Good thing Martin Luther King Jr. believed in non-violence. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if his ghost came back to slap some of these black Republicans silly.

I’m talking about members of the National Black Republican Association who have been running a radio ad claiming that King was a Republican. The ad features two black women spewing all sorts of silliness -- chief among it being the impression that Republicans, and not Democrats, are the true champions of civil rights.

What I find amazing is how this ad, as well as most other diehard black GOPers, manages to exploit aspects of the Democrats’ sordid civil rights past, but glosses over the GOP’s shameful civil rights present. And because their noses are so far up the behinds of the Bush administration, these black Repubs can’t see how such arguments are largely irrelevant; that what the GOP has been doing to us since 2000 has a lot more bearing on our lives than what some Democrats did to us in the 1960s.

And I’m sure it’s stuff that King would protest -- at the risk of having his phone tapped all over again.

Witness Inspiration as it happens. Watch Mike Thompson's film, "Act Two - The Process" now.

First of all, no one really knows whether King was a Republican. At least one biographer’s account portrays him as neutral. What is known is that his father, Martin Luther King Sr., was a Republican. What is also known is that in 1960, Daddy King changed his mind. He announced he was voting for John F. Kennedy, then the Democratic presidential candidate, after Kennedy intervened to help secure King’s release from a Georgia jail.

The Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, had refused.

And another thing: It’s time to put to rest this oft-circulated lie about how the Democratic Party didn’t support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While it’s true that southern Democrats overwhelmingly voted against the act, congressional records also show that northern Democrats overwhelmingly voted for it. The House vote, for example, among northern Democrats was 141 to 1 for the act, while the vote among southern Democrats was 92-11 against the act. What that shows is that the votes split along regional lines, not party lines.

So stories that portray all Democratic lawmakers, rather than Southern lawmakers, as having been the enemy of the civil rights movement is a half-truth that has morphed into a whole lie.

And if King didn’t tear up his GOP registration -- assuming that he had one to begin with -- in 1960, I’m sure that someone would have torn it up on his behalf in 1983. That was when the notoriously racist Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina viciously fought legislation to make King’s birthday a national holiday -- even to the point of circulating old FBI reports about him.

Helms, who once headed the Senate’s powerful Foreign Relations Committee, was a Republican. This is the same guy who used his power to support South Africa’s apartheid regime, and who blatantly aired a racist commercial for his re-election showing a white man’s application being rejected because of affirmative action. Unlike former Ku Klux Klan member Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Helms’ views about race didn’t evolve. They hardened.

So he, along with his bigoted doppelganger Strom Thurmond, found a new home with the GOP after the Democrats let too many black people into the party.

More have since followed -- and have had a hand in coming up with newfangled ways to suppress black rights and human rights. This summer, white Southern Republicans balked at renewing key sections of the Voting Rights Act -- a right that King got bloodied and bruised over. Now we have a GOP administration that launched a pre-emptive war that has nothing to do with freedom and everything to with incompetence and hubris. Something tells me that King -- who spent the latter part of his life campaigning against the Vietnam War and poverty -- would be out there holding signs with Cindy Sheehan, not having supper with Condoleezza Rice.

But what’s really egregious about the National Black Republican Association’s ad -- one that has been rightly denounced by key black GOPers such Maryland senatorial candidate Michael Steele -- is that it’s one more attempt to capitalize on King’s legacy by reducing his life’s work to labels and crass partisanship. Truth be told, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have done enough lately to uphold King’s ideas. Signing off on the Iraq War probably wouldn’t have won the Democrats any points with him. Which is why what’s important about King isn’t what party label he wore, but what causes he stood for.

Still, it takes a monumental dose of denial and delusion to believe that King would be voting Republican in the era of George W. Bush. And while it’s one thing to for us know what the GOP did for us in the past, it’s ludicrous to expect for us to live in it.