Martin Luther King Jr laughed and offered “advice” as a man “forcibly raped” a woman just a few minutes walk from The White House in Washington DC, according to an FBI summary of a tape recording in their possession.
The FBI was involved in a mammoth operation investigating Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s involving undercover informants, wiretapped phones and bugged hotel rooms, and attempted to spread the story of Dr King’s “sex orgies” and 40-plus extramarital affairs, but these stories never appeared in the media.
“They tried, but the press would not touch it,” said David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has dived into a recent release of files previously buried in the US National Archives collection relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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“There is this sort of dual reality where, across the government, there are hundreds of people who know this exists yet it is never publicly exposed,” Mr Garrow told The Independent.
“At that time there was an ethic in the US that prominent men’s private affairs didn’t qualify as news. That was what also protected JFK.”
He believes the FBI files show the intelligence operation targeting Martin Luther King Jr was almost unparalleled, rivalled only by the surveillance of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and the US Communist Party.
However most of it never saw the light of day. In the end Hoover resorted to ordering an agent to send Dr King the notorious “suicide letter” which threatened to expose his “filthy, abnormal” behaviour and urged him to kill himself by Christmas 1964.
Michael Mosbacher, the acting editor of Standpoint magazine, which is publishing Mr Garrow’s article about the files, says the tapes reveal MLK as “the Harvey Weinstein of the civil rights movement”.
“If public figures are now all – rightly – subject to scrutiny, there should be no exception for Martin Luther King, however worthy his other activities were,” he writes in the June issue.
Mr Garrow agrees it is time for a reassessment of the civil rights leader. “In the future we are going to see Dr King as a more privately troubled figure that we previously appreciated,” he said.
“The discussion will be, how great a private price did he pay because of his unwanted celebrity?”
Martin Luther King was, as he himself recognised, a “Jekyll and Hyde” figure, says Mr Garrow. He may even have been a manic depressive who was regularly hospitalised with exhaustion and indulged in binge drinking.
“King was relentlessly self-critical,” the historian said. ”This is not someone who is glorying in being famous. He was incredibly tough on himself and absolutely realised his own shortcomings.”
That is not to excuse his alleged behaviour. “I am deeply sympathetic to King – but at the same time rape is rape,” added Mr Garrow.
The recording of the alleged rape, supposedly taken in the Willard Hotel in January 1964, also exposes the attitude of the FBI to women and sex in the 1960s.
Its typed summary reads: “The group met in his room and discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts.
“When one of the women protested that she did not approve of this, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her.”
A handwritten memo, probably added by the FBI’s head of intelligence operations, adds: “King looked on, laughed and offered advice.”
The agents listening to the incident apparently did not consider intervening or even following up with the woman to see if she wanted to make a complaint.
“I think at least in the US context the mistreatment of black women was passed over more easily,” said Mr Garrow.
His article’s revelations, which were first reported by The Sunday Times, has so far met with silence from the US media, the King Center (formerly the Martin Luther King Foundation) and MLK’s family.
Civil rights activist, Edith Lee Payne, who was in the crowd for the famous 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, told the Daily Mirror that the claims were based on “false information” and accused Mr Garrow of attacking Dr King to gain “personal attention”.
“To suggest that [Martin Luther King Jr] would knowingly or willingly engage in anything illicit or criminal would discredit everything he sacrificed for, stood for and ultimately died for,” she added.
The tape recording, which is resting under court seal in a National Archives vault, will not be released until 2027.
Mr Garrow believes it should be made public. He said: “It will be a crime against history for these things to be destroyed, so I think it is imperative.”
Baxter Dmitry
Email: baxter@thepeoplesvoice.tv
This is bull from a long discredited organisation. Why would anyone trust anything from them?
What are the Liberal’s and Progressives SJWs, going to do Now? Ban Street Signs and Change Building Names.