How the King Legend Came about, and Why People Believed in It

By David in TN and Nicholas Stix

How the King legend came about, and why people believed in it:

For Martin Luther King Jr. was a fraud. He was something fortunately rare in a democratic society with a free press, a man whose whole life was a lie, the creation of clever manipulation and publicity. The man seen by most people and presented by the mass media and all too many historians and biographers for two generations, NEVER REALLY EXISTED.

Explaining the King legend is a major problem for historians. It should be said at once that Martin Luther King Jr. was not without some abilities and other qualities that help to explain the legend. His intelligence may not have been nearly as great as his admirers thought, but he was not a fool; and at his worst he was not as totally incompetent as some of his successors, notably Ralph Abernathy. A remarkable speaker, he gave memorable speeches, which might not survive rational analysis, but nevertheless moved his audiences. Witty, he was a brilliant activist and oozed charisma, and when he chose to exercise it, overpowering charm in private, as well as public. Handsome, he skillfully used his beautiful wife and children to evoke a picture of idealized family life that had no basis in reality. Earlier black leaders, whatever their real relationship with their families, had done their utmost to protect their privacy.

The biographer doesn’t care much about King’s womanizing, referring to it in passing. He considers it one of MLK’s more amiable traits.

The foregoing text was not about MLK, but about JFK, and was quoted by David from historian Alan J. Levine’s new book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. All I did was change the names and a few words that would have given away the real subject.

I have long maintained that JFK and MLK had much in common. Each cheated on his wife thousands of times, each was a counterfeit intellectual, with a team of ghostwriters producing speeches and books under his name, and each was credited with beliefs that he did not at all support. And each would be killed by a sniper.