Web site uses MLK name to attack him

Type the name “Martin Luther King” into the popular Google Internet search engine, and find a surprise: among the expected university and newspaper links, one site — the third highest ranked link — stands out.

It attacks the personal life of the slain civil rights leader and, by extension, the movement of nonviolence he championed. It rehashes allegations of plagiarism and adultery and accuses King of fraud, claiming he was not a “legitimate reverend” or “bonafide Ph.D.” It also invites visitors to learn about civil rights by reading the work of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

The site, martinlutherking.org, is run by a white supremacist group called Stormfront, described by one watchdog organization as the largest “hate group” online. It has used King’s name for its Web address since 1999.

King’s heirs, who have aggressively defended his name from unauthorized exploitation, have known about the Stormfront site for more than two years. A reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first asked King family representatives about it in early 2006.

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King’s nephew and head of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, said he’d sent the site’s operator threatening letters and offers of money to shut it down since then, but that they were ignored. Farris said he consulted lawyers, but has not approved filing a lawsuit.

“You never authorize a lawyer to do whatever it takes because that could be a black hole,” he said. “But we definitely asked them to look into it.”

Stormfront’s leader, Don Black, did not return recent phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Meanwhile, activity on a Stormfront Web forum linked to the site has grown, more than doubling since early 2006. Visits to the site jump each year around the King holiday, according to the San Francisco firm Alexa Internet, which tracks Web traffic. It also spiked in November after the presidential election.

The site continues to rank high on Google — even ahead of the King Center’s own Web site (www.thekingcenter.org).

Standard supremacist line

Black went to federal prison in the 1980s for plotting the armed overthrow of the Caribbean nation of Dominica. The Stormfront leader previously has said that he hoped his Web site was reaching high school students “who are forced to parrot the liberal party line about King being a great leader.”

Black hews to a standard supremacist line: white people are losing power and he supports separating the races. “The United States was traditionally a white nation, and we have the right to preserve it,” he said. “If that makes me a racist, I am.”

In another interview last week, Farris said there isn’t much the King family can do about the Web site, in part because it’s an issue of free speech.

“You can’t stop people from having opinions,” he said. “If people think my uncle was adulterous and didn’t have a Ph.D., we can’t do anything about that. The only thing we can do is stop them from using his name.”

In this case, Farris said, the Stormfront Web site, which includes a photo and a drawing of King on its home page, didn’t use King’s name. The Web address isn’t exactly the same as the famous civil rights leader’s because it doesn’t include two letters: “Jr.”

Yet it is close enough to fool unsuspecting Web surfers.

Thomas Page, who lives in Middletown, Conn., was searching for the name of King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, when he happened upon the site. He realized he’d been had when he noticed the promotion for Duke’s book.

“It’s just so appalling to be looking for Dr. King and to come across the KKK,” said Page, an energy consultant who visited the King Center on a trip to Atlanta several years ago. The site smears King and promotes a racist agenda while making “it look like it is coming from the King museum,” Page said. “I’m just disgusted that they would be able to register a site called martinlutherking.org.”

Many visitors to the site probably are curious children, said Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

“It’s meant to change people’s minds, particularly young people’s minds, about who Martin Luther King was and what his legacy is,” Potok said.

The home page offers a link to downloadable fliers “to pass out at your school.” Among the selections is one that asks: “Which holiday honors a philanderer, a drunk, a liar, a plagiarist, and a cheater?” The answer: “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.”

The site includes a link to a forum where there were recent discussions under headings such as “back when Christmas was white” and “Adolf Hitler speaks.” Writers in one thread entitled “black intellect” claimed black people are genetically predisposed to a lower IQ, and extolled the concept of eugenics.

Potok described Stormfront as the largest Internet discussion space in the world for white supremacists. The group’s Web forum claims nearly 154,000 members, up from 72,000 in January 2006.

How did Black’s site gain such prominence?

Google is mostly mum about its ranking system. In online documents, the company reveals that page rank is influenced by an examination of a Web site’s links to other sites and by the popularity of those other sites, and it explains that rank involves an analysis of text content. But the rest is a mystery.

A Google spokeswoman said in e-mailed responses that computer algorithms use “hundreds of factors” to conduct rankings, but that the factors “are the secret sauce” of Google and so the details are closely held. The spokeswoman, Katie Watson, said Google rarely removes sites except when laws are being violated, such as with child pornography. She said the views expressed at martinlutherking.org “are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

The King family could try to unplug Stormfront by filing an Internet domain name complaint or a lawsuit, lawyers said. But they said it would not be an easy case.

“As vile, reprehensible, ignorant and horrible as that Web site is, one could argue that it’s political comment,” said Pete Wellborn, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in Internet law and has taught at Georgia Tech. Still, Wellborn said the Kings could succeed, especially if Stormfront is making any money off King’s name.

Another Atlanta Internet attorney, Doug Isenberg, said a domain name complaint is easier to pursue than a lawsuit but that the King family would have to prove a “bad faith” attempt to confuse the public. Bad faith claims often involve appropriation of a corporation’s name for a Web site that sells a competing product.

“Obviously, Stormfront and the King Center are not competitors,” Isenberg said.

Farris, of the King Center, said people are free to make claims of philandering and drunkenness about his uncle. “Maybe we could sue, maybe we couldn’t. But there’s a thin line between opinion and slander,” he said.

Farris said the King Center is not focused on money: nine of 10 licenses to use King’s name or image are granted royalty free. But he said Black, the Stormfront leader, probably would enjoy the publicity of a lawsuit.

“Do we want to give this guy the satisfaction?” Farris said. “He hates us, so he’d get a kick out of us burning our resources.”