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Martin Luther King, Jr. made a fantastic statement in his “I Have a Dream” speech when he said that a person should be judged by his character not the color of his skin. Without any reservation I agree with that observation and will do just that as I take a look at King without any prejudice. I wonder if radical leftists, King worshipers, white liberals, black non-thinkers, media moguls, Joe Six-Pac, and others will do the same? Look at the King facts as you try to control your emotions.

I do not seek to defend bigotry, hatred, or unkindness toward Blacks or anyone else. Blacks were mistreated in bygone days and for that there is no defense. Slavery can not be justified; however, for the record, many slave owners were kind and thoughtful albeit wrong in holding other humans in bondage. And for the record, it must be stated that African black chiefs commonly sold their own people into slavery.

I do not seek to defend bigotry, hatred, or unkindness toward Blacks or anyone else. Blacks were mistreated in bygone days and for that there is no defense.

A hundred years ago Blacks were mistreated, lynched, and exploited. Their schools, streets, etc., were almost always inferior and even inadequate. It was common for elderly black men to be called “boy” and never “mister.” Blacks were almost always the first in the fields and the last to the table. While it embarrasses me that white Americans would treat Blacks in such a manner I don’t have any guilt, none, since I was not guilty of any mistreatment.

I can honestly say, and my life proves it, that I don’t care what a person’s color is. I look at his character. If a Black is a bum, he is a bum. If a White is a bum, he is a bum. Bums come in all complexions. I have dear friends who are black and who are always welcome in my home, but I don’t feel a need to “use” Blacks as a merit badge as many liberals do. So as I look at Martin Luther King, Jr., his color means nothing to me. It should mean nothing to you also. If a white man were guilty of the things King was guilty of, you would be disgusted and repulsed, but many of you will give King a pass. You must deal with that for it is actually dishonesty.

If a white man were guilty of the things King was guilty of, you would be disgusted and repulsed, but many of you will give King a pass.

I will look at the whole man and the circumstances that made him what he was: The Person, the Preacher, the Politician, the Party, the Plagiarist, the Prevaricator, the Philanderer, and the Proposal. To be fair, balanced, and accurate we must look at every facet of his life. Some will object, questioning my motives, but do my motives really matter? What is the truth?

The Person

Leftist author and Roman Catholic priest, Richard John Neuhaus said of King: “Dr. King was, for all that was great about him, an adulterer, sexual libertine, lecher, and wanton womanizer.” My research also revealed that King was a drunk, plagiarist, thief, and Marxist. Try to remember that we are not concerned with his race or complexion, but his character.

If I were looking at David Duke and did not deal with his past involvement with the Nazi movement, I would be accused of bias or poor research. In considering the man, it would be dishonest to not consider Duke’s connection with the radical right. In the interest of truth am I not required to do the same with King? If not, then why is he exempt from a careful, honest look at his past to make a decision about him in the present? If I am wrong, please correct me.

No person deserves to be called a journalist if he refuses to look at both sides of an issue or if he/she refuses to give proper weight to all arguments because of personal prejudice. If a writer is fearful of where the truth will lead him, he should be selling insurance. The future of a free press and a free nation depends on honesty in the press and pulpit.

Why is there very little honest, calm discussion in the King controversy? During the eight years I wrote columns for USA Today, the editor would not permit me to do a column on King although every year in early January, they always did a page honoring King. The January 17, 1986 issue has five columns on King without one critical word about him! Not one word on the whole page! That is a disgrace to all honest journalists everywhere.

Today we will look at the truth, the whole true, and nothing but the truth. Can you take it? Remember that character is what we are discussing, not race or religion.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, and was named “Michael.” He was known as “Little Mike” since his father was also named “Mike,” and was also known as “Daddy.” King was called “Mike” by some people even into the late 1950s. Daddy King toured Israel in 1934 and upon his return announced to his church that from then on he would be called Martin Luther King and “Little Mike” would be Martin Luther King, Jr. King, Sr. did that because of his appreciation for the life and work of Martin Luther, Protestant Reformer of Germany. Although their names were never legally changed, both father and son were known by their new names until their deaths.

At age 15 King entered Morehouse College, a black college in Atlanta and graduated with a B.A. in 1948. After undergraduate work at Morehouse, he entered the very liberal Crozer Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania where he received his B.D. in 1951. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. from Boston University. More about that later.

