Thursday, July 16, 2009
Black Conservative Group Claims Martin Luther King Jr. Was Republican.www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/king-a-republican-at-91927.html
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/king-a-republican-at-91927.html A little know fact, which I know yet most other people don't, is that MLK Jr. was actually a democratic socialist. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=871 I do not know why these african-american Republicans wish to claim him as one of there own. I do know know that black people in the southern states were typicly not allowed to vote in the Democratic primaries, and so they were only able to vote in the Republican ones. So if King ever were to have voted in a party primary, he would have most likely have been a registered Republican. A liberal one none the less. And also the Republican party of yesteryear was quite different from today's GOP. For instance the Fourierian socialist Horace Greeley was a member of the Republican party. But while MLK was not entirely open about his socio-economic views, for obvious reasons, he was not by any means a conservative.
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You have the party registration thing backwards. Before the 60s, Blacks were overwhelmingly Republican and Democrats were overwhelmingly racist and/or supportive of segregation/jim crow/slavery. In the south, Republicans had no chance of winning - none. The real election was the Democratic primary... so southern democrats made it so only party members could vote in the primary, to keep blacks from having a real vote. That's when southern blacks started to register as Democrats, just so they could try to swing the primaries towards the Republicans-in-Dem-clothing (pro or semi-pro civil rights candidates).
If you take the rare and cryptic comments on economics as most important, King may have been a socialist-lite.
If you're talking about American party politics and King's single issue status (civil rights), King was a republican, as were all his political allies until *some* dems started having the guts to abandon their party's old platform support his cause.
But happy MLK day, and I hope we can remember him less for his frustration with so-called capitalism (in most ways it was anything but) and more for the struggle and the words that speak to the hearts of a history of Republicans, the typical modern Republican, and a plethora of modern Democrats. All lovers of liberty and equality surely can espouse the treatment of others not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Didn't I post that most blacks in the south were registered as Republicans? Also I will add that back in those days the two parties were not tied down to there respective political bases. There were liberal Repunlicans, like Pres. Eisenhower, who forcibly integrated public schools, and conservative Democrats like George Wallace. Party identification is funamentally just a label. I wonder what is the supposed difference between a socialist lite, and a regular socialist. Whether or not he was influenced by marxism, he was still a commited socialist, with a lower case s. And finally the modern "Rockefeller Republican" is a practicly extinct being. Plus, for what it's worth, many of the old Dixiecrats are now Republicans.
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