The Martin Luther King Jr. Sex Tapes

Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife

By Robert Wenzel

There have long been whispers that J. Edgar Hoover, when he was the director of the FBI, had spied on Martin Luther King Jr. including with listening devices that recorded MLK sex romps.

It appears those rumors are true.

According to The Daily Mail,  David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and biographer of MLK, reports that he has seen summaries of tapes which are apparently scheduled for release to the public by the government in 2027.

From The Mail:

The recording from the Willard Hotel near the White House shows how King was accompanied by his friend Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore's Cornerstone Baptist church who died in 1991, along with several female parishioners of his church.

In King's hotel room, the files claim they then 'discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural and unnatural sex acts'.

The FBI document says: 'When one of the women protested that she did not approve, the Baptist minister immediately and forcefully raped her' as King watched.

He is alleged to have 'looked on, laugh and offered advice' during the encounter.

FBI agents were in the room next door but did not intervene.

The following day, King and a dozen others allegedly participated in a 'sex orgy' engaging in 'acts of degeneracy and depravity'.

When one woman showed reluctance, King was allegedly heard saying that performing the act 'would help your soul'....

King's philandering has long been suspected, however Garrow, who spent several months digging through the archive material, said he had no idea of the scale or the ugliness of it and his apparent indifference to rape until he saw the files.

He said: 'It poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.'

No doubt, this is something, that MLK should have had to deal with when facing Mrs. King and also with God, not me. And if rape occurred at the time, well then the woman should have reported it to the authorities. Still, nothing to do with me. This is all private life stuff.

On the other hand, I do have a problem with the public MLK and his focus on using his lectern to call for black men to make demands of government, when. in fact, the black man should have been running away from government and demanding its shrinkage.

The public MLK taught that government was the solution--just a differently directed government. He missed the notion that all government is about coercion of people minding their own business and thus by definition evil.

My thinking is more in line with that of the public Malcolm X. He was often anti-government. He called for black men to be entrepreneurial rather than make demands of government. And he was pro-gun and called for black men to form gun clubs.

Of course, early in his adult life, he was a street pimp.

But when we are dealing with political policy and societal structure, we must debate the proposed policies and political structures and not the character, good or bad, of the advocates of specific policies and political structures.

The Martin Luther King Jr. tapes move focus away from the real problem with King, his hate of freedom which is reflected when he launched into a typical socialist naive rant about capitalism:

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

It is, though, a wonderful thing when you have individuals who are advocates of sound policy and political structure, who are also class acts as men, such as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.