David Garrow confesses that while doing research for his 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., he came to more than just appreciate the late civil rights leader.
In particular, Mr. Garrow, a former University of Pittsburgh professor of law and history, said listening to every sermon he could find from King “had a very deep, profound impact on me.”
“I always had a very, very high opinion about his humility and self-sacrificing qualities,” Mr. Garrow said from his Squirrel Hill home Friday, “and I still have that.”
Following Mr. Garrow’s revelations this week about King that he found in federal files — including King’s presence near an alleged rape, his involvement in orgies, and possibly fathering a child with a mistress — he is reassessing not only his own personal feelings about King, but King’s place in history.
Because so many of the revelations in the files involve King’s relationships or involvement with women, Mr. Garrow said that even though King’s mark on history is clearly in civil rights, what he found in the files “is more about gender than about race.”
Since his research was revealed Thursday, the debate among historians has focused on whether Mr. Garrow should have trusted the documents he was seeing, and less about what he found.
That is most apparent, he said, because since he started talking with people about what he found “no one this month has asked me about the woman who was raped” by a friend of King’s who was a fellow minister, as described in FBI documents. The rape allegedly occurred in King’s presence; the FBI document claims King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” to the preacher.
Mr. Garrow said neither he nor the FBI could be sure who that woman was, though he continues to try to identify her. He notes that there is no evidence in the documents he has seen that FBI agents who were apparently listening in when the alleged rape occurred tried to stop the attack.
As someone who admired King, Mr. Garrow said it brought him no pleasure to reveal what he found about King hidden among 54,000 digital files concerning President John Kennedy’s assassination that the National Archives dumped onto its web page over the past two years.
“But I felt a professional obligation to say [with the revelations], ‘Hey folks, we are probably going to have documented evidence that’s not pleasant about King in 2027.’”
It is in 2027 that the audio tapes and their transcripts from the FBI files on King are supposed to be unsealed and available to the public.
If the summaries of the transcripts are accurate, those audio tapes will have King speaking with a “very off-colored, obscene sense of humor,” Mr. Garrow said, something that historians have long known about.
Other tapes may include audio of King having sex with mistresses, and, possibly the conversation he had with the minister who allegedly raped the woman in King’s presence.
When people hear those tapes “even in 2027, coming from a historically important voice — that is going to be shocking.”
Most of Mr. Garrow’s revelations came from FBI agents’ summaries of those audio transcripts that were inadvertently included in the Kennedy files.
Mr. Garrow began looking through the Kennedy files initially to try to uncover the identities of the many informants the FBI used to infiltrate civil rights and activist groups in the 1960s. He has identified some, and hopes additional research will help identify even more.
He said the nearly year-long work of painstakingly sorting through the digital files was difficult.
“It took me two to three weeks just to figure out how to attack the database” the National Archives set up, he said.
The King documents are less than 1% of the 54,000 digital files included in the archive, “but they’re incredibly important,” he said.
Mr. Garrow said one revelation in the FBI documents he found was how pervasive King’s drinking problem was in the 1960s, as the pressure on him as the leader of the civil rights movement mounted.
“The new material makes it clear that the personal toll that King’s public role took upon him was even greater than I ever described in ‘Bearing the Cross’” Mr. Garrow’s 1986 biography of King, he said.
One side effect of that, Mr. Garrow said, was the painful-to-read summaries of King’s sexual liaisons and the disrespect of women, including his wife.
“In all the instances where King engages in bad behavior, he’s drunk,” Mr. Garrow said, though he adds that that is “no excuse for his behavior.”
Another revelation that Mr. Garrow said forced him to change his own opinion involved the allegation that King fathered a child with a mistress.
That story had been rumored for decades, and Mr. Garrow had long dismissed it because the source was former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, one of baseball’s first African-American ballplayers.
“Newcombe had been a complete drunkard,” Mr. Garrow said, and he found the story unreliable.
Newcombe had reached out to the FBI to tell them that he knew that King had fathered a child with a woman who was also married, something he knew because he said the woman’s husband was sterile.
But when Mr. Garrow saw the details in the FBI files, including the timing of King’s alleged affair with the woman, and then checked the child’s birthday in 1964, he started looking more into Newcombe and learned that he had sobered up by 1967 and 1968, when he told the FBI the story about the child. Newcombe died in February.
Then when he noticed that the child later was married in 2003 by King’s closest surviving confidant, Andrew Young, Mr. Garrow decided he had to reconsider the story.
“I remember that moment,” he said of first seeing the details. “I’m looking at a collection of certain facts that now seem more likely than not that Don Newcombe’s story that the child was likely King’s is more likely true.”
In his article this week in Standpoint, a British cultural magazine, Mr. Garrow names the woman and her daughter — both of whom are still alive but did not respond to his requests for an interview — as well as naming the informants he found who had infiltrated the civil rights groups.
He said he contemplated not naming the woman and her daughter, in particular, but decided in the end: “If the government puts documents in the public view, you can’t pretend you didn’t see them.”
Bernice King, the youngest daughter of King and the chief executive of the Atlanta-based King Center, has declined to comment on the article.
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill
First Published: June 1, 2019, 10:00 a.m.
