More and more it's looking like MLK wasn't the saint everyone has always painted him to be.
By The Conversation | Posted June 29, 2019 at 06:15 AM
The other woman: New information comes out about Martin Luther King Jr.'s paramour
By The Conversation | Posted June 29, 2019 at 06:15 AM
In a recent article published in Standpoint Magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biographer David Garrow details new information about King he discovered in FBI documents. The most damaging is that King may have witnessed – and encouraged – a sexual assault at a Washington, D.C. hotel in January 1964.
Some historians have cautioned against taking too much stock of Garrow’s findings; the FBI, after all, has a well-known track record of trying to undermine the beloved civil rights leader.
But in the ensuing controversy, one aspect of Garrow’s explosive, 7,800-word article has gone largely overlooked.
Garrow publishes content from FBI files noting that a woman named Dorothy Cotton was King’s “constant paramour.” He also details FBI wiretaps from 1964 noting that King’s wife, Coretta, “berated” him “for not spending enough time alone with her.” At the time of the phone call, according to the FBI files, King was with Dorothy at a hideaway apartment in Atlanta. Garrow, at one point in his piece, calls Cotton “the most important woman in King’s life.”
The other woman: New information comes out about Martin Luther King Jr.'s paramour