on the way to looking up something entirely different.

If this has been analyzed and dealt with in the past here or elsewhere, I would appreciate a link.


WHEN THE COMMUNISTS TOOK OVER a country, one of the first things that they did was to confiscate all the privately-held weapons, to deny the people the physical ability to resist tyranny. But even more insidious than the theft of the people’s weapons was the theft of their history. Official Communist “historians” rewrote history to fit the current party line. In many countries, revered national heroes were excised from the history books, or their real deeds were distorted to fit Communist ideology, and Communist killers and criminals were converted into official “saints.” Holidays were declared in honor of the beasts who murdered countless nations.

Did you know that much the same process has occurred right here in America?

Every January, the media go into a kind of almost spastic frenzy of adulation for the so-called “Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.” King has even had a national holiday declared in his honor, an honor accorded to no other American, not Washington, not Jefferson, not Lincoln. (Washington and Lincoln no longer have holidays – they share the generic-sounding “President’s Day.”) A liberal judge has sealed the FBI files on King until the year 2027. What are they hiding? Let’s take a look at this modern-day plastic god.

Born in 1929, King was the son of a Black preacher known at the time only as “Daddy King.” “Daddy King” named his son Michael. In 1935, “Daddy King” had an inspiration to name himself after the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. He declared to his congregation that henceforth they were to refer to him as “Martin Luther King” and to his son as “Martin Luther King, Jr.” None of this name changing was ever legalized in court. “Daddy” King’s son’s real name is to this day Michael King.
King’s Brazen Cheating

We read in Michael Hoffman’s “Holiday for a Cheater”:

The first public sermon that King ever gave, in 1947 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was plagiarized from a homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled “Life is What You Make It,” according to the testimony of King’s best friend of that time, Reverend Larry H. Williams. The first book that King wrote, "Stride Toward Freedom, - -was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow. And no less an authoritative source than the four senior editors of "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., whose staff includes King’s widow Coretta), stated of King’s writings at both Boston University and Crozer Theological Seminary: “Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism… Appropriated passages are particularly evident in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology.” King’s essay, “The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God,” written at Crozer, pirated passages from the work of theologian Edgar S. Brightman, author of "The Finding of God. Another of King’s theses, “Contemporary Continental Theology,” written shortly after he entered Boston University, was largely stolen from a book by Walter Marshall Horton. King’s doctoral dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Harry Nelson Wieman,” for which he was awarded a PhD in theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack Boozer, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of God.”

According to “The Martin Luther King Papers”, in King’s dissertation “only 49 per cent of sentences in the section on Tillich contain five or more words that were King’s own…”! In “The Journal of American History”, June 1991, page 87, David J. Garrow, a leftist academic who is sympathetic to King, says that King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who also served as his secretary, was an accomplice in his repeated cheating. Reading Garrow’s article, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that King cheated because he had chosen for himself a political role in which a PhD would be useful, and, lacking the intellectual ability to obtain the title fairly, went after it by any means necessary. Why, then, one might ask, did the professors at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University grant him passing grades and a PhD? Garrow states on page 89: “King’s academic compositions, especially at Boston University, were almost without exception little more than summary descriptions…
and comparisons of other’s writings. Nonetheless, the papers almost always received desirable letter grades, strongly suggesting that King’s professors did not expect more…” The editors of “The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers” state that " …the failure of King’s teachers to notice his pattern of textual appropriation is somewhat remarkable…"

But researcher Michael Hoffman tells us “…actually the malfeasance of the professors is not at all remarkable. King was politically correct, he was Black, and he had ambitions. The leftist [professors were] happy to award a doctorate to such a candidate no matter how much fraud was involved. Nor is it any wonder that it has taken forty years for the truth about King’s record of nearly constant intellectual piracy to be made public.”

Supposed scholars, who in reality shared King’s vision of a racially mixed and Marxist America, purposely covered up his cheating for decades. The cover-up still continues. From the “New York Times” of October 11, 1991, page 15, we learn that on October 10th of that year, a committee of researchers at Boston University admitted that, “There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation.” However, despite its finding, the committee said that “No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree,” an action the panel said “would serve no purpose.”

No purpose, indeed! Justice demands that, in light of his willful fraud as a student, the “reverend” and the “doctor” should be removed from King’s name.
Communist Beliefs and Connections

Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide PhD, and his name isn’t really “Martin Luther King, Jr.” What’s left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people. On Labor Day, 1957, a special meeting was attended by Martin Luther King and four others at a strange institution called the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School was a Communist front, having been founded by Myles Horton (Communist Party organizer for Tennessee) and Don West (Communist Party organizer for North Carolina). The leaders of this meeting with King were the aforementioned Horton and West, along with Abner Berry and James Dumbrowski, all open and acknowledged members of the Communist Party, USA. The agenda of the meeting was a plan to tour the Southern states to initiate demonstrations and riots.

