Some dreadful things won’t die. Hate keeps them alive, though
submerged like some cold-war monster waiting to spring on a new generation.
It happened last week.
A posting on unsocial media announced, as if it were true,
that a photo of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. had surfaced. The photo, the
poster assured us, provided proof of Dr. King at a “Communist training school.”
I hadn’t seen this photo since the 1960s when I worked in
Louisiana one summer. Billboards throughout the more dismal areas of the South
dotted highways and byways with photos of Dr. King with a group of people,
attending a meeting. That’s all it depicted, a group of people at a meeting.
It could have been a meeting about anything anywhere. It
actually took place at the Highlander Center in New Market Center, Tennessee,
originally named the Highlander Folk Center. It has been around since 1932,
originating to offer adult education classes to the poor, teaching them such
subversive and incendiary things as how to read material that would allow them
to pass literacy tests often imposed on the downtrodden by Southern states.
By the 1960s, the center had entered the civil rights
movement. It offered training to activists who were dedicated to helping the
least of those among us exercise the ability to vote.
On can be assured that there was more of the Galilean than
of Marx taught there. Taylor Branch, in his multi-volume biography of Dr. King,
beginning with Parting the Waters, outlines
his relationship with the center in detail for those who would rather learn
than hate. There seems to be so few of those around anymore.
In all likelihood, the spread of the falsehood connecting
Dr. King with Communism oozed from the mind of then director of the FBI, J.
Edgar Hoover, who hated King with a virulence rarely seen in politics, and who missed no opportunity to besmirch his reputation.
The odd thing is that such rubbish as the aforementioned
photograph should re-surface after all these years. What, in present-day
America, could invigorate this deception and motivate someone to thrust it on
an unsuspecting new audience?
I guess we all know the answer to that.
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