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Every January, as the federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, a years-old item that refers to the famous civil rights leader as a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate is circulated anew: Unfortunately, most of this information is false and thereby misleadingly denigrates the memory of a man whom the U.S. has chosen to honor. 1) To this day, questions remain over the names of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father: what names they were given by their parents, what names appeared on their birth records, and when (if ever) they changed their names are subjects of some murkiness. According to an account Martin Luther King, Sr. gave to a New York Post reporter in 1957, he had always intended his son's name to be Martin Luther, and the appearance of the name 'Michael' in his son's birth records was a mistake due to confusion over his own name: No records documenting a formal name change for either King yet have been uncovered, so in a strict legal sense one might say that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name officially remained Michael until his death. However, what constitutes a legal name can be quite fluid. My own mother, born in the same era as Martin Luther King, Jr., was raised by people other than her birth parents from an early age and did not know her real first and middle names. (Indeed, she did not learn which names were actually listed on her birth record until I obtained a copy of the document for her when she was in her mid-50s.) Nonetheless, the first and middle names she adopted in place of the unknown real ones were listed on every government-issued record pertaining to her created during her adult lifetime (e.g., marriage license, driver's license, Social Security card, children's birth certificates) and were therefore her legal names every bit as much, if not moreso, than the ones that appeared on her birth record. In any case, whether Martin Luther King, Sr. gave a true account of the issue in 1957 (i.e., that both he and his son were officially named 'Martin' by their fathers but called 'Michael' through confusion or mistake) or simply decided in his adulthood that he preferred he and his son be known as 'Martin' instead of 'Michael,' the name change was not, as suggested above, an affectation on the part of Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was something decided for him by his father while he was still very young. 2) This is the one claim presented here that has some element of truth to it. During the 1980s, archivists associated with The Martin Luther King Papers Project uncovered evidence that the dissertation King prepared for his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University, A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, was plagiarized, and the story broke in the national media in 1990. King included in his dissertation a good deal of material taken verbatim from a variety of other sources without proper attribution (or any attribution at all), an act which constitutes plagiarism by ordinary academic standards. The Martin Luther King Papers Project addressed the issue in Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (and reproduced a statement therefrom in the FAQ on their web site): In 1991 a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation but did not recommend the revocation of his degree: 3) The claim that Martin Luther King stole his famous I Have a Dream speech from black pastor Archibald Carey is overblown. Carey's speech, a 1952 address to the Republican National Convention, and King's speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963, are quite different; the only substantive similarity between them occurs in their perorations: both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn America (composed in 1832) and references to several American geographic locations from which the speakers exhort their listeners to let freedom ring: 4) J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered Martin Luther King to be a threat to white America (terming him the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation) and spent years trying to dig up and manufacture derogatory information about him in order to publicly discredit him and thereby neutralize his effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The FBI asserted that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organization which King headed was controlled and funded by the Communist party and spent years trying to prove it, making King the target of an extensive surveillance program intended to gather evidence documenting ties between the SCLC and communists. But the Bureau was unable to uncover any credible evidence of active participation or funding between the Communist party and the SCLC, as David Garrow chronicled in his exhaustive study of Martin Luther King and the SCLC: Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the SCLC after the latter's assassination in 1968, also disclaimed ties between the SCLC and the Communist party in his autobiography: Ralph David Abernathy did acknowledge in his 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, that Martin Luther King engaged in extramarital affairs (evidence of which was sometimes recorded by the FBI through hotel room bugs), but he said absolutely nothing in his book about King's supposed obsession with white prostitutes, King's using church donations to have drunken sex parties, or King's hiring white prostitutes and occasionally beating them brutally. In fact, Abernathy stated quite emphatically that he never knew King to have any sexual involvement with white women at all: A commonly circulated item about Martin Luther King that is not included in this list is the claim that King was a Republican. Such claims are based purely on speculation; King himself never expressed an affiliation with, nor endorsed candidates for, any political party, and his son, 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. As for the assertion that no other public holiday in the United States honors a single individual besides Martin Luther King Day, we note that Columbus Day (honoring explorer Christopher Columbus) is a federal holiday, as is George Washington's Birthday.
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