Monday, May 12, 2008
Don't let the benign surface fool you -- white supremacists are using martinlutherking.org to defame the memory of the civil rights leader.
Jan 24, 2000 | Martin Luther King Jr. made the ultimate sacrifice to make America a better place. He wanted America to become a "beloved community" where people of all races would be able to get along and live together. But the "dreamer" would have a nightmare if he knew a Web site bearing his name is being run and maintained by Stormfront, a white supremacy group.
While the opening page of martinlutherking.org may look friendly, its content does not highlight the heroic events in King's life -- such as his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, his famous "I have a dream" speech at the 1963 march on Washington or the Nobel Peace Prize he won. Instead, it aims to debunk King's character, denying his status as an ordained minister, attacking his academic career, spreading tales of his womanizing and his alleged ties to communist groups. It even attacks his name.
"Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide Ph.D., and his name isn't really 'Martin Luther King Jr.'" reads a section titled "The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr.: Why he fought and who helped in the fight." It goes on to say, "What's left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own."
A link with the even more misleading title, "An Excerpt from 'The King Holiday and Its Meaning': Bring the Dream to life for someone you know: An educational tool" goes to a quote from North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms' congressional testimony, which alleges that "King associated with identified members of the Communist Party of the United States."
According to Stormfront founder Don Black, the site has been set up to combat the "propaganda" regarding King and his life. "The establishment media tries to turn Martin Luther King into a saint when the opposite is the case," he says. Black denies direct involvement in martinlutherking.org. But the e-mail address of the site's webmaster, Vincent Breeding, is on the Stormfront.org domain.
The site uses government documents, such as Helms' testimony, and information from the FBI campaign against civil rights leaders, as its sources. Civil rights groups and historians fear the appearance of official sources adds to the potential for gullible people to be taken in by half-truths and revisionist versions of history. The site's existence raises a perpetual Internet controversy: the potential to spread misinformation to a wide audience.
Roger Vickers is the public affairs officer for the Martin Luther King Center and the King family in Atlanta. He is not particularly alarmed by the site's misrepresentation of King. "None of the information is new," said Vickers. "Dr. King has just about been criticized for everything." He said this "misinformation" can be found in white supremacist books.
Black's response to the controversy over the site is also as old as the larger debate over the First Amendment freedom to distribute misinformation. "The Internet has opened up doors to people who during the Middle Ages would have been called heretics," said Black. "The Internet provides an alternative news media. It brings our message to millions of people who in the past didn't have access to it."
White supremacy groups on the Internet are nothing new. Groups such as the World Church of the Creator have used Web sites for years as a recruiting tool for new members and as a platform for their views.
But the group behind martinlutherking.org is especially Web savvy. According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, Stormfront is at the epicenter of the white supremacy movement on the Web. Founded in 1995 by Black, it is, according to Potok, "the oldest and largest hate site on the Net."
Black is a former Ku Klux Klansman and long-standing member in the white supremacy movement. (He is now married to former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke's ex-wife.) Black went to federal prison after a failed plot to overthrow a left-leaning government on the black island nation of Dominica. "It was in the prison that he learned computers," said Potok. "Now he is the chief purveyor of hate on the Net."
Stormfront's site counter logs over 2 million hits to date. The site has a White Nationalist News Agency, white heritage e-commerce, it has a bilingual version in Spanish and German and it has links to various white supremacy sites. With the addition of the Martin Luther King site, Black seems to be taking a stab at diversity.
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