Two MLK Scholars Discuss Explosive, Disputed FBI Files on the Civil-Rights Icon

The historian and former University of Pittsburgh professor David Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed 1986 biography of Martin Luther King Jr. But in the last few weeks, he has drawn intense criticism from the scholarly community after he published a long article in a conservative British magazine that includes some incendiary claims about the civil-rights icon’s legacy. Sifting through a vast trove of newly released government files on King (a prime target for the FBI in the 1960s), Garrow uncovered what he considers to be some damning revelations — the most disturbing of which involves King encouraging the sexual assault of a woman by a minister in a hotel room. Garrow’s treatment of that claim, which hinges on a single FBI agent’s note, has created a firestorm among historians, many of whom have charged him with academic negligence for presenting such a lurid allegation as near-gospel truth with so little hanging on it. (The piece’s provocative headline, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King,” didn’t help, nor did its placement next to an editorial calling King “the Harvey Weinstein of the Civil Rights Movement.”) In response to the outcry, Garrow has defended his methods. Intelligencer spoke with him about the reaction to his article and how he thinks King’s legacy has changed.

Intelligencer also spoke with another King expert: Professor Michael Honey, who teaches civil-rights history at the University of Washington Tacoma and wrote the book “To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.” Honey took strong issue with Garrow’s framing of the newly discovered file. Both interviews are below.

Q&A With David Garrow

You’ve gotten a lot of blowback from historians who say you have irresponsibly framed these explosive allegations against Martin Luther King Jr., that there’s no corroborating evidence for them beyond the single handwritten note that you cite from an FBI agent. And, as you’ve made clear, a lot of mainstream outlets turned down your essay for publication. Has any of this reaction and the fact that you had such difficulty placing it given you pause about the way you’ve handled this material?

I have received 100% support from all King scholars and FBI scholars whom I’ve been in touch with. I have not received a single negative, critical, or hostile email from anyone, either at the email I’ve used for coming up on 15 years now, nor at my publicly listed one. The small number of historians who’ve spoken out on social media do not include any King specialists, nor anyone who’s published extensively on the FBI.

So you’ve gotten universal backing from people you consider experts on King. 

Yes. I’ve gotten somewhere on the order of probably four dozen commendatory supportive emails from academics who I’ve known over the years: King scholars, FBI experts, legal scholars … You know, much of my life has been spent in legal academia. So I’ve been very pleased. And as I said earlier, I have not received a single negative comment from anyone who personally knows me.

You don’t consider any of the people who have written about this, or been quoted in articles, to be King experts?

From the two or three names I’ve seen, no. One person, I know, was the co-author of a book denouncing Hillary Rodham Clinton as a fake feminist, and has, from what I can see, a book forthcoming praising or commending a convicted police killer, JoAnne Chesimard. That’s been the one I’ve seen two, maybe three times. [Editor’s note: Garrow appears to be referring to Rutgers Associate History Professor Donna Murch, who wrote a critique of him in the Guardian.)

You write in your essay that one of the central reasons you find this account of King’s behavior plausible is that the description of it was recorded by an FBI agent in notes that were never meant to be revealed to the public, so there was little incentive for that to embellish what was going on.

Well, the number one thing to emphasize here is that the tape of that assault still exists. If we did not have the original tape and transcripts of that tape, it would be a much more difficult enterprise to figure out how to value [former FBI official] William Sullivan’s personal file on things. But the same file that contains Sullivan’s annotation of this updated report, that he was working on at the time of Dr. King’s murder — that’s the exact same file from which the suicide letter that Sullivan authored, that the FBI sent to King, comes from. So it’s actually an impeccable source. It’s the personal file of the head of FBI Intelligence in the 1960s. And it was conveyed to the Church Committee, the investigating congressional committee, in the 1970s. And it’s the transmission of that document from the FBI and Sullivan’s personal file to the Church Committee that is memorialized in these documents that were posted. I think it’s important to emphasize that the National Archives made these materials publicly available, and they’re available to anyone with an internet connection.

