Black History Month: Debunking the 10 biggest myths about black history
OPINION - Here at theGrio, we thought we'd kick off February the right way by debunking the 10 biggest myths about Black History Month...
2. The civil rights movement was inherently Communist
Martin Luther King’s inspiration for his philosophy of nonviolence and strategy of civil disobedience came from Mahatma Gandhi. The civil rights movement was not inspired by Communist beliefs or rhetoric, but the two biggest foes of the civil rights movement — FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the Klu Klux Klan — were fervently anti-Communist and characterized the civil rights workers as such.
It was the middle of the Cold War, and Hoover investigated any group that adopted the similar positions on civil liberties, racism, economic and peace as the Communist Party. Hoover thought the movement was a target of Communist infiltration, which is why his COINTELPRO program went after so-called subversive causes deemed Communist or socialist — including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Black Panther Party and others.