King was about average intelligence although he scored below average on his Graduate Record Exam in English and vocabulary. On his advanced philosophy test, he ended up in the bottom 33 percent, while in quantitative analysis he ended up in the lowest 10 percent.

The Preacher

King formally entered the ministry and was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in February 1948 at the age of nineteen. His father was pastor. Following his ordination, he became Assistant Pastor of Ebenezer. Upon completion of his studies at Boston University, he accepted the call from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He served as pastor of Dexter Avenue from September 1954 to November 1959, when he resigned to move to Atlanta to direct the activities of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1960 until his death in 1968, he was co-pastor with his father as Ebenezer Baptist Church and President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

We can know much about a person if we study what he has written, and I have spend days reading King. His seminary papers are very revealing as to what he believed and what his motives were.

In a paper by King written at Crozer on the "Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East" I discovered 8 spelling, punctuation, and composition mistakes in 9 consecutive lines! Plus the theological error that Scripture was subpoenaed to “appear before the judgement [sic] seat of reason.” He continued: “They realized that if they wanted to get an objective standard of reference they would they would [sic] have to go beyond the pages of the old [sic] testament [sic] into the path that lead [sic] to that locked door.” King was favoring the position that the Old Testament is not a reliable historical record. He also decided that the Genesis accounts of man’s creation and the Flood were not original. King concluded that the writer (or writers) of Genesis took (plagiarized?) information from the Gilgamesh Epic. King was like all unbelievers who jump at the opportunity to denounce, deny, and denigrate the Word of God and praise pagan literature.

King concludes his paper dealing with archeology and the Old Testament: “If we accept the Old Testament as being ‘true’ we will find it full of errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities–as that the Pentateuch was written by Moses.” No, the “contradictions” were in King’s life, not in the Scripture.

In plowing through King’s writings I found that he was very careless. He often started a sentence with the first two letters in caps, he repeated words, and he left the suffix or “s” off words. Misspellings are numerous! He evidently did not know the difference in “led” and “lead” since he made that mistake many times. He also did not know that there is no word “undermind” confusing it with undermine. The work is not the quality of a seminary student but maybe an average high school graduate!

In a later paper titled "What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection," King let the kitty out of the sack as to his heresy. Note the title alone is incriminating. The doctrines of Christ did not come about because of “experiences” of the early Christians! They came about because the Holy Spirit moved upon men to write about eternal truths.

King declared, “But if we delve into the deeper meaning of these doctrines, [Christ’s deity, virgin birth, and physical resurrection] and somehow strip them of their literal interpretation, we will find that they are based on a profound foundation. Although we may be able to argue with all degrees of logic that these doctrines are historically and philolophically [sic] untenable.” “Untenable” means something that can not be defended or maintained. He added, “Saint Paul and the early church followers could have never come to the conclusion that Jesus was divine if there had not been some uniqueness in the personality of the historical Jesus.” So the early Christians had no other reason to believe He was deity? What about his miraculous birth? What about walking on water? What about raising the dead? What about giving sight to the blind? What about rising from the dead? What about Christ’s declaration: “I and my Father are one.” No, no reason at all!

In another paper King wrote that “the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.”

He clearly asserted that the book of Jeremiah was not infallible. He also espoused the heretical view that the non-canonical books were as good as or better than the Old Testament books! “To my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. These works, although presented pseudonymously, are of lasting significance to the Biblical student.”

Regarding the virgin birth King wrote: “it seems downright improbable and even impossible for anyone to be born without a human father.” Of course, it is improbable but improbable does not mean impossible, especially with God! King wrote: “First we must admit that the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is to [sic] shallow to convince any objective thinker….To begin with, the earliest written documents in the New Testament make no mention of the virgin birth.” Well, we could go way back to Isaiah 7:14 where Isaiah promised that “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and [you] shall call his name Immanuel.” Yes, the translation could be “maid, damsel, or virgin” but Matthew 1:23 settled the matter when he wrote: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child…and they shall call his name Immanuel…” The clear truth in Matthew confirms the translation in Isaiah! So that settles that!

But not for King. He makes much of Mark’s Gospel not dealing with the virgin birth but a seminarian surely understands that the argument from silence is a very weak argument. No one says that all four gospels deal with the very same incidents or deals with them from the same perspective.

King takes a scalpel and seeks to excise the core doctrine of His resurrection from the Bible and from history: “From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting.” No, it is King who is found wanting after being weighted in the balances. Of course, King was aware that all four Gospels clearly teach the physical resurrection of Christ as do many of the epistles, but that is not good enough for King: the resurrection of our Savior is “found wanting.”

