Martin Luther King Cheated On His Wife & Other Lesser-Known Facts About The Civil Rights Leader For MLK Day
One of the easiest things to forget about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is that he was just a person. One of the most influential people of the 20th century, no doubt, but a person with unique flaws and quirks that made him different from the Christ-like figure he’s often portrayed as today.
At the time of King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, he was still the personification of the civil rights movement in the United States. But those near him said he appeared to have lost a step, in part because of conflicts in his inner circle of advisers and a growing estrangement from his former ally President Lyndon B. Johnson over the Vietnam War.
Five years after his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, though, and 40 years before the first African-American became president, King stepped onto the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennesse.
When racist assassin James Earl Ray aimed his rifle sight at King, he almost certainly saw the civil rights leader doing something King's children never saw him doing: smoking. King was a lifelong smoker, although very few – if any – pictures exist as proof because he never smoked in public. King didn’t want his family to know about the habit.
When racist assassin James Earl Ray aimed his rifle sight at King, he almost certainly saw the civil rights leader doing something King's children never saw him doing: smoking. King was a lifelong smoker, although very few – if any – pictures exist as proof because he never smoked in public. King didn’t want his family to know about the habit.
After King was shot, his advisers stopped the bleeding while one of them, Dr. Billy Kyles, removed a pack of cigarettes from King’s pocket. The Kennedy brothers allowed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap King.
In July 1963, one month before King’s March on Washington, Hoover personally convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy – brother of the president – to let the FBI install listening devices in King’s home, office and phone lines. Hoover created the FBI in his own image decades before, and by the 1960s Hoover had become paranoid and bitter.
In July 1963, one month before King’s March on Washington, Hoover personally convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy – brother of the president – to let the FBI install listening devices in King’s home, office and phone lines. Hoover created the FBI in his own image decades before, and by the 1960s Hoover had become paranoid and bitter.
King was a serial adulterer. While the ethical reasons for the FBI’s monitoring of King were murky (at best), the recordings do make up much of what we now know about the man’s personal life. King had engaged in so many extramarital affairs that his wife, Coretta Scott King, had reportedly become disillusioned with their marriage.
FBI monitoring devices recorded audio of King during a tryst at a Washington, D.C., hotel, eventually sending the tape to Mrs. King in an effort to discredit him in his own home. King even spent the last night of his life with a woman who was not his wife. In the chaos outside the Lorraine Motel, his advisers told the young woman to stay out of the ambulance to avoid tarnishing his legacy.
(As the movie “Selma” is hitting theaters, the film will re-open old wounds not just about the civil rights struggle, but about the character of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One of the deepest wounds is that of Senator Georgia Davis Powers—the woman who says she shared the dream with King and his bed.
Kentucky State Senator Georgia Davis Powers says she had a long-time love affair with Dr. King, Jr. She wrote in her autobiography that she spent the night with Dr. King his last night at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he was assassinated the next morning.
In her book “I Shared the Dream”, Powers wrote, “When they put Dr. King into the ambulance, I instinctively began climbing in to go with him.” She continues describing the scene, writing, “Andy Young gently pulled me back. ‘No, Senator,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you want to do that.’ ” When asked about the incident, Andrew Young says that he doesn’t remember).
They met in 1964 on one of his visits to Kentucky, when she was assigned to greet him at the airport. It is not really clear why she began the affair, she says, except she was entering midlife and feeling unattractive, and he asked to see her.
" Their affair was an open secret in his inner circle. She was in Memphis on the April evening in 1968 when he was assassinated. He had asked her to come. She was fixing her hair in front of the dresser mirror in her motel room when she heard the shot on the balcony. She ran out and saw him "lying in a pool of blood that was widening as I stood there staring."
Much of the world looked on that day in horror, and millions of Americans could say that they, like Ms. Powers, "shared the dream." Her book could just as easily have been called "I Shared the Dreamer." From the cover photograph of a fedora-topped King marching ahead of Ms. Powers to the scenes of furtive meetings in hotel rooms to her account of his assassination in Memphis, his fame and prominence overshadow her story.
SOME may see her book as the anthem of a liberated mistress. After all, she had her own career, she was not pining away for her man -- she did not hold such proprietary views. If he called, she came. They caught up on each other's lives, had warm, tender moments, then went their separate ways until the next time. Yes, she suffered the indignities of being the other woman. When King was shot, she began to climb into the ambulance with him until Andrew Young, a King lieutenant, said: "No, senator. I don't think you want to do that." But, reading her words, one gets the sense that she knew precisely what she was doing and has few regrets. She wrote the book, she says in the prologue, to set the record straight, believing the Government has distorted her role both in King's life and in the movement.
REV: Ralph David Abernathy( MLK'S RIGHT HAND MAN OF THE SCLC) did acknowledge in his 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, (1989 autobiography) that Martin Luther King engaged in extramarital affairs (evidence of which was sometimes recorded by the FBI through hotel room bugs), but he said absolutely nothing in his book about King’s supposed “obsession with white prostitutes,” King’s using “church donations to have drunken sex parties,” or King’s hiring “white prostitutes and occasionally beating them brutally.” In fact, Abernathy stated quite emphatically that he never knew King to have any sexual involvement with white women at all:Much has been written in recent years about my friend’s weakness for women. Had others not dealt with the matter in such detail, I might have avoided any commentary. Unfortunately, some of these commentators have told only the bare facts without suggesting the reasons why Martin might have indulged in such behavior. They have also left a false impression about the range of his activities.
