KING QUIET ON CIVIL WAR?

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia, states the following words on its website: "During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December, 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than the previous 350 years had produced." To say that this encomium greatly exaggerates is no more than true. During this 350 years referenced, there was the galvanic Civil War, 1861-1865, in which millions of former black slaves fought for, secured, reinforced their own freedom, whether by "contraband" attachments, or by military enlistment. They fought for freedom by military, not rhetorical, not nonviolent, force of arms: bullets, bombs, bayonets, blood, death, disease. Not only did the sable soldiers and sailors secure their own freedom, and that of the slaves (and free blacks), they saved the nation itself from dissolution, after January 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln finally, reluctantly released the epochal "Emancipation Proclamation." This executive order document was issued out of a very grave "military necessity," it stated, he admitted. The document ensnared 200,000 black men as Union soldiers and sailors, the very same men that Lincoln had earlier denied entry into the "white man's war," as the conflict was originally known its first two years . So, rather than see the nation divided into two slave and free nations, Lincoln freed certain slaves in parts of all or certain states that then officially had compromised the Confederate States of America (CSA), but not slaves in border states: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware. Still, I find it strange that the Civil War is not acknowledged on the King Center's website. Does any war's violence undercut Dr. King's philosophy of nonviolence? Was that the fear? that any reference to it might incentivize black militants? I looked on the website, because I could not find a quote, statement , any reference by Dr. King, a native of Georgia, to "Freedom War," as the slaves referred to the Civil War. But Dr. King's tapes have been turning up over the years since his apotheosis in 1968, in Memphis, so, our great leader, the Rev . Dr. Martin Luther King surely said a word or two about the greatest actual event of liberation in African American history before him, and including him, war's beneficiary!