From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King’s associate, advisor, and personal secretary was one Bayard Rustin. In 1936 Rustin joined the Young Communist League at New York City College. Convicted of draft-dodging, he went to prison for two years in 1944. On January 23, 1953 the “Los Angeles Times” reported his conviction and sentencing to jail for 60 days for lewd vagrancy and homosexual perversion. Rustin attended the 16th Convention of the Communist Party, USA in February, 1957. One month later, he and King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC for short. The president of the SCLC was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The vice-president of the SCLC was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also the president of an identified Communist front known as the Southern Conference Educational Fund, an organization whose field director, a Mr. Carl Braden, was simultaneously a national sponsor of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which you may have heard. The program director of the SCLC was the Reverend Andrew Young, in more recent years Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN and mayor of Atlanta. Young, by the way, was trained at the Highlander Folk School, previously mentioned.

Soon after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1958, Rustin organized the first of King’s famous marches on Washington. The official organ of the Communist Party, "The Worker,- - openly declared the march to be a Communist project. Although he left King’s employ as secretary in 1961, Rustin was called upon by King to be second in command of the much larger march on Washington which took place on August 28, 1963.

Bayard Rustin’s replacement in 1961 as secretary and advisor to King was Jack O’Dell, also known as Hunter Pitts O’Dell.
According to official records, in 1962 Jack O’Dell was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA. He had been listed as a Communist Party member as early as 1956. O’Dell was also given the job of acting executive director for SCLC activities for the entire Southeast, according to the St. Louis "Globe-Democrat - -of October 26, 1962. At that time, there were still some patriots in the press corps, and word of O’Dell’s party membership became known.

What did King do? Shortly after the negative news reports, King fired O’Dell with much fanfare. And he then, without the fanfare, "immediately hired him again- - as director of the New York office of the SCLC, as confirmed by the "Richmond News-Leader of September 27, 1963. In 1963 a Black man from Monroe, North Carolina named Robert Williams made a trip to Peking, China.

Exactly 20 days before King’s 1963 march on Washington, Williams successfully urged Mao Tse-Tung to speak out on behalf of King’s movement. Mr. Williams was also around this time maintaining his primary residence in Cuba, from which he made regular broadcasts to the southern US, three times a week, from high-power AM transmitters in Havana under the title “Radio Free Dixie.” In these broadcasts, he urged violent attacks by Blacks against White Americans.

During this period, Williams wrote a book entitled “Negroes With Guns.” The writer of the foreword for this book? None other than Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also interesting to note that the editors and publishers of this book were to a man all supporters of the infamous Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

According to King’s biographer and sympathizer David J. Garrow, “King privately described himself as a Marxist.” In his 1981 book, “The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.”, Garrow quotes King as saying in SCLC staff meetings, “…we have moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution… The whole structure of American life must be changed… We are engaged in the class struggle.”

Jewish Communist Stanley Levison can best be described as King’s behind-the-scenes “handler.” Levison, who had for years been in charge of the secret funnelling of Soviet funds to the Communist Party, USA, was King’s mentor and was actually the brains behind many of King’s more successful ploys. It was Levison who edited King’s book, “Stride Toward Freedom.” It was Levison who arranged for a publisher. Levison even prepared King’s income tax returns! It was Levison who really controlled the fund-raising and agitation activities of the SCLC. Levison wrote many of King’s speeches. King described Levison as one of his “closest friends.”
FBI: King Bought Sex With SCLC Money

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had for many years been aware of Stanley Levison’s Communist activities. It was Levison’s close association with King that brought about the initial FBI interest in King.

Lest you be tempted to believe the controlled media’s lie about “racists” in the FBI being out to “get” King, you should be aware that the man most responsible for the FBI’s probe of King was Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. Sullivan describes himself as a liberal, and says that initially “I was one hundred per cent for King…because I saw him as an effective and badly needed leader for the Black people in their desire for civil rights.” The probe of King not only confirmed their suspicions about King’s Communist beliefs and associations, but it also revealed King to be a despicable hypocrite, an immoral degenerate, and a worthless charlatan.