In a paper at Crozer titled “"The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus," his professor rebuked him suggesting that it would be good if he proofread his papers before turning them in! He was given a B+ by his professor. In this paper he misspelled “Samaria,” “learned,” “agonizing,” “omniscient,” “omniscience,” “reliance,” “orbit,” “warmest,” “intimacy,” “inadequate," and others. I would have given him an F or maybe a D if he rewrote the paper.

Returning to the divinity of Christ, King concluded: “So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied. The true significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory for every other true son of man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit og [sic] God. Christ was to be only the prototype of one among many brothers.” So all men have the potential of being divine! King was not a believer!

In a paper titled “The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically” King wrote: “The fundamentalist is quite aware of the fact that scholars regard the garden [sic] of Eden and the serpent Satan and the hell of fire as myths analogous to those found in other oriental religions. He knows also that his beliefs are the center of redicule [sic] by many.” He closes his paper with: “Others [sic] doctrines such as a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of the atonement, and the second coming of Christ are all quite prominant [sic] in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalist and they reveal that he is oppose [sic] to theological adaptation to social and cultural change. He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age. Amid change all around he is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are contrary to science.” He is saying, “You are a dummy if you believe the Bible to be the very Word of God.”

As to the atonement of Christ, he wrote, “First we may say that any doctrine which finds the meaning of atonement in the truimph [sic] of Christ over such cosmic powers as sin, death, and Satan is inadequate.” He added that to transfer guilt and punishment to another is “bizarre.” He goes on: “Moreover, no person can morally be punished in place of another. Such ideas as ethical and penal substitution become immoral….In the next place, if Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin, there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness. The debt is paid; the penalty is exacted, and there is, consequently, nothing to forgive.”

As to the Second Coming of Christ, Day of Judgment and resurrection of the body King wrote that these teachings taken literally “are quite absurd....It is obvious that most twentieth century Christians must frankly and flatly reject any view of a physical return of Christ.” Throughout his writings King scorns Bible-believing Christians and praises unbelieving liberals, but that is not surprising since he did that all his life.

A Black preacher encapsulated King’s theology and philosophy better than anyone: “It is as though Socrates, Thoreau, Hegel, and Jesus were all dumped together into one philosophical bowl like tossed salad.” Then I suppose Gandhi was added for flavor! When King received the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest man to ever receive it, he said: “I am a minister of the Gospel.” He was an ordained minister but not of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! He preached “another gospel.” And I cringe to hear him called, “a Baptist.”

The Politician

After assuming the leadership of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, King shot to fame because of a local incident involving the local bus system. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress refused to surrender her seat to a white person and was arrested on December 1, 1955. No one knows what motivated Rosa to refuse to surrender her seat, and she said that she had “no plot or plan.” Who knows? But we do know that she was an officer in the local chapter of the NAACP and was trained at the Communist Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and is in the famous photo along with King. Furthermore we know that she and King corresponded four months before the boycott. Sounds like collusion to me. How about conspiracy?

King came to Rosa Parks’ support and on December 5, he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. King was now the official spokesman for a civil rights organization. Preaching would henceforth be relegated to the background. Of course, he always intended it to be. Social action was his game from the beginning.

In the South in those days a Black had to give up his or her seat to any white person whatever the ages involved. In many southern cities Blacks had to sit in the rear of the bus reserving the front for whites. Of course, that was indefensible and many white Christians of that era must accept some of the blame for permitting that to continue without protest. As a white person I don’t accept any guilt but I am embarrassed that white Christians did not come to the defense of mistreated Blacks.

The bus-seating issue turned into a bus boycott that lasted 382 days, and during those days, King was arrested, threatened, and his home was bombed, and out of it all King emerged as the foremost black leader. Of course, no sane person will try to justify the bombing of his home.

In November of 1956, the U.S. Supreme ruled that bus segregation was illegal and the young black pastor from Montgomery was a national hero. King discovered that there were more advantageous in the civil rights movement than in pastoring a small church in Alabama. Being a civil rights leader meant more glamour, gold, and gals.

In 1957 King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to fight segregation and achieve civil rights for Blacks, and on May 17, Dr. King spoke to a crowd of 15,000 in Washington, D.C. This young Black was on the move. He found that the pay was better, the perks were greater and the prestige was incredible. The following year he even met with President Eisenhower, and Congress passed the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction!

