#MeToo and Martin Luther King

That Martin Luther King was unfaithful to his wife has long been public knowledge. But new revelations from King’s biographer David Garrow in the Times suggest that King’s sexual behaviour towards women is far more compromising than previously thought.

According to Garrow, the FBI bugged King’s Washington hotel room and recorded him boasting about his sexual misdemeanours in a tone that echoes Donald Trump’s so-called ‘locker room banter’. Worse still, Garrow cites a memo that claims King ‘looked on, laughed and offered advice’ as a Baptist minister friend raped one of his female parishioners.

These allegations are obviously deeply serious; they would have made for shocking reading even before the #MeToo movement brought sexual abuse into the public consciousness. And, if true, they should prompt a dramatic reassessment of Martin Luther King. Why then, as Garrow’s editor alleges, did the left-wing press almost universally shun his story on King, in spite of being offered the chance to publish it some weeks ago?