Martin and I were away more often than we were at home; and while this was no excuse for extramarital relations/affairs, it was a reason. Some men are better able to bear such deprivations than others, though all of us in SCLC headquarters had our weak moments. We all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.
In addition to his personal vulnerability, he was also a man who attracted women, even when he didn’t intend to, and attracted them in droves. Part of his appeal was his predominant role in the black community and part of it was personal. During the last ten years of his life, Martin Luther King was the most important black man in America. That fact alone endowed him with an aura of power and greatness that women found very appealing. He was a hero — the greatest hero of his age — and women are always attracted to a hero.
But he also had a personal charm that ingratiated him with members of the opposite sex. He was always gracious and courteous to women, whether they were attractive to him or not. He had perfect manners. He was well educated. He was warm and friendly. He could make them laugh. He was good company, something that cannot always be said of heroes. These qualities made him even more attractive in close proximity than he was at a distance.
Then, too, Martin’s own love of women was apparent in ways that could not be easily pinpointed — but which women clearly sensed, even from afar. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on a stage and having Martin turn to me to say, “Do you see that woman giving me the eye, the one in the red dress?” I wouldn’t be able to pick her out at such a distance, but already she had somehow conveyed to him her attraction and he in turn had responded to it. Later I would see them talking together, as if they had known one another forever. I was always a little bewildered at how strongly and unerringly this mutual attraction operated.
A recent biography has suggested without quite saying so that Martin had affairs with white women as well as black. Such a suggestion is without foundation. I can say with the greatest confidence that he was never attracted to white women and had nothing to do with them, despite the opportunities that may have presented themselves.
Of course, J. Edgar Hoover became preoccupied with Martin’s private life early in the civil rights movement, and this preoccupation was a significant factor in Hoover’s pathological hatred of him and the movement he headed. Early in the game the FBI began to bug our various hotel rooms, hoping to discover our strategy but also to gather evidence that could be used against Martin personally.
I remember in particular a stay at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where they not only put in audio receivers, but video equipment as well. Then, after collecting enough of this “evidence” to be useful, they began to distribute it to reporters, law officers, and other people in a position to hurt us. Finally, when no one would do Hoover’s dirty work for him, someone in the FBI put together a tape of highly intimate moments and sent them to Martin. Unfortunately — and perhaps this was deliberate— [his wife] Coretta received the tape and played it first. But such accusations never seemed to touch her. She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)
I Shared the Dream : MARCH 1995
More Martin Luther King affair with Georgia Davis Powers on this link:
Having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, the FBI attempted to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs.[288] Lyndon Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher."[301]
In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King's travels." He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction." Garrow asserted that King's supposed promiscuity caused him "painful and at times overwhelming guilt."[304] King's wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that "all that other business just doesn't have a place in the very high level relationship we enjoyed."[305]
The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family.[307] The bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work.[308] The FBI–King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:
In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.
I Shared the Dream : MARCH 1995
More Martin Luther King affair with Georgia Davis Powers on this link:
Having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, the FBI attempted to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs.[288] Lyndon Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher."[301]
In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King's travels." He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction." Garrow asserted that King's supposed promiscuity caused him "painful and at times overwhelming guilt."[304] King's wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that "all that other business just doesn't have a place in the very high level relationship we enjoyed."[305]
The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family.[307] The bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work.[308] The FBI–King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.[310]The letter was accompanied by a tape recording—excerpted from FBI wiretaps—of several of King's extramarital liaisons.[311] King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide,[312] although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC."[283] King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.[288]
In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
There is a 20 page FBI dossier in which the last two pages focus on King’s sexual activities, including relentless adultery, conceiving a child out of wedlock, and sex perversions, among them orgies both heterosexual and homosexual.
MLK had an illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent negro dentist from Los Angeles, CA. since 1962. MLK fathered a baby girl from this woman inasmuch as her husband is allegedly sterile.
Michael Hoffman, American author and an authority on the Jewish Babylonian Talmud, wrote on November 5, 2017: “Martin Luther King was assassinated by his own handlers in 1968. He had become a liability as his sexual appetite increasingly entailed orchestrating group sex acts that were difficult to conceal. Meanwhile the nation was enduring escalating street violence on the part of his non-violent followers. The Cryptocracy that directed the Civil Rights revolution, King was worth more as a dead martyr than as a highly compromise hypocrite.”
There is a 20 page FBI dossier in which the last two pages focus on King’s sexual activities, including relentless adultery, conceiving a child out of wedlock, and sex perversions, among them orgies both heterosexual and homosexual.
MLK had an illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent negro dentist from Los Angeles, CA. since 1962. MLK fathered a baby girl from this woman inasmuch as her husband is allegedly sterile.
Michael Hoffman, American author and an authority on the Jewish Babylonian Talmud, wrote on November 5, 2017: “Martin Luther King was assassinated by his own handlers in 1968. He had become a liability as his sexual appetite increasingly entailed orchestrating group sex acts that were difficult to conceal. Meanwhile the nation was enduring escalating street violence on the part of his non-violent followers. The Cryptocracy that directed the Civil Rights revolution, King was worth more as a dead martyr than as a highly compromise hypocrite.”
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