Progress NC Action releases 2 new ads featuring Martin Luther King III speaking out against Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s extremism

Progress North Carolina Action released two ads this week featuring Martin Luther King III, son of Civil Rights heroes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and a human rights activist in his own right, speaking out against Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s extremism.

Mark Robinson is vying to be the first Black governor of the state, but his views and hateful comments put him in complete opposition to the ideals many Black leaders have fought for over the decades.

Those ideals and the fight to end the oppression of Black Americans have often been the target of Robinson’s attacks. Over the years, he has attacked the Civil Rights Movement, the actions of his hometown’s civil rights heroes (the Greensboro Four), MLK Jr., the idea of reparations for slavery and the Black community as a whole.

Donald Trump has called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids” and “Martin Luther King times two” – but Robinson himself has said the Civil Rights Movement was “crap,” called MLK Jr. an “ersatz pastor” and a “communist,” and disavowed being any part of the Black community, once writing “Why would I want to be part of a ‘community’ that sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk?”

In one of the ads, King addresses Robinson’s insults against his father and highlights what bothers him most about the lieutenant governor’s views on civil rights.

“[I]t’s not the petty insults that bother me,” he says. “It’s his outright rejection of the Civil Rights Movement my father and so many others lived and died for.”

Robinson has blamed the Civil Rights Movement for causing the loss of “so many freedoms,” which is a demonstrably false claim.

“So many things were lost during the Civil Rights Movement,” Robinson said during a podcast appearance in 2018. “So many freedoms were lost during the Civil Rights Movement that shouldn’t have been lost.”

“As my father said, nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” King says in response to Robinson’s views on the movement.

In another ad, King says, “My father would be gravely disappointed in Mark Robinson.”

Robinson has referred to the civil rights era as the “so-called Civil Rights Movement” and criticized the Greensboro Woolworth sit-ins as a “ridiculous premise” meant to pull “the rug out from underneath capitalism and free choice and the free market.”

Further, Robinson has claimed that Planned Parenthood and Black gang members did more to “eradicate the Black race” than the Ku Klux Klan, said “African Americans love to kill each other,” claimed that Black people embrace “deviant, hyper sexual behavior,” called Black culture “a dismal failure,” and referred to Black men as “deadbeat” and Black women as “whorish.”

But Robinson hasn’t just attacked members of the Black community, he has also downplayed racism against Black Americans and went so far as to say that descendants of those who were enslaved should pay reparations to the government. 

“Nobody owes you anything for slavery. If you want to tell the truth about it, it is YOU who owes,” he said at the 2021 NCGOP convention.

“Mark Robinson’s history of racist, homophobic, and bigoted comments show that he is unfit to lead in North Carolina,” King said in a statement to USA Today, adding that he and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, “felt that it was necessary to speak out against his—and the former President’s—usage of my father’s name to promote hatred.”

“[W]e want to be clear: My father would not support Mark Robinson, and Mark Robinson is nothing like my father,” King told USA Today.