Lipton Matthews Interviews Beau Albrecht about MLK

Saint MLK

1,770 words

Beau Albrecht has been an online commentator since 2016. He began contributing to Counter-Currents in 2020, and recently published his hundredth article there. He lives in part of America’s “Flyover Country” well known for hot, dry summers and scenic topography.

Who was Martin Luther King?

The late Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., formerly known as Mike King before his rise to nationwide fame, began his career as a politically involved Protestant minister in Montgomery, Alabama. In a few years, he became the most prominent figure in black advocacy (better known as the civil rights movement), and he retains this distinction to the present day.

His death in 1968 transformed him into a martyr figure. Although a significant fraction of the public then considered him to be a demagogue, the passage of time has been kind to him, and today he’s positively remembered. However, there’s a significant difference between the real MLK and the nearly-deified legendary figure he’s been presented as for a long time. One almost could speak of a posthumous cult of personality that grew up around his image.

Would you describe him as a conservative?

MLK was concerned foremost with civil rights, in which he took the Leftist position of that era. Later on, he endorsed the far Left line during the Vietnam War. (Recall that JFK and LBJ, two center-Left presidents, had escalated the war.) He was under Marxist tutelage by then, which informed his stated views. He had far less to say on other political matters, though generally followed the Leftist position when he did so.

Despite that, he has many conservative admirers who find certain universalist sound bites of his to be appealing, just as liberals do. One of these is that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It’s a fine sentiment indeed, though invoking it cannot obscure basic incompatibilities. Neither can such pieties prevent the friction that inevitably arises with multiracialism. The “I have a dream” speech also resonates well for conservatives. However, the promised land of universal brotherhood and goodwill is further away now than it was 50 years ago. It was a nice-sounding speech, but MLK wasn’t as universalist as his conservative admirers suppose. It therefore makes for a sour note when they invoke the spirit of his message.

Specifically, it gets conservatives exactly nowhere to argue against anti-white racial preference policies by saying they contradict MLK’s teachings. Other than that, universalism is a Leftist concept, and not even Leftists are really that serious about it in practice. Browbeating Leftists into being better universalists doesn’t work. For conservatives to use the premises and language of their opponents is like fighting a battle on terrain chosen by the enemy. Universalism is an ideological dead end for Rightists. Nationalism is the way forward. We’re not going to get anywhere without admitting that multiracialism doesn’t work no matter how much goodwill anyone brings to the table.

Did King help to foment riots in the 1960s?

It was observed that for someone billed as a man of peace, it’s strange that violence so often followed in his wake. Provocation was a common tactic which often brought trouble. A brief FBI report of 20 pages released a few years ago, indicates the following plans, which we may take as indicative of the usual sort of method:

To add to the dramatic confrontation, King has boasted that he and his entourage are coming to Washington to stay; that his followers will conduct sit-ins, camp-ins, and sleep-ins at every Government facility available including the lawn of the White House. He has bragged that he will fill up the jails of Washington and surrounding towns.

The pattern was for the audience to behave outrageously until the local police finally reacted to the provocation, and then MLK could fulminate about “oppression” from his pulpit while other people were cooling their heels behind bars. The following is an excerpt from a commentator at Counter-Currents who had witnessed this sort of thing:

“Non-violence” was the most noxious of their tactics. It consisted of performing some type of mass loitering or similar public obstruction stunt, and then getting arrested and dragged into Paddy wagons. . . .  But the few non-duped saw that “non-violence” was really the masked THREAT of violence — masked by one open hand extended, and the other hidden hand holding a weapon. Hand it over or we will kill you.

Further evidence is in the true story of the march on Selma, Alabama. The present narrative, spun from a highly sanitized account thanks to the mainstream media executives of the time, depicts it as practically a holy crusade. Meanwhile, observers on the ground (including newspaper reporters, before the editors changed up their dispatches) described unending displays of highly provocative behavior, such as troublemaking, drunkenness, and public lewdness.

Was he a  Communist sympathizer?

There is overwhelming evidence that MLK had Communist sympathies, although he likely didn’t delve too deeply into the theory of it. In fact, we have pretty much everything demonstrating his views short of a public proclamation by him while waving a party card. Much of this evidence was documented by the office of Senator Jesse Helms, and compiled by his eminent staffer Sam Francis. Counter-Currents has a copy of this document published in two parts.

