The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. He opposed affirmative action. He grew so radical near the end of his life that he considered renouncing nonviolence.
Which of those statements are true?
None of them. They 're all bogus. But that won 't stop them from circulating among some Americans as MLK Day approaches. When the United States commemorates King 's birthday on Monday, most people will celebrate the actual man. But others will invoke a phantom version of King that materializes on Facebook pages, e-mail links, Twitter feeds and the occasional billboard.
The phantom version speaks and acts in ways that have no relation to the man. Myths are inevitable with many historical figures, but with King they short-change the scope of his vision and drain him of his humanity, say King historians and those who knew him.
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King is still misunderstood even by those who claim to know him, says the Rev. Lewis Baldwin, a historian and authority on King.
"Each year we celebrate a man whom we have not come to understand," says Baldwin, a professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and author of the forthcoming book, "Behind the Public Veil: The Humanness of Martin Luther King, Jr."
Consider what follows as "mythbusting MLK," a debunking of the five most persistent misperceptions about the civil rights leader.
Myth 1: He grew more radical in his last years
Here 's the standard take on King 's evolution: He started off focusing on racism, then grew more radical in the last three years of his life as he turned against the Vietnam War and focused on