January 20, 2026
To the Editor:
Three months before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King gave a speech at a large event organized by the magazine FREEDOMWAYS to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Dr W.E.B. Du Bois. In talking about Dr. Du Bois, who had publicly joined the Communist Party (CPUSA), King said, “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”
Obsessive anti-communism is apparently what Eric Blanc was demonstrating when he wrote his article about how Dr. King came to socialism – leaving out the names of Jack O’Dell, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry and others; or the connection of Rosa Parks and her husband to the Communist-led movement to free the Scottsboro Nine; or the poet Don West as a co-founder of the Highlander Center.
One can’t attempt to write the history of all or part of the Civil Rights movement and downplay, ignore or leave out the CPUSA or individual communists or those close to the party. Dr. King was neither a communist nor a Marxist, but he understood, without hesitation, the implications of Du Bois choosing to join the CPUSA. Professor Blanc would do well to follow Dr. King’s thinking.
Walter Tillow
Louisville, Kentucky
[The writer was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 1963-65 and worked on the ’64 Atlantic City convention challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)]
PHOTO: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Carnegie Hall, February 23, 1968 in honor of the centenary of the birth of Dr W.E.B. Du Bois.
