4. King Was a Serial Adulterer
Of course Hoover wouldn’t have had his ammunition against King if the reverend wasn’t such a horn dog. But alas, everyone has their vices, and women were King’s. In a 1989 King biography, his friend and associate Rev. Ralph Abernathy wrote that King believed in the Bible’s prohibition of sex outside of marriage, but he “had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.” According to Abernathy, King spent the last night of his life enjoying the attentions of two lovers, followed by an unpleasant encounter with a third woman he left sprawled across his motel room bed.
Abernathy’s wasn’t the only account of King’s serial adultery. According to Pulitzer prize-winning biographer David Garrow, King’s philandering ways were an open secret among civil rights activists. Some even warned King to rein in his “compulsive sexual athleticism.” But Garrow claims King was unrepentant, telling one associate, “I’m away from home 25 to 27 days a month. F**king’s a form of anxiety reduction.”
Another King biographer, Taylor Branch, claimed that during King’s trip to Norway to collect the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, members of his entourage were discovered chasing after naked or near-naked prostitutes in an Oslo hotel. Branch even claimed that on one of the FBI’s tapes of the happenings in King’s hotel rooms he can be heard shouting, “I’m f**king for God! I’m not a negro tonight!”
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