1968 - Mark Kurlansky [68]
In these hard times for black heroes, not surprisingly, Martin Luther King was frequently criticized. Many civil rights activists, especially those in SNCC, used to jokingly refer to him as “de Lawd.” Beginning in 1966, King would occasionally be booed by SNCC activists while speaking or shouted down with cries of “Black Power!” King once responded, “Whenever Pharaoh wanted to keep the slaves in slavery, he kept them fighting among themselves.”
He had often been accused of stealing more media attention than he deserved. This might have been true. He was a media natural; that was how he had become a leader. He sometimes reflected on what a good life he could have had if he had not gotten involved in civil rights. He was the privileged son of a distinguished Atlanta clergyman. He had not been born into the poverty and discrimination he was trying to end. He wasn’t even aware that racism existed until the sixth grade, when his white friend stopped playing with him because they had gone off to different schools.
As a doctoral student at Boston University, he impressed young women with his care and clothes, unusually well outfitted for a graduate student. Coretta Scott, his future wife, recalled, “He had quite a line.” She termed it “intellectual jive.” He was a small, unimpressive-looking man until he began to speak. From the beginning he was picked for leadership roles because of his speaking abilities and because he seemed to the press to be much older and more mature than he was. He was only twenty-six years old and a newcomer to Alabama when he became leader of the Montgomery bus boycott.
He often spoke of his own life as something he had no choice in. “As I became involved and as people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership.”
Although born in 1929, a decade before the older sixties leaders such as Tom Hayden, King thought like a sixties activist—dreaming of something bigger than just the South and an issue larger than segregation. He felt part of an international movement toward freedom.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, whom Eldridge Cleaver called “America’s flattest foot,” pursued King relentlessly. It spied on him, photographed him, planted informants around him, recorded his conversations. Ostensibly, Hoover was searching for a communist link and convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who committed most of his worst decisions in the service of the cold war, that there was enough cause for concern for Kennedy to okay the wiretaps. King, who clearly saw the failings of capitalism and on rare occasions expressed admiration for Marx, was careful to avoid too much of this type of rhetoric. As far as formal communist ties, all that could be shown is that he knew one or two people who may have at an earlier date had communist connections.
What the FBI turned up was merely very solid evidence that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had constant sexual relations with a long list of women. Close associates occasionally warned him that the movement might be hurt if stories got out. King once said, “Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.” And few people in the movement could criticize him, since most of them were indulging on occasion as well. “Everybody was out getting laid,” said political activist Michael Harrington. But King did it more often—not by chasing women: They pursued him everywhere he went.
The FBI presented photographs and other evidence to select journalists. But no one wanted to report this story. In the 1960s such a story was considered beneath the dignity and ethics of journalists. In 1965 the FBI went so far as to send taped proof of sexual affairs to King and his wife along with a note suggesting that the only solution was for him to take his own life.
But these attacks were not nearly as disturbing to King as the sense