ACN Investigates: Martin Luther King Jr. -- A Republican?

It's Martin Luther King Jr. day and with that comes another round of yearly head bashing. Democrats and Republicans across the nation are claiming that Dr. King was a republican and a member of the GOP. However the answers might not be as clear cut.

MLK Jr. marched with Memphis sanitation workers, planned a Poor People's March, and advocated a guaranteed annual income to end poverty. In some senses he defended himself preemptively from both sides when he said: 

"...took this position in order to maintain a bipartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times."

In 1959 Dr. King wrote to a supporter stating that:

"...in the past, I always voted the Democratic ticket." 

However we know that his father was a longtime Republican. What is most revealing may be found in the times. At the time it was historically the Democrats who were the segregationists of the country. In 1960 though, Dr. King's father publicly endorsed John F. Kennedy over Richard M. Nixon for president.

King's niece has said before:

 "My uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during his lifetime, was a Republican."  

 In a 2008 Associated Press story, King’s son and namesake Martin Luther King III said:

"It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states." 

Dr. Kenneth W. Goings, professor and past chairman of the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University, said in an email message that King may have had to register as a Republican to vote in Alabama in the 1950s. Goings said: 

"Daddy King was a Republican as were most African Americans in the South until the early 1940s.  But the combination of Dem. Party outreach and Republican Southern strategy meant that by the 1950s the South was well on the way to the split that is evident now. I’ve not seen any evidence that MLK Jr. was a Republican but if he registered to vote it would have been as a Republican in Alabama simply because the Dems. would not allow black voters.  Throughout the (Civil Rights) movement he worked with the northern Dem. Party...I wonder if somehow people have just confused Sr. and Jr. (maybe even on purpose)." 

Michael K. Honey, a professer at the University of Washington-Tacoma and a scholar of sorts on MLK Jr. said:

"The Democrats certainly disappointed him on the (Vietnam) war, and the Republicans had an orthodox conservatism opposed to most of the changes he wanted to see."

Weighing these statements against Dr. King's niece's and some claims by Republicans it would appear that the idea that Martin Luther King Jr. was a republican is false.