We know that the FBI was out to destroy King and his reputation …

Let me interject there. This piece breaks a crucially important new ground on exactly that matter. Because up until now, the received version was that Sullivan himself, alone, unbeknown to anyone else, arranged for that package to be sent. Now, with this new material, we know that Sullivan’s immediate boss, the number three person in the FBI, Al Belmont, himself handled the package before it was sent to Dr. King. And Sullivan told the headquarter supervisor who personally mailed it that not only Belmont, but [then-Associate Director] Clyde Tolson and J. Edgar Hoover himself all authorized this act. So this ties Hoover, personally, to this incredibly vile act for the very first time. That’s important and newsworthy.

We know that the agency had an agenda. Don’t you think it’s possible that this could have colored an FBI agent’s perceptions to the point that he might have wanted to exaggerate or even make something up, even if it’s in a file that he didn’t think would be revealed to the public?

We also have a public Justice Department report from 1977 from five attorneys in the office of professional responsibility, who listened to the tapes before they were put under court seal, and read the transcripts. And the public-signed report of those five lawyers says that everything that’s in the transcripts is on the tapes. There was also a previous Justice Department internal investigation, carried out by the Civil Rights Division. So two independent Justice Department investigations testified to the accuracy and reliability of those FBI materials.

Does it strike you as odd that the FBI didn’t use this allegation of King being a witness to a rape as evidence, as artillery against him in their campaign to discredit him? Why wouldn’t they have thrown everything they had at him?

What we know for a fact is the two agents listening in as that alleged assault took place, did nothing. They could have called their hotel-manager friends who had you know, helped arrange the surveillance, and said, “send someone to go knock at the door and interrupt this.” They could do that without outing what they were up to. But that didn’t happen. Nor is there any indication in all of these copious files that anyone higher up in the FBI upon learning of what had transpired, thought anything wrong had been done. Now, those are the facts we know. I posed the question to a number of friends, particularly African-American friends, in these past months. Those agents listening in knew that the woman who was being assaulted was black. And my question that I’ve posed privately to friends is, would those agents have behaved differently had the woman whom they were listening to been white? I don’t have an answer for that.

For many years I have been a very outspoken voice, calling for the prosecution and conviction of Malcolm X’s still-living assassin. Going back to 1992, 1993. White law enforcement has never shown any interest in pursuing Malcolm’s actual killer. I believe that this interest is because Malcolm especially back then was looked down upon, and that crime was dismissed as a “black-on-black” crime. think we have a rich historical track record of white law enforcement viewing black-on-black crime as unworthy of their attention.

What will we learn in 2027, when the public finally gets access to files that have been under court-ordered lockdown?

There’s a huge amount of material covered by the court seal. It’s not simply the tapes and transcripts of the hotel-room microphone surveillance that the FBI carried out, it’s also the logs, the sort of hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute summary notes and transcriptions, from the wiretap on Dr. King’s home in Atlanta, and the multi-line switchboard at his office, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Anyone who’s ever seen the logs of an FBI wiretap realizes how totally intrusive that sort of electronic surveillance is, whether it’s targeting Dr. King or targeting some Trump campaign hanger-on. I have a public record of being intensely critical of FBI surveillance activities of American citizens, irrespective of their politics. I consider Edward Snowden perhaps our greatest living American hero.

Another critique that has been directed at your piece centers around the women with whom King is alleged to have these extramarital affairs. One academic quoted in the New York Times said that you demonstrate “no ethical discord about your own role in revealing unsubstantiated accounts about these women, dead or alive.” How do you respond to that? 

I am not the one who’s revealing this. It’s the National Archives who’s revealing this. I’m simply a reporter who’s saying these documents are publicly available. I have privately known the names of many of these women for 40 years. I knew Dorothy Cotton, the most important woman in Dr. King’s life — I spoke with her many times. I never publicly named Dorothy, nor any of the half a dozen other women whose names I’ve long known, until now, until we had federal government putting all this material out in public view at archives dot gov.

You write of King that these allegations “pose so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.” Let’s say for the sake of argument that everything in your article is true. We already know that King’s personal life was turbulent. Would this actually change the way we think of him as a civil-rights icon?

