As we celebrate the man who gets credit for the ubiquitously celebrated intrusion into the white man’s wallet, neighborhood, and payroll known as the Civil Rights laws, we pause to highlight the heroic content of Martin Luther King’s character, rather than judge him by the color of his skin.

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of sociology at Georgetown University, has written a biography of MLK entitled “I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.” In this book he documents many juicy details on King.

Beginning with his adultery, he documents that King:

• from his early days liked light-skinned women, and throughout his life used nice clothes and cars to “wreck all the women.”
• cheated on his wife Coretta while engaged.
• at one point during his notoriety had a girl “in every town.”
• was “serviced” by Scandinavian chicks in 1964 while in Oslo to receive his Nobel prize.
• according to Abernathy (King’s close companion), had three girls (at least one white) in a row the night before he was killed, and exclaimed during climax: “I’m not a Negro tonight!”

Moreover, it is apparent that the FBI had tapes on King’s romantic rendezvous as well as multiple hotel orgies. Evidence even appears to indicate that King and Abernathy sodomized each other in at least one of those merrymakings.

Similar details on King’s adultery can be found in a well-researched book by David Garrow, entitled “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” (HT: The American View There, you will find happy facts such as this one):

• Many activists became aware of King’s “various sexual involvements” and he was warned about them by the head of the Congress of Racial Equality. King replied: “I’m away from home 25 to 27 days a month. F***ing’s a form of anxiety reduction.”

Moving on to his now well-documented plagiarism, Dyson records that:

• King’s trial sermon as an undergrad was greatly dependent on a some other whitey’s sermon.
• at seminary his citation habits continued to be sloppy.
• King plagiarized his Boston University dissertation borrowing heavily from Jack Boozer’s “The Place of Reason on Paul Tillich’s Conception of God.”
• in his speeches, King often borrowed copiously from other white preachers.

We invite you to explore the provided links to learn more about the the hero of equality. We only caution against getting too caught up in the facts about King’s life and missing the true spirit of the holiday. For King’s personal character during a few decades would not compare to the subsequent and necessary black-on-white thievery, rape, murder and overall white dispossession over the next half century. It is precisely for those fruits that we memorialize Martin Luther King today.

HT: First Word
More on cheater King here: academics |speeches | women

Note: This is a reprint from my old Hoosier Nation post.