Because of King and other black agitators, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed whereby private businessmen were forbidden by Federal law to make personal choices. While it was good that Blacks (and others) would no longer be discriminated against, it was and is tragic that Congress did not have the intelligence or moral courage to delineate between the good and bad parts of the law. An American businessman (white or black) should have the right to make stupid, financially unwise decisions if he wants because as an American he has a right to fail as well as to be stupid.

At the same time train and bus stations and other public buildings had separate rest rooms for “Whites” and “Colored.” Again, that is indefensible. There should have been no separate facilities for Whites and Blacks in any publicly owned building because Black taxes built and supported those buildings. However wrong that was, it is also indefensible for government to tell a private business man he had to serve Blacks (or Whites). That is government taking authority it does not have. Government has the power but not the authority to do so. In other words, an American (of any race) has a right to not like people of other races. In fact, he has a legal right to hate as long as he does not harm another person. Of course, no Christian has that right since he is to be governed by Biblical standards. I am saying that property rights are more important than a person’s right to get a hair cut or purchase a ham sandwich.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey promised us that the Civil Rights Act would not result in quotas–affirmative action. If so, he promised to eat the 800 pages of the Act. Too bad he is not alive today to carry out his promise!

So I will shock many Conservatives and say that Rosa Parks was right when she refused to give up her seat to a white person! When she was arrested, King came to her defense, and I applaud him and her (although I believe he “used” her). In May of 1956 the buses of Montgomery were integrated. No longer would a Black be forced to surrender his seat to a White. But the young pastor was not satisfied with his (their) victory. He demanded “employment of Negro bus drivers for predominantly Negro routes.” That meant white drivers in black areas would be replaced by Blacks. King had tasted success and liked it. It didn’t matter about white drivers’ contracts, seniority, their ability, their families, etc. Replace them with Blacks or else!

The chickens had come home to roost. Many white officials (and others) had mistreated so many Blacks for so many years, but that had come to an end. And now, white citizens would have to pay for the many years of mistreatment of Blacks. Many Blacks and Whites think that is a noble concept.

Where it is possible to prove that a Black has been treated unfairly by any government entity, i.e., city, county, or federal then that Black should be compensated. If a man were refused promotion in the military because he was black, then he deserves to be compensated for the unfair treatment. However, for many reasons I do not believe in a general compensation plan or reparations.

In 1959 King resigned from the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist and moved to Atlanta to direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the following year King became co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

On June 23, 1963, King led 125,000 people on a Freedom Walk in Detroit, and the March on Washington held August 28 was the largest civil rights demonstration in history with almost 250,000 people in attendance. It was during that march that King made his famous I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

On a Los Angeles television show, July 21, 1963, four Blacks, including a King representative made their positions clear as to what they wanted from “whitey.” The show was The American Experience and aired on KTTV in Los Angeles and many other cities. The black participants were Wyatt Walker (representing King), Allen Morrison who was editor of Ebony magazine; Malcolm X, minister of the Nation of Islam; and James Farmer, top honcho of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Malcolm X almost blew all the television tubes at the station when he demanded the white power-structure give Blacks a separate nation far from all whites. In that new nation would be the homes, businesses, utilities, etc., that any nation would require. The other Blacks only demanded complete integration and “compensatory preference” by force if necessary. The startled television audience was told that “mere equality” was not enough but “massive preferential treatment” was required. Black workers were to be paid more than white workers for doing the same job, and Whites were to be fired and Blacks, even less qualified Blacks, would replace them even if employers had to pay for their transportation to the jobs. There were not-so-subtle suggestions that revolution in America would result if these demands were not met.

The year 1964 started great for King because he was chosen Time’s “Man of the Year” and his photo was on the magazine’s cover on January 3. Then in July he attended the White House signing by President Lyndon Johnson of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In December he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person to ever receive that award. When he received notice of the award he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. However, that meant nothing since he was the titular head of the “civil rights movement.” It is further enlightening of his character (or lack thereof) to note that when he went to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize, he was caught drunk, running naked down a hotel hallway trying to catch a woman.

Blacks were getting restless as Malcolm X criticized King’s nonviolent movement and he picked up many followers with his self-defense and Black Nationalism message. At the same time Stokely Carmichael was gaining black adherents daily with his “black power” message. Blacks often derisively referred to King as “Da Lawd.”

