MLK's Hideous Legacy
Remembering Reverend King for who he really was.
January 1964. The historic Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the White House. A group of men, including some ministers, gather in a room with young female parishioners. They discuss which of the women would be suitable for various sex acts, each more debased than the last. When one of the girls raises her voice in disapproval at the talk, a Baptist minister forcibly rapes her as another minister of the gospel “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”
The man who laughed was Martin Luther King Jr., according to author and historian David Garrow. Nine months after that alleged rape, on October 14, 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ahead of MLK Day this year, Boston unveiled a monument with all the aesthetic charm of a malignant tumor that represents the hug King shared with his wife, Coretta Scott King, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Some of King’s fans have lamented its appearance, but its grotesqueness accords well with the hideousness of his real legacy, which you won’t find with any ease these days, and for a good reason: King’s hagiography is integral to the mythos that rationalizes the incumbent political order; whether something is good or bad depends on whether it is closer to or further from King’s ostensibly color-blind “dream.” But it, like his official biography, hides the rot beneath a mawkish veneer of moral decency.
King was more than a sexual predator. He inaugurated the age of anti-whiteness and the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” regime. He supported affirmative action and racial quotas, contrary to conservative fairytales that cling to King’s blather about character over skin color. He gladly accepted help from known communists and was, in fact, funded by them. But it is the moral bankruptcy evinced by his adultery that sets the stage for reckoning with the rest. Plutarch wrote that he “must have his own house in good order who undertakes to order the affairs of his friends and the public,” for “ill-doings on the part of husbands to their wives” will eventually come to light and call all the rest into question.
No one has brought more damning evidence against King’s standing as archon of America’s morality in this regard than Garrow. No conservative critic is he. Garrow is a democratic socialist who donated to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign with bylines in The New York Times, The Nation, The Financial Times, and The New Republic. In 1987, he even won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography about King, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The back cover makes clear the significance of Garrow’s contribution to the corpus of King lore.
But in 2019, the historian published a discovery that rocked the foundations of the shrine he had helped build for King. Garrow found never-before-seen evidence of King’s extensive extramarital affairs with dozens of women and his presence in a hotel room when one of King’s colleagues, a Baptist minister, allegedly raped a parishioner as the civil rights leader “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”
Garrow submitted an article with his findings to The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Times. Naturally, all rejected his submission. He turned his efforts across the pond again to Standpoint, a British right-of-center magazine, which agreed to publish his exposé: “The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King.” It was the culmination of weeks that Garrow had spent painstakingly poring over hundreds of FBI reports and surveillance summaries just recently made available through the Byzantine National Archives website.
In 1977, U.S. District Judge John Lewis Smith signed a court order requiring the FBI to hand over all materials concerning its electronic surveillance of King to the Archives. “Said tapes and documents,” Smith stated, would be “maintained by the Archivist of the United States under seal for a period of fifty years.” And when that seal breaks on January 31, 2027, Garrow believes that “a painful historical reckoning concerning King’s personal conduct seems inevitable.”
But we don’t have to wait until then.
Garrow found a web of sordid affairs with many women, including some who were married. For instance, one of King’s girlfriends was Dolores Evans, the wife of a black dentist in Los Angeles. Another was a member of his Ebenezer Baptist Church congregation in Atlanta named Barbara Meredith. King’s sexual liaisons stretched from Illinois to Nevada and New York. There’s even evidence that he secretly had a child born to one of these mistresses. In all, King’s “occasional partners” included 40 or more women, free and paid. One traumatized prostitute told investigators that King subjected her to “the worst orgy I’ve ever gone through.” When Coretta complained to King about his behavior, he reportedly told her that she should have some affairs of her own.
The night after the alleged rape occurred in 1964, King and his friends resumed their escapades and “participated in a sex orgy,” according to a surveillance summary reviewed by Garrow. “When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural [sex] act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul.’” Reporting these unsavory details did Garrow no professional favors. The Times downplayed his findings as merely “factoids aplenty” and gave other scholars space to attack Garrow. The headline of a similar barb launched by The Guardian was self-explanatory: “A historian’s claims about Martin Luther King are shocking—and irresponsible.”
The main complaint of Garrow’s critics amounts to something like this: the FBI wanted to discredit King, so naturally, the documents, transcripts, and summaries reviewed by Garrow are tainted to that effect. However, Garrow notes throughout his article that the people in charge of surveilling King operated under the assumption that these things wouldn’t see the light of day and, therefore, had little reason to embellish and deceive. Garrow points to Assistant Director William C. Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, who led the efforts to bug King’s hotel rooms. He writes:
Another criticism is that the FBI had no real reason to surveil King. But the truth is that the FBI became so obsessed with the minister’s perverted sex life that it almost overlooked his concrete connections to communism in the U.S.
