Biographer David Garrow has said after gaining access to secret FBI files and recordings, which are sealed form the public until 2027, could lead to a ‘painful historical reckoning’ for civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jnr.
The Pulitzer prize-winning author and biographer of MLK has said that the archives show details of over 40 different affairs with women carried on by the married preacher.
He also listened to a recording of MLK laughing as he watched a friend of his Pastor Logan Kearse raping one of his female parishioners in the Willard Hotel near the White House in January 1964.
King and Kearse can be heard chatting a room with several women present about which of them would be suited for various “natural and unnatural” sex acts as the documentation describes.
The recording details that when one woman objected Kearse immediately and violently raped her as King looked on and laughed as well as offer advice to his friend.
In another remark to Kearse, King suggests founding the “National Association for the Advancement of P**sy Eaters” in a play on the existing National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
Thought FBI agents were in the next room and aware the rape was taking place they were ordered not to intervene so as to avoid revealing the surveillance operation.
King was subject to a in depth surveillance programme ordered by then FBI Director J Edgar Hoover who feared he may have had links to the Communist Party or the Soviet Union.
King was also recorded partaking in a orgy involving over a dozen people and the agents recorded that he engaged in acts of “degeneracy and depravity”.
The FBI later sent a recording of King’s extra marital affairs to himself and his wife encouraging him to commit suicide.
David Garrow said that while King’s philandering has long been suspected he had no idea of “scale of ugliness of it or of his apparent indifference to rape until he saw the files”.
The files also include a statement by a prostitute who claims to have partook in a threesome with King describing it as the worst experience of her life.
There are also suggestions in the files that King fathered a daughter in Los Angeles with one of the women he was having an affair with.
Martin Luther King would be assassinated in 1968 by James Earl Ray but many researchers including King’s family believe that certain elements of the government were involved in the killing, this was after he won significant concessions for the African American community.
In the age of #metoo and ‘Times up’ it is yet to be seen women’s rights activists will call for statues of King to be torn down, streets and schools baring his name to change namesake or possibly even an end to the annual Martin Luther King Jnr Day holiday.
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