• Washington Post via MSNBC, Friday, October 20, 2006 12:15 PM

A black conservative group is under fire for a radio ad that claims the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. "We've gotten some e-mails and telephone calls filled with vitriol," says Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association. "They've called me Aunt Jemima, a sellout, a traitor to my race."

But for Rev. Joseph Lowery, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which the slain civil-rights leader helped establish, the ad was an abomination. "To suggest that Martin could identify with a party that affirms preemptive, predatory war, and whose religious partners hint that God affirms war and favors the rich at the expense of the poor, is to revile Martin," he says.

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