10 Americans You Won't Believe Were Accused Of Being Communists

6. Martin Luther King Jr

Even though Martin Luther King Jr publicly stated that "Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible", he did face accusations throughout his life of being a socialist sympathiser - and in 1953 he referred to the Red question as "one of the most important issues of our day". Having been accused of being a Communist throughout the whole of the 1950s, it was not until 1962 that the FBI launched an investigation into King due to his relationship with supposed socialists via the Civil Rights Movement. Recovered FBI files have even proven that the Bureau attempted to discredit the Civil Rights Movement by linking it to Communism, and in 1963 King was forced to fire his employee Jack O'Dell after he was accused of being a socialist. Such was his frustration with the FBI's investigations into him that King told a crowd in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964: "I am sick and tired of people saying this movement has been infiltrated by Communists... There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida." It is true that King agreed with the core concept of social justice within communist, but he also maintained that with its "cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, communism provides no place for God or Christ".