In 2019, David Garrow, the biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., wrote that a “profoundly painful historical reckoning and reconsideration inescapably awaits” with the respect to the Great Man of the American Civil Rights Movement.
The reason? Revelations that King was an accessory to raping one woman and very likely tried to rape another.
Six years later, Americans await that “historical reckoning.” Today, as in every year, government offices and schools are closed to honor him, with nary a word being uttered about the real King, who was more than just a sex pervert.
He was also a Marxist, champion plagiarist, and most decidedly not a Christian believer.
King’s Sex Crimes
Garrow’s frank assessment of King as a “sexual libertine,” based on declassified FBI files, did nothing to dampen the ardor of even the most conservative Republicans, and indeed, President Donald Trump discussed King’s “dream” in today’s inauguration speech.
The FBI files “expose in graphic detail the FBI’s intense focus on King’s extensive extramarital sexual relationships with dozens of women, and also his presence in a Washington hotel room when a friend, a Baptist minister, allegedly raped one of his ‘parishioners’, while King ‘looked on, laughed and offered advice’,” Garrow explained for Standpoint. “The FBI’s tape recording of that criminal assault still exists today, resting under court seal in a National Archives vault.”
Indeed, King might have been a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records in the adultery category, given that he bedded some 40 women while married to Coretta Scott King.
But the most chilling revelation about King concerned a night at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., Garrow reported:
Approximately 12 individuals “participated in a sex orgy” which the prudish [Assistant FBI Director William C.] Sullivan felt included “acts of degeneracy and depravity. … When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural 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’.” Sometime later … “King announced that he preferred to perform unnatural acts on women and that he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of P***y Eaters’.” Anyone familiar with King’s often-bawdy sense of humour would not doubt that quotation.
As well, “King is reported to have gone to the apartment of one of his female employees on 11/4/65 and to have torn her clothes off of her in an apparent attempt to attack her,” the FBI reported. A Los Angeles woman gave birth to this illegitimate child, the bureau said.
King’s binge-drinking sexual libertinism explains Garrow’s call for a “profoundly painful historical reckoning and reconsideration” that “inescapably awaits.”
Six years after the revelations, Americans are still waiting.
Plagiarist
Another black mark against King is his literary theft — a lesser failing, admittedly, but one that goes to the validity of his doctorate from Boston University.
Detailed by former Chronicles editor Theodore Pappas decades ago, the plagiarism didn’t merely involve King’s swiping a passage here and there for his doctoral thesis. The thesis was a work of literary grand theft. It was “plagued with plagiarism,” historian Ralph Luker wrote.
But “his liberal white professors gave him a pass because he was a charming young black man,” Luker explained. Those professors “patronized” him.
That didn’t happen at the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, where King was an undergraduate. But, Luker explained,
When he went to predominately white institutions in the North, King received extra-ordinarily high grades for academic work which was not only often heavily plagiarized, but was otherwise quite unexceptional. …
The temptation to over-reward a charming young African American student who told his liberal white professors in the North almost exactly what he knew they already deeply believed about a subject was simply overwhelming.
Not a Christian
But telling the professors what they wanted to hear likely explains King’s false claims about Jesus Christ and the basic tenets of the Christian faith: Jesus’ virgin birth, His miracles, and His death and resurrection. Indeed, few Americans know that King was not a “Christian,” strictly speaking theologically.
King denied that Jesus Christ was God:
Jesus was by no means omnicient [sic]. … The orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.
Jesus was not born of a virgin, King asserted. Rather, he explained, Christians concocted the doctrine because they could not explain the “uniqueness of quality and spirit” that Jesus possessed and had “no knowledge of the scientific.”
King also denied the resurrection:
From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting.
In fact, it isn’t and wasn’t found wanting.
Finally, King believed that the Christian religion sprang from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian “mystery religions. Those “conditioned” people to accept the faith, which was a mere “trend in the social order or in the historical cycle of the human race.” King was particularly obsessed with the supposed connection between Jesus Christ and Mithra, a Persian god. In fact, the birth, miracles, death, and resurrection of Christ are not a retelling of the Mithraic myth.
Added to all this is King’s devotion to Marxist ideology. A phalanx of communists surrounded him, and he supported racial quotas and reparations for slavery.
Despite these incontestable facts, King is the only American who enjoys a national holiday in his name.
Thanks to a court order, the FBI’s complete file on King will not be unsealed until 2027.