On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., we remember how the Soviet Union considered him a threat to the spread of communism throughout the world.
Russia’s secret war against Martin Luther King Jr.
“Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.” – Martin Luther King Jr. April 3, 1968 Memphis, Tennessee
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. arrives in Memphis Tennessee in April 1968
Many are aware of the FBI wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement, and active measures against him but not of the campaign waged against the civil rights leader by Soviet intelligence, also known as the KGB.
What motivated the KGB to work to destroy Reverend King?
Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence came out against the war, but also to double down on his rejection of revolutionary violence in the United States, stating that, “[a]s I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems.” KGB wanted violence to erupt in the United States and viewed the civil rights leader as an obstacle.
Reverend King in his 1958 book Stride to Freedom summed up his views on Marxism and rejected it for the following reasons:
The Challenge of Marxism
During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me to this day.
First I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God.4 This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality—a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an “interim” reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end. And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
