January 15: Dr. King’s Advisor

Among the key advisors and closest friends to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was born on this date in 1929) was Stanley David Levison, a businessman and attorney whose Communist activities in the 1950s provided J. Edgar Hoover with ample excuse to wiretap and harass Dr. King. Levison, writes Samuel Freedman, served as King’s “fundraiser, strategist, ghost-writer, confidant” and “helped devise the idea for the coalition of black clerics that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; he assisted King in drafting his address accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; he played an instrumental advisory role in King’s pivotal decision to publicly oppose the Vietnam War . . .” Levison died in 1979 at the age of 67.

“The liberation struggle is the most positive and rewarding area of work anyone could experience.” —Stanley Levison