Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy Transcends Political Labels

What's in the water these days?

Along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt at pop-anthropology by juxtaposing bloodlines and cultural behavior of Latinos and Virginia Senator George Allen's use or misuse of racial slurs, there is a recent political advertisement suggesting that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican and that the Ku Klux Klan was created by Democrats.

Since there is no need to debate the origin of the Klan, the real news here would be that Martin Luther King was a Republican. Say it ain't so! However, the National Black Republican Association, a group running the controversial radio advertisement, stands by its claim.

Taylor Branch, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the King years may very well be the exhaustive research conducted on the civil rights leader, maintains King was nonpartisan.

Personally, I could go along with Branch were it not for my own curiosity about the matter while in seminary. I contacted the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University inquiring about King's political affiliation.

What prompted my curiosity was my knowledge that King's father was indeed a Republican and in all likelihood would have endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1960 were it not for the John Kennedy campaign's support of King after his arrest in Georgia.

JFK took a political risk, which could have lost all of the Southern states, by calling King's wife, Coretta, directly. Nixon made no such overture. If the elder King had been a Republican, it would stand to reason that his son would do likewise.

It is not out of the question King registered as a Republican. But, according to the King Research Institute at Stanford, no such record exists.

The claim, while overly simplistic, may bear some truth. If so, does this mean that Branch is wrong? It is possible that both sides are right in their assessment -- assuming that one allows for certain caveats.

If we accept that King was a Republican, is the advertisement suggesting that King would be in lock step with today's Republicanism? If history is any indicator, King's courageous stand in opposition to the war in Vietnam makes it difficult for me to believe he would endorse any party beholden to the doctrine of pre-emption and subsequent occupation of a sovereign nation.

Somehow I just don't see King echoing the president's "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" statement during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

What is tragic about the advertisement is the questionable accuracy about King's political affiliation is at the cost of the King legacy. Martin Luther King never endorsed anyone for president; he was committed to challenging injustice.

The closest King came to an endorsement was his lack of such for 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater, as a senator, failed to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ironically, Lyndon Johnson, who unquestionably did more to aid the civil rights cause than anyone who occupied the White House, perhaps received some of King's harshest criticism in opposing the war in Vietnam.

While King may or may not have been a Republican on paper, Branch is ultimately correct that King was nonpartisan in word and deed. King was driven by a moral conscience that was affirmed growing up in the historical black church along with his deeply held belief in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That commitment cost King support from black and white communities alike as he opposed the Vietnam War. Revisionist history notwithstanding, few at the time could see the link King drew between poverty and violence at home and our intervention abroad.

In King's own words, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs on social uplift is approaching spiritual death." I can't imagine King saying anything differently today.

Martin Luther King was a man of unquestioned moral courage. If that, rather than a voter registration card, is the criteria for political affiliation then neither party has the right to lay claim to his great legacy.

Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist.

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