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If you tune into 104.7 FM Pirate Radio, you might just hear that civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t deserve his status as an American icon and hero. Instead, the broadcast claims, King paid for prostitutes and liquor for “drunken sex parties, which sometimes lasted for several days.” Oh, and he was also a communist who hated America. The Greeley Tribune reports that the twice-daily broadcast, meant to question the official annual holiday of King’s birthday, which takes place later this month, is the creation of Brett Reese, the owner of the station and a member of the Greeley-Evans School District 6 Board of Education.
Reese says his reason for airing it is to provoke an “honest discussion of history.” During the five-minute broadcast, Reese says of MLK, “He’s not a legitimate reverend, he’s not a bona fide Ph.D., and his name really isn’t Martin Luther King Jr. What’s left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.” Tobias Guzmán, chairman of the Human Relations Commission for the city of Greeley, says Reese is perpetuating hate: “He’s continually putting anger in the minds of people and hate in the minds of people, and it’s unfortunate that is his method of operation.”
9News has further comment from Reese, including a statement in which he claims that “99 percent” of what’s in his broadcast is the “truth…. I can tell you for a fact, there may be some small aberration that’s in there.”
Meanwhile, Politico reports that King’s historic “I have a dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, to 250,000 people, is now the subject of a fascinating retrospective, Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation.