“The [thing] nobody wants to say . . . or doesn’t know to say,” said Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, an executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the mid-1960s, “is that the people around [Martin Luther King Jr], and Dr. King himself — we were all left-wingers.”

Walker knew of what he spoke. A member of the Young Communist League in the 1940s, he retained his left-wing politics well into the sixties, commenting in a 1963 TV interview that “granting to the Negro full emancipation means a readjustment of the entire economy. . . .  I think it’s an inevitable move toward some kind of socialism.”

This image of King and his cohort as committed radicals defies their popular portrayal as “I Have a Dream” moderates. But in an important new article drawing on years of painstaking research, scholar Matt Nichter reports that Walker was basically right. The SCLC — the famed group of black ministers, first helmed by King himself — was suffused with “personnel overlap,” “network ties,” and “organizational alliances” with the socialist and communist left of the 1930s and 1940s, often referred to as the Old Left.