This article describes how an allegedly respectable biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. has uncovered evidence that he may have conducted inappropriate activities while leading the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.
Sex.
We are supposed to be shocked, I suppose, that Martin Luther King strayed from his marriage vows (actually, you’d have to have been hiding under a rock for 30 years to not know that). And we are entitled to knowledge of King’s offenses because Martin Luther King Jr. is respected and celebrated and widely known. So journalists have an obligation to find any dirt on him they can and splash it across as many front pages as possible so we may all come to regard the formerly admired hero as a disgusting example of perversity and sin. We may now go out and tear down the statues. Repeal the laws he caused to be passed. Restore the attitudes he changed.
Mr. Garrow, the author, will defend himself, because you know he will be savaged by a lot of people who feel that smearing Martin Luther King Jr. is not an admirable activity, regardless of whether he participated in an orgy or not. And he’ll have to respond to this question: what is the point? Is there any interest, other than your own, that is served by repackaging the fact that Mr. King had sex with some women?
[Some might object to my use of the word “smear”, which is usually associated with the act of relating false, pejorative information about someone in order to destroy their reputation. I would argue that publishing true information which the publisher would know would destroy someone’s reputation with the general public even though it may not, on it’s own, be directly relevant to the issues for which a person is famous, is also a smear. Think about it this way: what if a “journalist” set out with a list of 25 randomly selected politicians and artists and decided to try to find “dirt” on all of them, and was willing to accept information of dubious veracity coming from bodies known to have an interest in discrediting the person? And what if that person was deceased and unable to offer a defense or explanation? Easy target.]
Did someone out there stake the claim that people of significant accomplishments never do anything naughty? And what do we mean by bad? The sex, of course, grabs the headlines, partly because of the perversity in all of us— mostly because of the perversity in all of us. We immediately read the story not because we are interested in social justice and the law and women’s rights: we read it because deep in our own very dirty minds we want to know more about the sex. It appeals to our desire for sex. It tickles are fantasies about having sex. It makes us feel good to condemn other people for having sex because we are ashamed of our own perverse desires and condemning others is a way of deflecting suspicion. It makes us feel like we have inside information that others don’t have: you admire Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? But I happen to know that he had sex with women in hotel rooms.
David Garrow probably knows this. He also knows he will make a lot more money from a book about Martin Luther King having sex than he would from a book on how little has changed in terms of segregated schools in the past fifty years. He knows that perfectly, but will never admit it, because that would implicate you for wanting to read about Martin Luther King having sex. He needs to provide you with cover, for your prurient interest in sex. You need to be able to say, “I was reading about the important civil rights leader” because you don’t want to have to say, “I saw the word ‘sex’ in the title and immediately felt an overwhelming desire to read the article, because I have a dirty mind.”
How different, really, is Garrow from the FBI agents who secretly tapped King’s phones and bugged his hotel rooms and recorded his SEX and then tried to persuade him to commit suicide? The FBI– certainly, J. Edgar– think that you should be shocked by the sex. He had sex. He had sex with women. He had sex, sex, sex. You could read this all day and all night and never be satisfied that you have read enough about Martin Luther King Jr. having sex. You participate in the attempt to make him commit suicide because you join the FBI in the belief that a perfectly monogamous relationship is the only kind of sex anyone should ever know about.
The greatest defense against this attitude– maybe the most contemptible motive there is– is to come to the realization that the sex is not a big deal. He shouldn’t cheat on his wife, but it’s not that big of a deal. It was wrong, but it’s not that big of deal. It’s not the end of the world. We all have the need and the urge. Many of us fantasize about it but excuse ourselves because we only fantasized about it, though if we could, we would.
It is nowhere near as wrong as trying to persuade him to commit suicide by splashing these details all over the press. Where are the names of the FBI agents and administrators who tried to do this? We know one of them– J. Edgar Hoover. Someone made a film about him and he got what he deserved: he was portrayed by the most mediocre name actor in Hollywood: Leonardo DiCaprio.