According to Assistant Director Sullivan, who had direct access to the surveillance files on King which are denied the American people, King had embezzled or misapplied substantial amounts of money contributed to the “civil rights” movement. King used SCLC funds to pay for liquor, and numerous prostitutes both Black and White, who were brought to his hotel rooms, often two at a time, for drunken sex parties which sometimes lasted for several days. These types of activities were the norm for King’s speaking and organizing tours.

In fact, an outfit called The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, which is putting on display the two bedrooms from the Lorraine Motel where King stayed the night before he was shot, has declined to depict in any way the "occupants - -of those rooms. That "according to exhibit designer Gerard Eisterhold "would be “close to blasphemy.” The reason? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent his last night on Earth having sex with two women at the motel and physically beating and abusing a third.

Sullivan also stated that King had alienated the affections of numerous married women. According to Sullivan, who in 30 years with the Bureau hadáseen everything there was to be seen of the seamy side of life, King was one of only seven people he had ever encountered who was such a total degenerate.

Noting the violence that almost invariably attended King’s supposedly “non-violent” marches, Sullivan’s probe revealed a very different King from the carefully crafted public image. King welcomed members of many different Black groups as members of his SCLC, many of them advocates and practitioners of violence. King’s only admonition on the subject was that they should embrace “tactical nonviolence.”

Sullivan also relates an incident in which King met in a financial conference with Communist Party representatives, not knowing that one of the participants was an infiltrator actually working for the FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover personally saw to it that documented information on King’s Communist connections was provided to the President and to Congress. And conclusive information from FBI files was also provided to major newspapers and news wire services. But were the American people informed of King’s real nature? No, for even in the 1960s, the fix was in"the controlled media and the bought politicians were bound and determined to push their racial mixing program on America. King was their man and nothing was going to get in their way. With a few minor exceptions, these facts have been kept from the American people. The pro-King propaganda machine grinds on, and it is even reported that a serious proposal has been made to add some of King’s writings as a new book in the Bible.

Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of this radio program is far greater than to prove to you the immorality and subversion of this man called King. I want you to start to think for yourselves. I want you to consider this: What are the forces and motivation behind the controlled media’s active promotion of King? What does it tell you about our politicians when you see them, almost without exception, falling all over themselves to honor King as a national hero? What does it tell you about our society when any public criticism of this moral leper and Communist functionary is considered grounds for dismissal? What does it tell you about the controlled media when you see how they have successfully suppressed the truth and held out a picture of King that can only be described as a colossal lie? You need to think, my fellow Americans. You desperately need to wake up.


BigStar303: You know it’s not a good sign when the very first assertion turns out to be incorrect.

This is just plain wrong. According to 5 USC SEC 6103, “President’s Day” is, in fact, stated as “Washington’s Birthday.” The more-generic “President’s Day” arose incorrectly through popular usage; there’s actually a few people actively campaigning to educate the public about this and go back to “Washington’s Birthday” as given in the law. (NPR had a story on these people just this past week.)

But don’t take my word for it; read the actual statute yourself.

I’ll leave it to others to dissect the rest of this rather unpleasant document, but given that its very first assertion turned out to be flat-out pure-D 100% USDA-certified wrong, I wouldn’t put much faith in the remaining claims.

Quoting from the rant that BigStar303 quotes from:

> Born in 1929, King was the son of a Black preacher known
> at the time only as “Daddy King.” “Daddy King” named his
> son Michael. In 1935, “Daddy King” had an inspiration to
> name himself after the Protestant reformer Martin Luther.
> He declared to his congregation that henceforth they were
> to refer to him as “Martin Luther King” and to his son
> as “Martin Luther King, Jr.” None of this name changing
> was ever legalized in court. “Daddy” King’s son’s real
> name is to this day Michael King.

And Gerald Ford was born Leslie King. And Bill Clinton was born William Blythe. And John Wayne was born Marion Morrison. So what?

Quoting further:

> The first public sermon that King ever gave, in 1947 at
> the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was plagiarized from a
> homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick
> entitled “Life is What You Make It,” according to the
> testimony of King’s best friend of that time, Reverend
> Larry H. Williams.

You’re expecting a sermon that he gave at 18 to be a masterpiece of original thought? Most sermons are pretty unoriginal. Frequently they quote without attribution.

