Yes, there were Communists in the NAACP and SCLC. Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was very much influenced by the Frankfurt School. But that heroic struggle "to be judged by the content of the character," it really led to a fundamental change in the United States, which was fought for with blood and with dedication. Marin Luther King did give his life, he did go to the Mountaintop. He died for a cause which was very important.
00:27. What you must come to understand, and it's important that you get this, is that legitimization of the struggle in the minds of the public is exactly what communists during the Cold War we're trying to achieve when they produced martyrs. The idea being that if we draw a lot of attention to a given activist, draw attention to their demonstrations, their speeches to the extent that they are killed in the process, it suddenly legitimizes everything they ever said, every speech they ever gave. Their movements only become "noble" and "righteous" and at that point it becomes very difficult to dispute because someone died for it. Even Martin Luther King's friend, James Baldwin, who once was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, left the Communist Party much earlier on because he saw that the Communists were willing to kill their own people for the cause. Although he would chalk this up to the lie that it's only the American Communist who would do such a thing and he himself would remain sympathetic to communist aspirations until the day that he died.
I had been a communist, you know, when I was 19, and I learned a great deal about the American Communist Party. Most people lost their lives because the American communists were also after all Americans, you know, and you worked for them like you worked for everybody else, except that they were communists. You know, you're not supposed to say you worked for them."
King on the other hand remain dedicated to the cause. He would continue to take orders from well-connected communists and continue his subversive role. As an attendee of the Communist training institute, known as the Highlander Folk School, he learned what is known as non-violent direct action. He was warned that those who partook in it could suffer bodily injury or even death but that martyrdom was necessary to draw attention to the demands of the cause.
There is nothing in the non-violent discipline that says if you engage in non-violent activity you will not be the recipient of violence. You will not be the recipient of suffering even it doesn't say you won't be the recipient of death. Indeed, it says that you must be willing to die for something that you believe.
And by the way, there are numerous blacks today who are not professional victims, who work hard, who have good upright moral character, who get along fine with the United States of America in the same way that their grandparents and great grandparents got along fine in America on the basis of their merit, on the basis of their character, long before King ever told people about this dream that he has. They were doing this on a peer-to-peer basis and genuine progress was being made well before Martin Luther King. So I don't give any credit to Martin Luther King for people deciding to judge me by my character as opposed to my skin color.
