Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was the time the Ku Klux Klan decided to pull out all the stops, with the new KKK fliers from the White Loyal Knights declaring MLK, Jr. to be a “communist pervert.” But do historical facts actually support King’s ties to communism and allegations of sexual escapades?

In a related report by the Inquisitr, even as the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement grows in size, the KKK has been expanding and is said to be targeting Afghanistan war veterans who have recently come home to the United States. A former Imperial Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan attacked Nicki Minaj, going so far as to claim that black people did not really invent hip hop.

The Ku Klux Klan propaganda denouncing Martin Luther King, Jr. as a communist was distributed in California during the commemoration of the holiday. Leaflets were found distributed in bags containing a rock and candy, which in the past has earned these new fliers the nickname of “Kandygrams.” But the message contained in the KKK leaflet is hardly sweet.

“Under the order of U. S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the FBI wired King’s offices, and hotel rooms from 1963 to 1968. These tapes notably records his transactions with communist agents, but also wild interracial sex orgies which included acts of perversion. King’s aids would use tax exempt money donated to his southern Christian Leadership conference to hire White prostitutes to perform sexual acts with him. King often would use two prostitute at the same time. These shocking tapes were ordered sealed for 50 years by U.S. Federal Judge John Smith Jr. on January 31, 1977. In other words we will not be able to learn all the gory details until the year 2027. some 90 congressmen, led by the late rep. Larry McDonald, urged Congress to find out what was on these tapes before they approved the disgraceful King Holiday Bill. A cowardly and spineless Congress voted 338 to 90 approving the King Holiday. “Still, many have been able to learn some of the shocking incidents recorded in the King tapes. Washington’s old Willard Hotel was the scene of King forcing White women to drink ‘black Russian’ and performing sexual acts with him. In Las Vegas King’s aids paid $100 each to prostitutes to join him in orgies. In New York city King got drunk and threatened a young White girl working for civil rights to submit to his strange sexual tastes or he would jump from the 13th floor window. She succumbed to prove to loyalty to King. In Norway, King was nude when stopped by police while chasing a woman down a hotel corridor. In Los Angeles a dentist supporter of King was outraged when he discovered his wife engaged in weird sexual acts with the civil rights leader. King was forced to flee the city after the dentist threatened to kill him. This escapade was taped on February 20, 1968. The following April someone else would shoot King. Is this the kind of man we want to hold up to our children to be honored as a national hero?”

The Californian branch of the Ku Klux Klan apparently based their leaflet’s message upon an article on the KKK website, which calls for the abolishing of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But this idea that King was a communist is hardly a new one.

At one time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country” and Alabama’s Democratic Governor, George Wallace, said that “President [Kennedy] wants us to surrender this state to Martin Luther King and his group of pro-Communists who have instituted these demonstrations.” Roadside billboards even purported to prove with photos that King attended a communist training camp.

Today, these claims are seen as a smear campaign and a relic of a time when unpopular figures of politics were labeled as communist. But that’s not to say King did not associate himself with people with communist leanings.

In a new book, Dangerous Friendship, author Ben Kamin documents Martin Luther King, Jr.’s friendship with a trusted adviser named Stanley Levison, who actually was a one-time member of the Communist Party. Due to this history, even some of Levison’s friends told him he could bring King down with their “dangerous friendship.”

Unfortunately, this friendship did lead to the FBI investigating Levison and King. According to KPBS, the accusations related to communism “broke up the ability of the Kennedy brothers to support the civil rights movement before President Kennedy died.”

But what were King’s actual beliefs? Although modern conservatives, progressives, and even socialists have tried to claim King as their own, if you read “Where Do We Go From Here” it’s obvious at least that King was not a communist.

“Now, don’t think that you have me in a ‘bind’ today. I’m not talking about Communism. What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.”

Based upon that brief section, it’s also obvious that Martin Luther King’s exact political beliefs are complicated, but the Ku Ku Klax is dead wrong to pigeonhole the civil rights leader as “communist.” Unfortunately, according to the Daily Mail it’s possible the second part of the KKK accusation may have had some truth to it.

Civil rights leader Reverand Ralph Abernathy may have been the man who cradled King as he lay dying from an assassin’s bullet in 1968, but Abernathy was also the same man who confirmed rumors of King’s history of adultery and sex.

In his autobiography, Abernathy claimed that King “understood and believed in the Biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.” King may have had four children with Coretta Scott, but Abernathy claims King spent his last night alive enjoying himself with two lovers.

Regardless, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day commemorates the memorable actions of this flawed saint, who once admited, “‘There is a Mr Hyde and a Dr Jekyll in all of us . . . you don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint.” The Ku Klux Klan may try to drag down the civil rights movement by focusing on these flaws, but what is best remembered is King’s dream for the United States.

[Images via The Daily Beast]