...In a sense, King’s right-wing critics were more on target than many of his liberal supporters today: King was a radical. Unlike recently-retired Senator Jesse Helms and others alleged, however, King was never a Communist. His deep religious faith made any adherence to the materialist values of Marxist-Leninism impossible. He was, however, a democratic socialist, a Christian socialist, who firmly believed that meeting the basic needs of the poor was a higher priority than ensuring profit for the few. He could never accept the communist dictum that "the end justifies the means;" indeed, central to his beliefs was the recognition that the means and the ends are inseparable.
For, even as he moved to the left later in his life, he never wavered on his firm commitment to nonviolence. To King, nonviolence was actually more radical than violence, which simply perpetuated the oppression of one group against the other. He believed that nonviolence was not just a tactic nor was it just a personal ethos; it was both. This gave King, like Mohandas Gandhi, the stature of being both a great moral leader and a brilliant political strategist. He recognized that nonviolence was strategically the only realistic option for oppressed African-Americans to achieve justice as well as the fact that violence would simply polarize the races and make true justice and reconciliation impossible...
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0120-08.htm