MLK as "socialist", as taken from a facebook discussion:

When and at what point did black America start to be an issue in bourgeois society? After the liberation of the slaves, local jurisdictions kept discrimination alive in the south; on the other hand, the federal government used blacks as normal citizens, especially for wars. The latter is key to the fact that American blacks were considered normal citizens without access to regular life in the competition of US society. The state couldn’t carry on treating blacks as normal in their obligations but not in the rights they were granted.

This unfairness was the birth of the civil rights movement. MLK’s dream of blacks being judged by their character was an indication to the state officials that they were treating their subjects differently, and many within the federal government saw no reason why blacks shouldn’t be allowed to compete. Why would a state consider it necessary to distinguish blacks and whites? From the state point of view, there was no reason blacks shouldn’t be given access to all levels of competition in what was then white society. Jim Crow contradicts a free competing society.

The dream of Martin Luther King convinced the state. What was he looking for? The fulfillment of a dream offered to overlooked blacks. He addressed the state as the political leaders and he as the subject. This is not in opposition to legality or the monopoly on force of the state; it was not anti-capitalist; it was seeking the right to be just a rightful citizen, a true competitor like everyone else with access to competition. Why should a state deny them? MLK truly believed the right to compete would add to social equality, open opportunities for blacks, give them larger chunks of America’s wealth. To get a higher percentage of the wealth, injustice needs to be removed, there needs to be an equal right to compete. If this is translated into equal rights to participate in the economy, then the 99 percent who do not become successful have not been mistreated, its just the way the best get to the top; this ideology of the hierarchy, that the best get the best jobs, was not questioned by MLK. He had an objection to bad wages, but questioning whether workers need to be paid poorly is not questioning why there are workers and factory owners in the first place.

In those days, the working class wanted more and that was the dominant political flavor. MLK wanted to give blacks more opportunity and thereby give them more wealth, which was in agreement with the method by which wealth is distributed. He thought that if you put employers and labor in relation then it’s beneficial to both. Only dirty commies call it 'exploitation.' Fair wages for good work. America was the leading capitalist country, it upheld part of its promise, especially considering what proles were normally used to being offered; so the working class had TVs, college. The idea of work giving access to a better life materially was allowed, it was said to pay to be a good worker, this was even agitated towards. Nowadays, high wages are an attack on America’s capability to compete with cheaper societies, and to be cheap enough is the ultimate economic goal. But in those days it was normal for labor to ask “what’s in it for us?” Nowadays that’s considered contrary to the logic of the system, where costs have to be as low as possible and where the livelihoods of people are a contradiction to the aim of the owners; labor is expensive, so there can’t be high wages. In those Cold War days, class awareness was different, the US opposed the USSR which said it was the paradise of the working class.

MLK asked for participation in a society that he saw in need of reform, but in its core acceptable.

Then the state made equality a federal law not modified by local state laws. Then the state in the early 70s took up changing the moral atmosphere towards race, re-educating youth, starting affirmative action, busing, so the state did everything to make clear that all its subjects were addressed, that nobody is inferior because of origin, race, gender. If that’s the case, this opens the box to: what does it tell you that blacks are poor in the majority? Is there still any document proving America is a racist country?

This opens a number of wrong views people take. A person criticizes the distribution of good and bad positions within society; this is a poor critique. It is not criticizing the fact of poor or rich, it takes that as a fact and thinks its a reflection of nature. Indirectly, its asking for more whites to be poor and more blacks to be rich, or at the very least for there to be more black CEOs/rich. It takes for granted a division of labor where for no logical reason someone who is cleaning streets gets less of what society offers in wealth than a CEO or a doctor; the logic of the work does not define the wealth, what people find just in it is that it goes with the logic of the society by definition. In the USSR, doctors didn’t make more than workers.

There is more if anyone's interested, but not about MLK, just black emancipation, liberalism, etc.