ANOTHER WINGNUT MYTH GOES "POOF!"

I first heard of this nonsense from Ronald Reagan:

A National Holiday for King
Monday, Oct. 31, 1983 By GEORGE J. CHURCH
TIME Magazine

But Reagan, asked at his news conference if he agreed that King had Communist sympathies, replied with inexcusable flippancy (and mathematical inaccuracy):

"We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?"

I just came across a wingnut poster on AOL who made the unsubstantiated claim that King was a Marxist. Fortunately, we now have access to the FBI files:

FBI tracked King's every move
updated 10:52 a.m. EDT, Fri April 4, 2008
By Jen Christensen
CNN
Hoping to prove the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was under the influence of Communists, the FBI kept the civil rights leader under constant surveillance.

The agency's hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about communism.

While King did have associates who had been members of the Communist Party, by all accounts they severed those ties when they started working in the civil rights movement. What's more, the FBI bugs never picked up evidence that King himself was a Communist, or was interested in toeing the party line.