Playing a pivotal role, there were several prominent figures in MLK’s entourage who had Marxist ties. The above-referenced FBI report names eight founding fathers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with Communist affiliations:

• Stanley David Levison — “Assistant Chief”
• Clarence Jones — Advisory Committee
• Harry Wachtel — Advisory Committee
• Cordy T. Vivian — Director of Affiliates
• Randolph Blackwell — Program Coordinator
• Hunter Pitts O’Dell — Administrative Assistant
• Lawrence Reddick — Advisory Committee
• Bayard Rustin — Advisory Committee

Among this mini-Politburo, Stanley Levison was the most important. In earlier times, he had been entrusted with laundering large amounts of money from the Soviet Union into the Communist Party USA. Then the civil rights movement gave him another way to advance his cause.

After the New Yorker took interest in the Montgomery clergyman, soon MLK became the public face of the civil rights movement across the country. After that Comrade Levison was his top advisor, handled the taxes, provided ghostwriting services, assisted with securing large monetary grants, and so forth. His organizing skills really got things into the fast lane, and I suspect that Comrade Levison had plenty of interesting connections, too. As I wrote earlier about the FBI findings, “again and again, the document recounts MLK’s top consigliere telling him what to say, guiding his moves, suggesting initiatives to promote, and even deciding when it was time to put the peace issue on the back burner. By the end of all this, MLK comes across looking like a marionette operated by some clever ventriloquists.”

Was King truly a man of character?

For someone who has been regarded as a moral giant, an exemplar of universalist ethics, and a secular saint, and who has been lauded as the Drum Major of social justice — whose image can even be found on Santeria-style prayer candles — there exists quite a remarkable gulf between the actual man and the legend.

Chronologically, the first act indicating something wrong was the plagiarism problem with MLK’s doctoral dissertation. Although it’s not the crime of the century, academic dishonesty is a bad sign, and there were worse things to come. There are those who dismiss it by saying it was a tradition for black preachers to riff on each other’s messages. Even so, someone who makes it all the way to graduate school knows what the rules of scholarship are. Nothing was done about the cheating after it was discovered, though it would take far less literary theft to revoke the doctorate degree of any mere mortal.

Other than that, the FBI report notes financial irregularities. Lots of foundation money that had been donated to advance sociopolitical goals was spent by MLK and his entourage on booze and prostitutes. Granted, it hardly breaks my heart to read about someone partying away large donations from globalist moneybags establishments. Still, as fun as drunken debauchery is, embezzling money is dishonest. More seriously, one rather obviously might expect better behavior from a reverend.

This brings us to related problems with MLK’s character: his immorality and violence against women. There’s quite a lot that could be recapped, of course. All told, some high-ranking FBI figures expressed exceptional moral indignation about him, men who surely had become accustomed to the unsavory side of human nature during their careers. As the report says while drawing to a close: “Throughout the ensuing years and until this date King has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.”

Since his stock-in-trade was shaming America for not living up to its own high standards, this phony preacher was standing on shaky ground.

Is King deserving of national adulation?

It’s beneficial for there to be unifying figures who everyone in the country can look up to as heroes, but MLK just doesn’t fit the bill. As much as people want to believe the nice myth surrounding him, the reality is far different. It doesn’t do anyone favors to pretend otherwise.

For blacks searching for revered figures to admire, there are several better choices. Jesse Jackson has his foibles, but is overall far better. Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey were some very upstanding men who did a lot of good for their people. Although Malcolm X’s militancy is troublesome, he has his moments, and I’ll certainly credit him for honesty.

Do you think that the FBI’s remaining files on King will be unsealed in 2027?

It’s scheduled to be released then. Even so, there might be an administrative measure or a court maneuver to keep it buried. There already was such a lawfare effort which led to it being placed under lock and key for 50 years. That was a compromise by the judge; the initial demand had been to destroy the files altogether. Therefore, when the time is up, it’s entirely possible that another attempt might be made to throw the evidence down the Orwellian memory hole. If history does get censored like that, then it would be practically an admission that the MLK archive is full of highly damaging material. The only reason to cover it up would be if the revelations are so severe that public knowledge of them would tend to delegitimize the globalist/Leftist moral order, discredit its ethnic hierarchy, or otherwise threaten the interests of the present powers-that-be.

This article originally appeared at Council of European Canadians.

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