Stuart Cosgrove: Digging into the explosive smear of Martin Luther King

It was the “kiss-and-tell” adventures of an exiled courtesan and prostitute to the Tory Party. Wellington famously cut short the threat with the now famous retort: “Publish and be damned.”

This week, the term has rattled around the American media in noisy disagreement in the aftermath of an expose of the venerable civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, by his biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David J Garrow. It was jaw-dropping stuff and the publication has unlocked a renewed debate about King’s complex sexual reputation, the politics of feminism and tribal disputes about how the dead should be honoured.

Garrow’s article focused on the now notorious FBI surveillance of King in the mid-1960s and revealed in graphic detail King’s extramarital sexual relationships with dozens of women. The most damaging allegation is that he watched a friend, a Baptist minister, allegedly rape one of his “parishioners”, while King “looked on, laughed and offered advice”.

Garrow published and is now being damned for his decision. It is a controversy with so many different threads that it is impossible to fully disentangle the mess of arguments that the essay has unlocked.

Firstly, there is the “where”. The article was published in the UK-based magazine Standpoint apparently after several better-known American newspapers and magazines turned it down. Standpoint is at best an odd publication to lead on the story. It is usually described as “right-wing” and is the in-house publication of the charity the Social Affairs Unit which, according to its own rubric, “addresses social, economic and cultural issues with an emphasis on the value of personal responsibility’’.

One of the consistent themes of the magazine is to challenge, undermine and ridicule compassionate and centre-left ideals.

Garrow’s article appeared in an edition that carried an excoriating perspective on the disability rights movement and also demonised Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish eco-schoolgirl, accusing her of being the dupe of green corporate lobby groups.

The songwriter Billy Bragg was also belittled and the subject of a blistering attack on the “myths” of folk music. Despite its sometimes refreshing polemics, it is a magazine packed with dyspeptic writers, ageing Tory radicals and desperate attention seekers.

Garrow had every right to publish his expose of King, but I wish he had published it somewhere else, maybe in a publication with a less gleeful attitude to reversing social progress.

Ironically, one of the reasons Garrow ended up at the doors of a conservative British magazine was in part because his feature on King’s sexual past had been rejected in the United States by The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

This in itself has provoked suspicion that mainstream newspapers are reluctant to savage one of the holy-cows of 20th-century history, fearing a backlash from African-American readers and the civil rights establishment.

But the muted response to the story had another explanation – the biggest journalistic totem of all: veracity.

Garrow’s perspective on King’s sex life has never been substantiated and the accusations come from one deeply contaminated source: the FBI, which in the mid-60s was the architect of one of the most disgraced political witch-hunts of the time.

In the mid-60s, the disgraced COINTELPRO operation which sought to infiltrate, undermine and destabilise America’s civil rights and black power movements was at its height and the FBI were playing fast and loose with personal privacy, bugging activists’ homes and their offices. In King’s case, that also included illegally bugging hotel rooms where he was staying.

THERE is much to be curious about, but it does not end with King’s dalliances. It calls into question the polluted rivers that Garrow drew his story from. Dig deeper and you will find that corrosive sex was not confined to secret tapes and illegal bugging of King’s life, but went to the very top of the FBI’s senior directorate. FBI boss J Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual and a troubled voyeur, who used spying on others as a source of power and means of personal gratification.

FBI boss J Edgar Hoover

Only he can answer why the most senior law-enforcement agency in America spent so much time spying on the private lives of citizens. Hypocrisy hung around Hoover like a bodyguard, and so, whatever the merits of Garrow’s investigation, Hoover and his conflicted organisation were not the most trustworthy finger-pointers of the day.

A third dynamic was the opportunity to provoke a war between different factions within liberalism, and this was almost certainly what attracted Standpoint to the story. They anticipated that the story might set two of the biggest movements of our times at each other’s throats – the #MeToo feminists who have persuasively opened our eyes to sexual assault and power harassment in public life, set against the campaign groups around Black Lives Matter who have highlighted modern-day racism in policing and public policy.

Wouldn’t it be great, the conservative mindset wondered, if these two could rip each other apart in a messy and potentially destructive war of values?

Of course, it didn’t quite work like that. The New York Times, who had rejected the original article, commissioned Barbara Ransby, a black feminist, to respond. She wrote: “As a black feminist and a civil rights historian, I do not need to be persuaded that many black male ministers during the civil rights era were morally duplicitous, felt sexually entitled and slept around. So did many Catholic priests, politicians, Hollywood celebrities and some award-winning male academics.”

Ransby then raised another objection to what she considered to be Garrow’s own prurience, channelling the untrustworthy FBI reports: “Consenting sexual activity, even activity that mainstream public opinion might not condone, is the prerogative of the adults involved. Rape, on the other hand, is a violent crime.”

A major problem she saw in Garrow’s essay, apart from the questionable evidence, “is that he fails to adequately distinguish between the two”.

This was not what Standpoint hoped to achieve. They saw a malicious and mischief-making opportunity to drag down the statuesque reputation of Martin Luther King, and therein lies another perspective of this fascinating story.

America is in the midst of a deeply divisive and ideologically polarised view on the statues of the past. Memorials to civil-war veterans that glorify white supremacy and pay civic respect to the defenders of slavery are under divisive scrutiny, raising a moral dilemma: When is a statue a commemoration of dark history, and when is it simply a monument to past events?

Some have raised similar questions of Martin Luther King.

After intense nationwide campaigning, led in part by the Motown star Stevie Wonder, King’s birthday is now a national holiday, and many roads and thoroughfares have been renamed in his honour, not least the section of 125th Street in Harlem that is now Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Are these landmarks and memorials to be placed under the same historic scrutiny? Many opponents of the civil rights movement, who include crude white supremacists and well-heeled right-wing academics, are gearing up for 2027, when the remainder of the FBI’s redacted files on King will be made public. It looks likely to be an ugly revisionist war.

Meanwhile, in a city square in Glasgow, the statue commemorating the Duke of Wellington, the man who gave us the phrase “Publish and be damned”, sits with a traffic cone on his head, a symbol of urban playfulness, drunken revelry and ridiculous military honour.

The passage of time can play endless tricks on greatness.