Martin Luther King’s wife was convinced he never cheated on her because he suffered a ‘guilt complex’ that would have made him tell her.
Coretta Scott King said that the civil rights leader was faithful even though the FBI sent her tapes of him having sex with other women.
Mrs King said without a confession from her husband she had a ‘gut feeling’ that their marriage was secure.
Dr King, whose life is celebrated on Monday in the US on Martin Luther King Day, was the subject of a smear campaign by the FBI which put him under intense surveillance.
FBI agents bugged his hotel rooms and attempted to destroy his marriage by sending Mrs King graphic recordings of him with other women.
The tapes were featured in the Oscar-winning film ‘Selma’, about the historic march from the Alabama town led by Dr King.
Mrs King addressed his supposed adultery in a series of interviews with her friend Dr. Barbara Reynolds, which are compiled in a book called ‘My Life, My Love, My Legacy’, which is out in the US Tuesday.
In the book Mrs King bluntly says: ‘The question everyone wants to know is this: Do I believe my husband was unfaithful?’
Mrs King, who was married to her husband for 15 years until his death, told Miss Reynolds that ‘scandal sells books – fidelity does not’.
Mrs King said she believed her husband was ‘no saint’ – but his but his faults were things like stepping out of his pajamas and leaving them on the floor.
The FBI did not share her views and at a press conference in 1964 its director Herbert Hoover called Dr King the ‘most notorious liar in the country’.
A few days later one of his deputies, William Sullivan, wrote a vicious letter to King and gave it to an agent in Miami to post to him in Atlanta.
It became known as the ‘suicide letter’ and called him ‘filthy’ and ‘abnormal’ and urged him to take his own life.
Dr King was shot dead in 1968 by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee in a killing which galvanised the civil rights movement.
Mrs King, who died in 2006, told Miss Reynolds that she did not think that he acted alone and that his death was a conspiracy between the US government, Memphis police and the Mafia.
Mrs King also told Miss Reynolds that she was not very impressed with Dr King the first time they met in the 1940s and thought he ‘looked like a boy’.
Donald Trump has come under fire from Rep John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, who said that he will boycott the Presidential inauguration.
Mr Lewis said that Mr Trump is not a ‘legitimate President’ to which the President-elect hit back that his home district in Georgia was ‘crime-infested’.
Mr Trump cancelled a planned trip to the African American History Museum in Washington today (Mon) due to ‘scheduling issues’.
Source: Daily Mail
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