The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was called a communist, an outside agitator and a drum major for righteousness.

But now a growing number of people are calling King something else: A conservative icon.

As the nation celebrates King's national holiday Monday, a new battle has erupted over his legacy. Some conservatives are saying it's time for them to reclaim the legacy of King, whose message of self-help, patriotism and a colorblind America, they say, was "fundamentally conservative."

But those who marched with King and studied his work say that notion is absurd. The political class that once opposed King, they argue, is now trying to distort his message.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/19/us/mlk-conservative/