There is some controversy regarding the people around Martin Luther King Jr. at the time, but there's little out there to prove that he was a Communist, and polemics is not necessarily proof, and often isn't.
The FBI feared Levison was working as an "agent of influence" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them.
[197] Another King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
[198] However, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.
[187]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther_king
Don’t believe everything (or anything?) that Dyson writes. King — the King of the Civil Rights Acts was certainly a centrist and even conservative. We on the left — including SNCC and the Panthers and SDS — regarded him with suspicion. We didn’t want integration into the American system which we regarded as the Great Satan. Consequently, King was pushed aside in 1966 and had no following. Under pressure from the left he gave the worst speech of his career — the one about Vietnam — in order to regain his popularity among activists. The later Father John Neuhaus, then a radical, either wrote the speech or had an enormous influence on it. Martin Luther King’s message — America should be a society with a single standard for whites and blacks is anathema to the left and they have spent the last forty years subverting it.
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