I would say three things. Number one, rape is rape, and I think we’ve seen a sea of change over the past two years in Americans’ understanding about just how widespread the abuse of women by powerful men has been. Not just in the media business in recent years, but at the top of US politics in the 1960s. Number two, come 2027, I think what will be most problematic for people is not the sound of people engaging in sex acts, but so famous and distinctive a voice as Dr. King’s saying some incredibly nasty, unpleasant things, particularly with regard to the then recently deceased president.

In my Standpoint article — I didn’t want to keep harping on it, because it sounds like you’re making an excuse, but I think literally all the time during these different episodes, Dr. King was extremely drunk. We’ve known for 35, 40 years that he certainly had somewhat of a drinking problem by the end of his life. This new material, I think, makes it clear that that binge drinking was occurring at least four to five years earlier as well.

Lastly, I think where the future of scholarship on King will go is toward an even deeper appreciation of how privately troubled he was, because of the burden of his public role. Perhaps my major theme in “Bearing the Cross” 30-plus years ago was that King did not seek out and did not enjoy being a famous public figure. He felt that he had been called and drafted into that role. He wished he could hand off those responsibilities to someone else. And he came, across the course of the 1960s, into an increasingly self-sacrificial understanding of what his life required of him. There are several psychological professionals who have forthcoming book manuscripts on Dr. King, and their unpublished work has had a deep impact on my own understanding of how to interpret this material. But they have professional qualifications in that field, and I don’t.

Q&A With Michael Honey

What’s your overall impression of David Garrow’s essay? And what do you make of the veracity of the claim he’s advancing about Martin Luther King Jr.?

Well, first of all, it’s kind of disturbing that he would report this as if it’s true and verified. I’ve done a lot of research on King, civil rights, and labor history. I’ve got an FBI file of my own from the 1970s, when I was a civil-liberties organizer in the South. And pretty much anybody who has done that kind of research or had that personal experience knows that you can’t accept what an FBI agent says in a written report to J. Edgar Hoover as true.

Over and over again in their summation of things, the FBI gets things wrong. Politically, they don’t understand what’s going on. They’re narrow-minded, and they don’t know the difference between SDS and SNCC, or the New Left and the Old Left. The context for what Garrow is reporting is that J. Edgar Hoover has given them a mission for well over five years by the time King is killed — they were out to destroy King, and also believed, incredibly, that one of the most famous Baptist preachers in the world is a closet communist. And Hoover, once he discovers King’s romantic relationships, claims he’s a pervert and so forth. If you’re an agent in the field, your job is to find stuff that Hoover wants you to find and to give him dirt on King. And the reference that David Garrow’s making in that article about King supposedly standing by while somebody is raped — he’s going off a handwritten note of somebody in the margins of a file, and we don’t even know who made the note. That is not verifiable information.

Garrow says it’s an impeccable source — it was the personal file of William Sullivan, who was head of intelligence at the FBI. 

I don’t think William Sullivan is some paragon of truth. He was one of Hoover’s right-hand men, but so what? I just don’t see why Garrow would accept Sullivan’s or anybody’s word for this. I’ve found FBI material on things I was doing where they totally misinterpreted what was going on. In the King files, you find that as well. I don’t think it’s credible, and the public should not accept it as credible or as any kind of proof. FBI agents had a vested interest in giving Hoover what he wanted, and Garrow knows that better than anybody — he’s the one who wrote the book on it.

Here’s another issue. When people first discovered what the FBI was doing with political surveillance of movements, it was a shock, and sort of outrageous. And now, because we’ve worked with these files for years, it seems like what’s happening is that people are accepting those files as true — which is really a huge mistake. They shouldn’t have been keeping those files in the first place, and they shouldn’t have been wiretapping his hotel room in the first place. That’s private information. I think there’s something really wrong here. We’re waiting for this audio to be published so people can hear it, but it’s not our business. There was no criminal anything that Martin Luther King was doing. There was no reason for these investigations, except to destroy him as a leader. I don’t know if the rest of the files should even be made available to the public in 2027. Why is it our business to know about these private conversations?