Thanks for this piece. I remember that those of us who had moved on
from Civil Rights to the anti-war movement longed for Dr. King to speak
out against the war; indeed, there were some who denounced him for not
doing so, while others understood that his doing so would cause
difficulty for the civil rights movement, which still had things to
accomplish.
When he finally gave the sermon at Riverside Church, it was broadcast
(and rebroadcast) on WRVR, Riverside Church's-then fm station, which
carried their services and a mix of classical and jazz. Those of us who
had joined the anti-war movement rejoiced that he had finally come out
aganst the war, which many of us saw as of a piece with the civil rights
question.
Yes, it did lead to yet more denunciations of Dr. King as red; but this
was nothing new: it went back all the way to Montgomery, once it was
learned that he was associated with the Highlander School and those
nasty New York Jewish liberals, some of whom did indeed have present or
past Communist ties.
ANYthing on the even the right fringe of the liberal side of politics
was often so denounced in the 40's-60's-- even, e.g., my future
mother-in-law for urging public kindergartens in Houston, or my cousin,
a Presbyterian minister, when his Houston congregation's elders refused
to allow a John Bircher to donate American flags to put in every Sunday
School classroom. (Both of these things from the mid-50's.) The
Birchers were all over the place in the newspapers and on radio and tv.
And even LBJ was labelled a "Communist" in his Congressional and the
1948 Senate campaigns, because he favored low-interest-rate Federal
loans to the Rural Electrification Program for rural power distribution
facilities to farmers who lacked electricity because the private
utilities thought the investment cost too high to build them and for the
development of co-op electric generation and transmission systems such
as the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) and Brazos Electric Power
Cooperative(BEPC) which sold power to the REA coops in Texas when the
private utilities wanted too high a price for electricity -- and this
not from the right-wing organizations, but from the campaign of Texas'
Governor Coke Stevenson, his opponent in the Democratic Senate Primary
which ended in the infamous "landslide".
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