No, Martin Luther King Jr. Was Not A Republican

From Think Progress, courtesy of their facebook page:

"While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy."

More here.

Apparently, some Republicans are trying to put MLK into the same glass display chamber where they keep Reagan's body for patriotic viewing, as per the Soviets and Lenin's tomb.  While weird and shocking to consider in this day and age, you can kind of sense the argument, if you try to contextualize it historically.  King was from the South, where racist white Democrats had ruled since the end of Reconstruction, and even though the Democratic Party was moving in a civil rights direction nationally, it was still the party of Jim Crow South of the Mason Dixon Line.  And a Republican president did, after all, free the slaves a century earlier.  So, you know, maybe.

But no.  King was not a Republican.  No f'ing way.  Lots of Republicans in those days were totally against integration, a view strongly articulated by conservative intellectual guru William F. Buckley in the pages of his right-wing journal the National Review--actually, this position is alive and well in the GOP right now, as embodied by Rand Paul and others who would leave it up to business owners as to whether they should hire or serve people of color, you know, for "freedom" or some such.  And Republicans then, as now, only offer pro-business "solutions" to poverty issues, which is to say, no solutions at all.

This is, of course, not to say that King was a Democrat, either.  Like I said, at that point in history, LOTS of Democrats were as racist as all get out.  And, even though the party was, indeed, moving slowly toward the embrace of civil rights and equality, many had to be dragged, kicking and screaming--indeed, Howard Zinn has told us that President Kennedy initially opposed the March on Washington, and only embraced it once he realized there was no way to stop it.  So while the Democratic Party was, to some extent, better than the Republican Party on civil rights, they weren't all that, not by a long shot.

Instead, King hungered for justice.  He called out the white power structure, which included people from both parties.  That is, political partisanship is one thing, but right and wrong is quite another.  

And the man who was introduced at the March fifty years ago as "the moral leader of our nation" understood this in the middle of the twentieth century better than most Americans understand it today.

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