Pamphlets on MLK cause controversy

By Frank Visco
Collegian Editor
January 30, 2008

Copies of a pamphlet that distorted facts about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to advance a white supremacist agenda were discovered in the La Salle Student Union Building Jan. 22, the day after the former Nobel Peace Prize winner’s national holiday. The copies, which were illegally posted and also left for pickup, were quickly removed by Community Development staff.

“I felt like it was pretty rude to do that [right after MLK Day],” senior communication major Marcely Jean-Pierre, president of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc., said. “There was a cowardice to it, doing it anonymously.

“I don’t think it was successful in counteracting the meaning of the day and why we celebrate, but I feel as though whoever posted it wanted to take something away, not only from what the university was doing [with King’s Dream], but from what the country has done in acknowledging this as a national holiday.”

According to Dr. Joseph J. Cicala, Dean of Students, a student leader originally reported the illegal postings to Community Development. About 35 copies were found in the building, and, excluding one or two for documentation purposes, they were all destroyed.

Community Development then contacted the Residential Staff, Security and Safety and Food Services who scanned the residential halls, academic buildings and dining halls, respectively. No other copies of the pamphlet, entitled “The Beast as Saint: The Truth About Martin Luther King, Jr.,” were found.

Security immediately launched an investigation into the incident. More evidence was provided Jan. 23, when a student reported that someone had attempted to hand him a pamphlet in the Union food court. The student gave a description of the individual, but Cicala said he could not disclose particulars that might interfere with the investigation.

“Security is doing their best with the investigation, but it may be tough,” he said. “I’m just happy that the right things were done once the pamphlets were found.”

According to Director of Security and Safety Art Grover, security is reviewing tapes and assisting Community Development in trying to uncover the individuals responsible. Although he indicated nothing was certain, Grover said that it was possible that the perpetrators were outsiders, especially since a similar incident was reported at St. Joseph’s University.

In the event that the culprit is discovered, Cicala indicated his or her status with the university would dictate the consequences. A student would likely face disciplinary action, while a non-student would be asked not to return to campus, he said.

Shortly after the incident, the leaders of The Point and Cicala attended a previously scheduled meeting with the Board of Trustees. After the meeting, the group had the chance to briefly discuss the situation.

“We’re sort of wrestling with what to do,” senior accounting/finance major Tom Richezza, president of the Commuter and Off-Campus Student Association, said. “We want to address the situation, but at the same time we don’t want to give it attention that it doesn’t deserve. We’re thinking about putting together an awareness program, but we’re going to talk more about it [at our meeting tonight].”

However, senior marketing and management major Vanessa Levros, a Point member and the president of the African American Student League, said she thinks a response is definitely needed.

“I don’t think it needs to go under the rug,” she said, “I think there needs to be more of a response when things like this happen. Usually La Salle paints walls or tears down flyers when these types of things happen, but then it often gets dropped.”

Both Richezza and Levros indicated that the Point is considering the possibility of bringing in a King scholar to lead a lecture/discussion. Regardless of whether or not that happens, Levros said dialogue should commence.

“We need to create a dialogue,” she said. “It’s something I want to see more of because these things do happen at La Salle, and if we choose not to address them, we’re not going to fix the problem.”

The pamphlet was based on a 14 year old radio broadcast by Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the National Vanguard white supremacist group, who pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography charges earlier this month.

In the pamphlet, Strom expresses anger at the fact that King is the only American with a national holiday declared in his honor and calls the late civil rights leader “a modern-day plastic god.” Going on to compare King to mass murderers, Strom derides American society for allowing “the pro-King propaganda machine” to grind on.

To advance Strom’s agenda, the pamphlet asserts four basic claims: King’s real name was Michael King; he plagiarized much of his work, including his doctoral dissertation; he had communist beliefs and connections with former communists; and he misapplied funds contributed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the clergy-led civil-rights organization he founded) to pay for liquor and prostitutes.

These contentions are not new, and have actually existed in some form for decades. Literature pertaining to such claims can be found in bulk on the Internet in connection to academic study, as well as white supremacist groups such as Stormfront and The Creativity Movement.

Each of Strom’s claims has a varying basis in fact. It is widely reported that King was born Michael Luther King, but that his name was later changed to Martin (along with his father’s). In the early 1990s, both the King Papers Project, a component of Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, and a committee at Boston University, the institution that awarded King his doctorate in 1955, concluded that King had plagiarized in his academic work.

Despite King’s plagiarism, Boston University never revoked King’s doctoral degree. According to the Boston Globe, the committee decided “no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree,” and that King’s dissertation still “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.”

“I think that King’s greatness, the reason why he’s memorialized, was not his academic work,” Dr. Clayborne Carson, the director of the King Papers Project, said. “He is celebrated because of his contribution to the African American freedom struggle.”

Strom’s third and fourth claims are distorted, but still appear to be rooted in credible sources. King was never a confirmed Communist, but had relationships with several former Communist Party members.

Carson, a history professor at Stanford who has dedicated two decades to studying King, said “there is a wealth of evidence” available that shows King rejected communism: “Nothing I know of has concretely linked him to a communist group. It’s all based on innuendos and guilt by association.”

The FBI supposedly had tapes of King in sexual affairs, and held them over King’s head in an attempt to stop his public work. Although the FBI files on King are sealed until 2027 and nothing is concrete, much of this history was mentioned in David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“Unlike the plagiarism, the issue of extramarital affairs is largely based on material no one is allowed to see, and even if you could, would you trust the source?” Carson said, alluding to his belief that much of this information came out as a “campaign to destroy King.”

Although Carson said he was not in a position to totally deny or confirm the more damning claims, he said it wouldn’t lessen the impact of King’s public work.

“I never held that King was a saint, but a man with flaws and limitations, just like any other human being,” he said. “The powerful thing isn’t that a saint did wonderful things, but that a flawed person did wonderful things. I don’t study saints; I study history, and real people, and that’s what Dr. King was.”

Much like Carson, Jean-Pierre and Levros have been able to separate Dr. King’s private life from his public works.

“I feel like what he did to change our country and unite people clearly overshadows any imperfections in his life,” Jean-Pierre said. “It’s pretty typical of a pessimistic person to highlight the wrongs of a man, even if he was responsible for so much good.”

“I feel like this takes his flaws and embellishes them to make it go in their favor,” Levros added. “But these ‘facts’ don’t affect the work he did. People try to distort things to their advantage, to make connections that a logical person would realize don’t add up.”

viscof1@lasalle.edu