Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social conservative. At least that’s the way one of his surviving family members is characterizing him on the 25h anniversary of the holiday that bears his name.
MLK’s nice, Dr. Alveda King, director of African American Outreach for Priests for Life, says advice columns her uncle wrote for Ebony magazine in 1957 and 1958 reveal a man who today would be regarded as a social conservative.
“In advising men and women on questions of personal behavior 50 years ago, Uncle Martin sounded no different than a conservative Christian preacher does now,” says King. “He was pro-life, pro-abstinence before marriage, and based his views on the unchanging Word of the Bible. Today, Planned Parenthood would condemn Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of the ‘religious right’.”
In advice columns written for the African American-oriented magazine, MLK told a young man who had impregnated his girlfriend and refused to marry her, resulting in a “crime,” that he had made a “mistake.” He urged another reader to abstain from premarital sex, noting that such activity was contributing “to the present breakdown of the family.”
“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man of peace, justice, and most of all a man of God,” King says. “Were he alive today, he would be working to secure peace and justice for those in the womb and healing for a nation that is still pained by over 50 million missing lives.”
Have you read any of those original Ebony magazine columns?
