In a 1956 speech, for example, he
said: “Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic Party.”
The same year, in a letter citing his uncertainty about for whom he would vote for president, he wrote that, “In the past I have always voted the Democratic ticket.”
And in 1958, he
noted: “I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either party.”
The unsupported assertion that King was a Republican has cropped up numerous times, sometimes
citing King’s niece, Alveda King, who once
declared her uncle was a Republican.
But Alveda King in a 2013 Newsmax column said that her earlier statement was made “without having all the facts” and that “Uncle M. L. tended to vote Democrat, but remained independent because he found weaknesses in both parties.”
Likewise, two of King’s children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, have
both denied that their father was a Republican.
In a statement
provided to the Associated Press in 2008, King III said: “It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states.”