George S. Schuyler writing in the Savannah Morning News caught the mood of many thinking people in relation to King and his posse of political parsons: “Ever since the long and futile Montgomery bus boycott (settled not by marching but by federal court order), the peripatetic Dr. Martin Luther King and his pose of political parsons in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) have roamed the country collecting coin and infecting the mentally retarded with the germs of civil disobedience, camouflaged as non-violence and love of white people.

“Phony prayers for the salvation of white ‘oppressors’ and chanting slave songs fooled nobody except possibly the Utopians and wishful thinkers. Only the unwary and True Believers thought this program was anything but pixilated [slightly crazy!]” The late Schuyler was one of my favorite writers, and I forgot to mention that he was black!

Many ordinary Americans, black and white, were getting weary of the protest marches, confrontations, finger-pointing, and whining from black leaders who always had excuses for black failures and those excuses also were the fault of whites. King’s motives were being questioned by many, Blacks and Whites including Democratic Chicago Mayor Daley. He said of the Chicago riot of July 1966 that King’s associates were there “for no other reason than to bring disorder to the streets of Chicago.”

King really revealed his motives in an interview with the Baltimore Sun: “In an interview…Dr. King acknowledged that his ‘end-slums campaign in Chicago is an implementation for the concept of black power,’ but under a more palatable name.

“Dr. King acknowledged that his presence in Chicago, the street rallies, sit-ins, marches…have more far reaching aims than the immediate dramatization of problems of impoverished Negroes…

“Dr. King…spoke at the headquarters of the West Side Organization, where a sign on the wall said: ‘Burn, baby, burn, boycott, baby, boycott.’ Roving bands of youths and some adults …broke windows, looted stores, and stoned police cars and small police vans.”

Many observant Americans thought that violence was an integral byproduct of the much vaunted civil rights marches, and some black leaders requested, while others demanded, that King and his aides stay out of their cities. Rev. Henry Mitchell who represented 50,000 Blacks and a group of West Side black ministers in Chicago told King to “get the hell out of here.” He and the other black preachers said that King “brought hate” to their city and suggested that if King wanted to march he should march with rakes, brooms, and grass seed! In other words do some non-glamorous and not headline producing WORK on the West Side.

One more example of King alienating black leaders: J. H. Jackson was president of the National Baptist Convention and said that King was causing problems all over America. Jackson said that King was responsible for “designing the tactics that led to a fatal riot” and the death of Rev. A. O. Wright in Detroit.

King was gaining power with white Washington liberals with every year and after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965, King changed his focus to a Poor People’s Campaign. In 1967 he announced that his new campaign was to guarantee poor people jobs and freedom. The following year King announced that his poor campaign would culminate in a March on Washington, D.C., and he demanded a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights. That would guarantee an end to housing discrimination, jobs to all able-bodied people and a guaranteed income to those unable to work! Only when pigs grow wings and learn to fly!

Yes, the black preacher had come a long way. He could now dictate to the President of the United States and the U.S. Congress!

On March 28, 1968, King led a march for sanitation workers that turned violent, and he delivered his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech but on April 4, King was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. His death resulted in riots in over 130 American cities with 39 deaths and 20,000 arrests. Within a week of the assassination, the Open Housing Act was passed by an intimidated Congress.

Jesse Jackson appeared on the April 5, 1968 edition of the Today Show and told the world that he had been with King when he was shot and cradled his head in his arms and “was the last person on earth” to whom King had spoken. For the show, he wore a blood-stained olive-brown turtle-neck sweater which Jackson identified containing King’s blood.

However, that was not the truth since eyewitnesses report that Jackson was nowhere near King when shots rang out, but was down in the courtyard while King was on the balcony. It is also not true that King died in his arms. It was Ralph Abernathy who cradled King and stayed with him until he died. No, Jackson was not the first person to cradle King's body, but he was the first person to talk to the television cameras as he presented himself as the anointed heir to King.

King was an apostle of non-violence yet seemed to generate violence most of his adult life which ended in his tragic death at the hands of a twisted degenerate by the name of James Earl Ray.

(You have just read about a third of the MLK report. To order the full report, including full documentation, send $5.00 to P.O. Box 944, Ringgold, GA 30736. Includes my conversation with the President of a major fundamental Baptist University as to why they honor King’s birthday! Also includes my correspondence with the editor of one of the major Christian newspapers as to their very soft, positive review of a King book. Proof from King’s own writings that he was not a Christian! And much, much more!)

Tags: blacks, martin luther king jr, mlk, racial problems