Before it finally acquired Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s authorization to wiretap King, the FBI spent months convincing Kennedy that King’s closest confidant and advisor, Stanley D. Levison, was a “secret member” of the Communist Party USA. Levison “had a talent for raising funds from left-wing contributors who preferred giving money to him personally to giving it directly to the Communist Party,” according to historian Murray Friedman. “Levison’s opposition to the McCarran Act, which required the registration of officers of the Communist party, and his support of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg brought him under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Friedman adds.
Citing some of Garrow’s work, Friedman writes that Levison served as a “financial angel for the Communist Party” starting in 1945 or 1946. The FBI knew this because it had informants “high up in the party.”
Just how influential was Levison as a close friend of King? For starters, he co-wrote one of the drafts of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But more importantly, he bankrolled King. Indeed, upon a review of King’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI discovered a bombshell. According to Garrow:
Garrow notes those “gifts” to King “had taken place simultaneously with Levison’s ongoing contributions to the Communist Party,” for which he was a substantial fundraiser. Between 1957 and 1962, Levinson and his twin brother Roy contributed the equivalent of more than $700,000 today to the party. There’s also evidence of Levison having a direct connection to Moscow around this time.
In John Barron’s 1996 book, Operation SOLO: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin, the author notes that King’s friend frequently met with Victor Lessiovsky, a high-ranking KGB officer in New York under the cover of special assistant to United Nations Secretary General U Thant. Lessiovsky’s expertise was in the recruitment and manipulation of “Third World peoples.”
After King was warned to discontinue contact with Levison, he stayed in touch with him indirectly through Clarence Jones. Jones was discharged from the Army as a security risk in 1955 after he refused to sign the Armed Forces Loyalty Certificate stating that he was not a member of the Communist Party. The FBI identified Jones as a member and leader of the Labor Youth League, described by the leftist daily People’s World as “a Marxist-Leninist youth organization with fraternal relations with the Communist Party.” Jones also co-wrote with Levison the draft of King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”
Simply put, the FBI had good reason to monitor King for his connections to the Communist Party, the truth of which undermined the façade of an “all-American” political movement. But it was the affairs uncovered by the bureau that exposed King as a moral reprobate who inaugurated the age of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Despite the happy talk about judging people by the “content of their character,” King sought to force companies working in black communities to hire a certain percentage of black employees—the very definition of affirmative action and racial quotas. “If a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas,” King said. From janitorial work to board rooms and bankers and professors. It’s easy to see how King paved the road for people like Ibram X. Kendi.
“Full equality, King said, would require not merely the elimination of legal segregation, but the far broader achievement of ‘untrammeled opportunity for every person to fulfill his total individual capacity,’” recalled Garrow. For King, John Kennedy’s civil rights bill wasn’t nearly enough. “Housing and employment opportunities seem most critical—if any priority can be assigned to the many ills the Negro suffers,” King stated.
Nor is it obvious that King intended for any such “diversity” programs to be temporary. In fact, there is more evidence that he had in mind the radical and permanent transformation of American society. King even criticized figures like Booker T. Washington as naïve for preaching that blacks should focus on self-help. “I do not share the notion that he was an Uncle Tom who compromised for the sake of keeping the peace,” wrote King. “Washington’s error was that he underestimated the structures of evil; as a consequence his philosophy of pressureless persuasion only served as a springboard for racist Southerners to dive into deeper and more ruthless oppression of the Negro.” Even here, the language of “structural” and “systemic” racism requiring radical political surgery is evident.
King explicitly called for lawfare to change the U.S. legal system and engineer social behavior and attitudes. “Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving this problem,” said King in 1962. “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”
Among those “heartless,” King counted “white moderates” who were sympathetic but ultimately queasy about the true cost of King’s not-so-colorblind crusade. “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail to do this,” King wrote, “they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.” There is little difference between this rhetoric against recalcitrant whites and what you might read today from Kendi or some other racial huckster.
The only people who might be surprised by any of this are those unaware of the disconnect between King’s public persona as a humble, decent minister and the reality of his moral depravity, perfectly conveyed by the recently unveiled atrocity in Boston. But given King’s centrality in the liberal moral pantheon, where he towers above even Washington himself, the ineluctability of a reckoning is doubtful. That day will not come until enough people take up the iconoclast’s hammer and begin to do to King’s legacy with their own hands what his acolytes have done to the history and heroes of America.
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