Was Martin Luther King, Jr. a radical?

The answer to this question depends on perspective. During his life, King was suspected by the federal government of communist ties, and was subjected to surveillance by the FBI for this reason. King was not a communist. That said, over the years, King, or perhaps more accurately King's rhetoric, has become very much a part of our national culture. In the process, it has lost some of its power, its fire, and perhaps, some might say, its radicalism. Historian Tim Tyson has said that Americans have come to view King as a sort of "innocuous...Santa Claus."

The reasons for this are many. King has become a seminal American figure, and people on both ends of the ideological spectrum can identify with his words about equality, love, and nonviolence. But King's rhetoric and personal beliefs went beyond this, to ideas that many Americans then and now found unsettling. For one thing, King was vehemently against the Vietnam War, which he saw as unjust and fought disproportionately by the nation's poor, especially African-American young men. King openly spoke of the ways the issues of "class" were intertwined with issues or "race," and argued for structural economic reform as a way of attacking racism, especially as it affected America's inner cities. As one historian has argued, King's place was among the "non-communist interracial democratic left."  Late in his life he argued for reparations for African-Americans, increasingly advocated direct action in labor disputes (like the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee he was supporting when he was assassinated), and consistently pushed President Lyndon Johnson to devote more energy and money to the Great Society. 

All of this is not to say that King is a radical, but simply that he was perhaps more radical than is currently understood in American popular memory. His efforts went beyond political equality for African-Americans to more controversial demands for substantive economic measures that would redistribute wealth to marginalized people. It should be noted that King's radicalism was also downplayed by Sixties radicals themselves. By the end of his life, he had earned the enmity of many more militant elements (the Black Power movement) in the New Left, mostly for his refusal to compromise on nonviolence.