Examines King’s patriarchy and sexuality within the context of the Black church.
In His Own Words
“And in every one of us, there’s a war going on. It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there’s a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil . . . sometimes we even have to end up crying out with St. Augustine as he said in his Confessions: ‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet.’ We end up crying out with the Apostle Paul, ‘The good that I would I do not: And the evil that I would not, that I do.’ Or we end up having to say with Goethe that ‘there’s enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.’
“I don’t know about you, but I can make a testimony. You don’t need to go out saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all Gods children. But I want to be a good man.”
– from “Unfulfilled Dreams,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, 1968
Women’s Heroic Examples
Strong activist women surrounded King, although he resisted giving them positions of power within his organization. His wife came to the relationship a seasoned peace activist. Rosa Parks, long a fighter against segregation, was active in the movement to get black women registered to vote. Long before King came along, the Women’s Political Council, to which Parks belonged, had determined that a bus boycott could be effectively used to end segregation of public transportation.
All the King’s Women
It was a Tuesday afternoon. Coretta Scott King looked at the stack of mail that routinely came for SCLC and decided to organize the various letters and packets that had piled up haphazardly the past several days. She opened one, a package that contained a letter and a reel of tape. She assumed the tape was of one of Martin’s speeches. Folks always mailed her copies of his speeches; she collected them. Then she read the letter. “You are finished . . . Satan could do no more . . . What incredible evilness.” The letter went on to demand that King do the right thing and commit suicide. Coretta was used to receiving hate mail, but this was horrific. She played the tape.
The FBI had bugged several hotel rooms and had spliced recordings of King as he was engaged in several episodes of marital infidelity. It was an open secret among movement insiders that — as his best friend and right hand in the struggle, Ralph David Abernathy, put it — King “had a woman in every city.”
From the time he was a teen, King was attractive to women. He was a natty dresser and he first honed his considerable verbal skills not in the pulpit, but on lines designed to bowl the girls over. His charisma grew when he became the most famous Negro in America.
But King’s attitude toward women in general was unenlightened, to say the least. In an “Advice for Living” column in Ebony magazine, he advised a woman whose husband was straying to look to herself as the possible cause. He asked whether she nagged or made efforts to be attractive to her husband. He also severely curtailed the contributions that Coretta wanted to make to the movement. Coretta was an avid peace activist in her own right, but her husband’s view that “the primary obligation of the woman is that of motherhood” put her in a role that confined her.
No doubt about it, King had problems with strong women and he felt they had no place in the leadership of the movement. As Ella Baker, one of the few women who was considered a leader in the struggle said: “There would never be any role for me in a leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I’m a woman . . . And second . . . my penchant for speaking honestly . . . would not be well tolerated. The combination of the basic attitude of men, and especially ministers, as to what the role of women in their church set up is — that of taking orders . . .”
Though women did provide vital contributions to the movement — and it is fair to say that there would have been no movement without the tireless efforts of many women — they were almost never recognized for those contributions.
Andrew Young, former U.N. ambassador, congressman, and Atlanta mayor, blamed King’s backward views (even for the times) of women on his mother. She never said anything publicly, Young said, but “she ran Daddy King, she ran the church and she ran Martin, and Martin’s problem in the early days of the movement was directly related to his need to be free of that strong matriarchal influence.” Young unwittingly shows the blame-the-females attitude that permeated the male-dominated black liberation movement and somehow attempts to excuse King’s backward attitudes.
Again, we must look at the paradoxical nature of King’s life. King’s prodigious sexual appetite was nourished within the very church that condemned sex outside of marriage. Sexual license seems to be rampant among religious leaders, white and black. It appears to many that evangelicals, especially, have a tradition of expecting and receiving fleshly favors from women as a reward for doing God’s work.
Marcia L. Dyson, writer and wife of Michael Eric Dyson, says there is a tradition, in Christian churches especially, of “ministers who exploit this power over women and even take it for granted, as if it were an entitlement — sometimes preying on vulnerable and lonely women, at other times seeking out accomplices in sexual misconduct who are quite willing, or at best, self-deceived.” The demands of the movement kept King on the road and away from home 90 percent of his time. The temptations were all but irresistible.
There are those who say that King’s promiscuity and his patriarchal mindset about women — along with his plagiarism, which we’ll discuss later — fatally flawed his character. But Michael Dyson argues that: “Character is undeniably an important ingredient in judging the worth of public figures like King. But character is hardly reducible to personal life. Personal matters surely count in assessing character but so do courage, integrity, sacrifice, and love as they are expressed on the battlefield of public conscience. King possessed these traits in abundance, and arguably, they are the character traits most relevant to judging his effectiveness in the public realm.”
A Closer Look
In his book, I May Not Get There With You, Dyson compares King to hip-hop artists, as well as to Bill Clinton. Though most hip-hop artists like comparing themselves to Malcolm X, they have far more in common with King. Dyson says that although it may seem blasphemous, there is more than a passing similarity between King and, say, Tupac Shakur:
“They both smoked and drank, worked hard, and with their insomnia waged a “war on sleep.” King and Shakur cursed, told lewd jokes, affectionately referred to at least some of their friends as “nigger,” had fierce rivals, grew up in public at the height of their fame, shared women with their friends, were sexually reckless, wanted to be number one in their fields, occasionally hung out with women of ill repute, as youth liked nice clothes and cars, were obsessed with their own deaths, made a living with words, lived under intense scrutiny, allegedly got physical with at least one woman, had their last work published posthumously, and died before reaching their full potential.
“That said, there are also huge differences between King and many hip-hop artists. The most obvious is King’s rejection of violence as a philosophy of life or as a means to freedom. Neither do I mean to suggest that hip-hop artists are engaged in a profound mission to change the world nor to argue that they should receive the sort of tribute paid King.”
The comparison with Clinton is less favorable — to Clinton. Dyson says, and many African Americans agree, that Clinton’s racial politics are more harmful than even Reagan’s. Blacks expected little from Reagan and they were not disappointed. But blacks took Clinton’s ease with them as a sign of good character, when the truth is that Clinton reached out to blacks only when it benefited him.
Assignment: Pitfalls on the Path to the Promised Land
King’s patriarchal viewpoints and his marital infidelities have been used to discount the good that he did. Compare and contrast what we know of King’s infidelities to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and to what you know of John Kennedy’s many extramarital affairs. Conduct Web research to learn more. Write down your opinion of the character issues involved. To what extent does adultery taint a man’s (or woman’s) work on behalf of society?
