Martin Luther King Jr. was just an “ersatz pastor” and a “communist,” and the 1960s civil rights movement was “crap,” according to a series of Facebook posts by Mark Robinson, the leading Republican candidate to be North Carolina’s next governor.
Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, regularly criticized King and the civil rights movement for years on Facebook ― specifically on MLK Day ― HuffPost found amid a review of his posts. The Black politician also downplayed slavery, rejected the idea that he’s part of the African American community, and attacked the late congressman and civil rights icon, John Lewis.
These posts are surfacing at a time when Robinson, who is on track to be the GOP nominee for governor in November, has been trying to soften his rhetoric, and celebrate King and the civil rights movement.
Last month, former President Donald Trump hailed Robinson as “better than Dr. Martin Luther King” at a campaign event, and Robinson responded by saying he “took it as a compliment” and “knowing what I know about him, and the history thereof, you know, those are big shoes to fill.”
His social media posts tell a different story.
In January 2018, Robinson mocked people who celebrate King, who he said was just a subpar pastor. He didn’t mention King by name, but he was clearly talking about the civil rights leader in his series of messages posted on MLK Day that year.
“It is at once funny and sad that so many people will follow the lead of a bunch of atheists and worship an ersatz pastor as a deity,” he wrote in one post.
Robinson also used MLK Day to dismiss the idea that racism is real.
“The ‘state of race relations’ exist chiefly within your own mind,” he said.
“‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty we are free at last!’ Now what?” he said in another post that day.
Those posts came exactly one year after Robinson wrote that he planned to work on MLK Day, a federal holiday, to show that he wasn’t “a leach” on society and allowing the government to cut him a break.
“Tomorrow I will do my ‘service to the community’ by going to work to continue to support myself and my family so I’m not a leach on said community,” Robinson posted on Jan. 16, 2017.
He also wrote on MLK Day that year, “I don’t like Communist. No matter what ‘color’ they are.”
The North Carolina Republican later admitted in his 2022 book, “We Are The Majority,” that he had been calling King a communist.
“December of 2007 was when I joined Facebook,” he wrote on pages 156-157. “Every political thought I had in my head, I put on there, up to and including my posting photos of Martin Luther King and calling him a communist.”
Officials with Robinson’s campaign and in his official government office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Robinson hasn’t limited his Facebook criticisms to King on MLK Day. That same day, in 2017, he attacked Lewis, who nearly lost his life fighting for voting rights. On March 7, 1965, Alabama police officers gassed and brutally beat Lewisand hundreds of other peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. That day, now known as “Bloody Sunday,” left Lewis with a fractured skull.
“Hey John Lewis, Just because you got beat up by some Democrats in 1965 doesn’t mean you can’t get criticized by some Republicans in 2017,” Robinson wrote.
That same day, Robinson posted that actual real-life slavery isn’t as bad as slavery “of the mind,” which is Satan’s greatest tool.
“Slavery of the mind is FAR worse than physical slavery,” the GOP gubernatorial hopeful wrote. “Slavery of the mind cannot be seen, cannot be made illegal, and is and always has been the greatest tool of Satan used against man….. and men against each other.”
The day before, Robinson also posted that he didn’t “care what Lewis did in the 60s” because the problem was what Lewis was doing that year, in 2017.
(In fact, in 2017, Lewis was calling out Trump for not being “a legitimate president,” citing Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections to help him win.)
In May of 2017, Robinson posted on Facebook that the 1960s civil rights movement was “crap” and a communist effort.
That same month, in a particularly long post, he wrote that he doesn’t consider himself part of the “African-American’ community” because this community murders its children and “sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk.”
Going back further on Facebook, Robinson wrote in 2015 that the civil rights movement was “never about giving rights” to people, but about setting the stage to take people’s rights away. The year before that, he wrote that racial integration was never about freedom but about destroying Black people and “the bondage” of their minds.
Robinson is already known for his wildly offensive comments about women, LGBTQ people and Muslims, in addition to fueling bonkers conspiracy theories. The reason he’s still the Republican front-runner for governor is because he’s modeled himself after Trump ― a strategy that some North Carolina political analysts predict will fail him in the general election in this swing state.
His GOP challengers include former Rep. Mark Walker, state treasurer Dale Folwell and trial lawyer Bill Graham, a relative newcomer to the race who has vowed to spend millions of dollars of his own money. Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, is the leading Democratic candidate. The current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, is term-limited out this year.
A Stein campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
