Martin Luther King, Jr., hero of the civil rights movement, was
undoubtedly a great man. He was also a ladies’ man who routinely stepped
out on his wife, Coretta, sometimes with members of his own
congregation. It’s doubtful whether in today’s world, where privacy is
almost a forgotten concept, King could still have become famous without
being destroyed by sexual scandals.
We know about King’s reputation for two reasons. First, because the
FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover’s was deeply suspicious about him, believing him
to be a communist (although King was, in fact, a registered Republican)
and ordered his agents to spy upon King constantly. What they found
wasn’t evidence of communist, but was, instead, evidence of almost
compulsive womanizing. Second, his own inner circle eventually had to
admit that King just couldn’t keep his pants on.
Ironically enough, the priapic Kennedy brothers, Robert and John, the
same men who were revealed to have been involved in sexual scandals that
included mafia molls, movie stars, virgins, and orgies, were impressed
when Hoover told them about the scope of King’s activities. In later
recordings, Jackie Kennedy Onassis said, without a hint of irony, that
“I can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know,
that man’s terrible.” According to Jackie, Bobby Kennedy to that King
“was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and
women, I mean, sort of an orgy.”
Even King’s friends had to concede that King had a hard time keeping his
pants on. Rev. Ralph Abernathy, one of King’s fellow civil rights
campaigners and the man who was at King’s side when he died, admitted in
1989 that King did indeed have a “weakness for women.” Although King,
an ordained minister, fully understood the Bible’s prohibition on
adultery, Abernathy wrote that “It was just that he had a particularly
difficult time with that temptation.”
Even on the last night of his life (not that King knew he would be
killed the following day, of course), Abernathy describes how King had
sex with two women simultaneously and then, later, had sex with yet a
third woman. Indeed, that evening, which followed King’s “I’ve been to
the mountaintop” speech saw King entertaining a revolving door of women.
In the years since Abernathy told his story, others who claim to have
been there at the time dispute his narrative of events. One of the women
Abernathy hinted slept with King, Georgia Davis Powers, says that,
while she was in King’s hotel room, all that they did was talk.
Abernathy, however, stuck to his version until the day he died.
The fact was that, as King told a friend, sex was the only thing that
relaxed him. “I’m away from home 25 to 27 days a month. F*****g’s a form
of anxiety reduction.” He developed long-term relationships with three
women, but was perfectly content to take whatever came along when he was
on the road. Invariably, though, because of his fame, King could have
his pick of women. He liked light-skinned black woman, with model-like
looks.
King’s behavior wasn’t unusual for the circles in which he traveled. All
of the early civil rights preachers apparently had sex on their minds.
Many who observed them said that sexual charisma was part of their
appeal. For these pastors, sex with female congregants was the norm, not
the exception. Michael Harrington, one of the activists involved in the
civil rights movement at the time, explained that the movement was “not
at all a sour-faced, pietistic” effort. Instead, “Everybody was out
getting laid.’ Or trying to.”
King’s circles apparently had sex wherever and whenever they wanted.
When King traveled to Norway in 1964 to collect the Nobel Peace Prize,
hotel security was appalled to discover that the men who traveled with
him were chasing naked, or near-naked, prostitutes down the hotel halls.
Hotel management, however, was convinced to keep quiet about the
matter.
Meanwhile, King insisted that his wife, Coretta Scott King, stay home
raising their four daughters. Indeed, he had very little interaction
with her or with her child-rearing decisions. Even cloistered in her
home, Coretta was no fool. She knew that King was carousing but, as she
once admitted, “I just wouldn’t have burdened him with anything so
trivial . . . all that other business just didn’t have a place in the
very high-level relationship we enjoyed.”
Sometimes it’s useful to remember that, at least with men, the same
energy and courage that leads some of them to true greatness, is coupled
with an overwhelming sex drive – and a sense of entitlement that both
powers their public endeavors and, they believe, their private ones.
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