More quotes:

> King’s doctoral dissertation, “A Comparison of the
> Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and
> Harry Nelson Wieman,” for which he was awarded a PhD in
> theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences
> plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack
> Boozer, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of
> God.” . . . Why, then, one might ask, did the professors
> at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University
> grant him passing grades and a PhD? Garrow states on page
> 89: "King’s academic compositions, especially at Boston
> University, were almost without exception little more
> than summary descriptions…and comparisons of other’s
> writings. . . But researcher Michael Hoffman tells us
> “…actually the malfeasance of the professors is not at
> all remarkable. King was politically correct, he was
> Black, and he had ambitions. The leftist [professors
> were] happy to award a doctorate to such a candidate no
> matter how much fraud was involved. . .”

Let me mention a few things this leaves out. King entered Morehouse at 15 and graduated at 19. He entered Crozier Seminary at 19 and graduated at 22 with the top grades in his class. He entered Boston University’s grad school at 22 and got his Ph.D. at 26. He did very well on his coursework throughout this period. Then he got to the point where he had to do his Ph.D. thesis, and it became clear that he wasn’t a very original thinker. O.K., who ever claimed that he was an original thinker? He was a brilliant rhetorician. He was a superb speaker both in the writing and the delivery. He was a effective leader in the civil rights movement. None of that requires large amounts of original thought, let alone academic research. The statement “Segregation is wrong” was hardly a new thought originated by King.

Did King’s professors know that he had plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis? Probably not. They knew at some level that he wasn’t a brilliant researcher or an original thinker. That’s probably why he didn’t look for and wasn’t offered teaching jobs in theology. Ph.D.'s in theology mostly go into two jobs. The ones with top-notch original theses teach theology. The rest mostly become ministers. Many churches with highly educated congregations insist on Ph.D.'s.

Most professors know that most Ph.D. theses aren’t extremely original. That’s why they insist on telling their Ph.D. candidates about the difference between plagiarism and research. Plagiarism is when you steal your ideas from one source instead of many. Plagiarism is when you leave those ideas in the original author’s words instead of carefully re-writing them. Plagiarism is when you don’t footnote the ideas you stole.

Although they try to look for such things, Ph.D. committees do occasionally miss plagiarism. I suspect that what happened in King’s case was that the committee gave the thesis a pretty cursory reading and accepted it. Saying that the professors were “politically correct” in 1955 is stretching that already ridiculous term beyond all previously known bounds. King knew what plagiarism was and he deserves to be criticized for it, but I don’t see what this has to do with his leadership of the civil rights movement.

The rant continues:

> Justice demands that, in light of his willful fraud as a
> student, the “reverend” and the “doctor” should be
> removed from King’s name.

Even if we accept that plagiarism should mean the loss of the Ph.D., what does this have to do with the term “reverend?”

Then there’s a lot of stuff about the fact that some of King’s supporters were communists, including this:

> From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King’s associate,
> advisor, and personal secretary was one Bayard Rustin. In
> 1936 Rustin joined the Young Communist League at New York
> City College. Convicted of draft-dodging, he went to
> prison for two years in 1944. On January 23, 1953
> the “Los Angeles Times” reported his conviction and
> sentencing to jail for 60 days for lewd vagrancy and
> homosexual perversion.

So is the point here that anyone who is homosexual is thereby so evil as not to be trusted in anything? Was Rustin actually a draft-dodger (i.e., one who by fraud avoids being drafted), or was he a pacifist whose application to be a conscientious objector was rejected?

In any case, so what if some of King’s supporters were communists? He needed all the help he could get. Was he supposed to alienate a significant part of his supporters by publicly denouncing communists?

Then the ranter gets on his high horse about the fact that King hired prostitutes. So is the point here that any leader has to be sexually perfectly pure? So let’s say that no one is allowed to be a leader unless they’ve never had sex with anyone except someone they were married to at the time. That leaves just me and . . . uh . . . (Yes, I am worried if King was using SCLC money for prostitutes and liquor. Is that part true?)

Then we’re informed that:

> J. Edgar Hoover personally saw to it that documented
> information on King’s Communist connections was provided
> to the President and to Congress. And conclusive
> information from FBI files was also provided to major
> newspapers and news wire services. But were the American
> people informed of King’s real nature?

It’s kind of strange that the writer is praising Hoover, since he was a closeted homosexual, and I thought the writer didn’t like homosexuals. But in any case, what Hoover was doing was not investigating and exposing Communists. He was blackmailing King. He didn’t publicly release documents about King’s sexual habits or his Communist associations. He privately provided them to news people and to King himself, thinking that he could get King to resign from his leadership this way. The newspapers refused to print any stories about King’s sexual escapades, just like they refused to print any stories about Hoover’s homosexuality.

Back to the beginning of the rant:

> Official Communist “historians” rewrote history to fit
> the current party line.

And the ranter is rewriting history to fit his party line.