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These memories of racism from my youth all came flooding back recently as I read a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. In successive years, two long and incisive biographies of King won Pulitzer Prizes: David Garrow's Bearing the Cross in 1987 and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters in 1988. I read Garrow's book. The text runs for 722 pages, and reading it occupied most of my evenings for a week. The experience gave me an odd sense of something like, but not quite, déjà vu.

I was traveling familiar terrain—Selma, Montgomery, Albany, Saint Augustine, Jackson. Garrow presented these names—and I too now view them—as the battlefields of a courageous moral struggle. But when I grew up in the South in the sixties, they represented a geography of siege. The troublemakers from the North, with their federal marshals and carpetbagging ministers, were invading our territory. And the person leading the march in every one of those cities was our number-one public enemy, a native of my own Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr.

What galled me most in those days was King's appropriation of the gospel. He was, after all, an ordained minister, and even my fundamentalist church had to acknowledge the goodness of his father, Daddy King. We had our ways of resolving that cognitive dissonance, of course. We said that King was a cardcarrying Communist, a Marxist agent who merely posed as a minister. (Hadn't Khrushchev, memorized the four Gospels as a youth?) When King came out against the war in Vietnam, that seemed to us to verify our theory.We said that Daddy King had raised Martin right, but that the liberal Crozer Seminary had polluted his mind. He followed the "social gospel," if any gospel at all. (We never asked ourselves what conservative seminary might have accepted Martin's application back then.) And when the rumors about King's sexual immorality surfaced, the case against him was closed. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a fraud, a poseur, not a true Christian.

I discovered that both of the recent biographies of King deal with these accusations in exhaustive detail. Most of the political and sexual rumors can be traced back to leaks from FBI agents, for J. Edgar Hoover had a personal vendetta against King. Yet no evidence exists that King ever had communist sympathies, although he sometimes tired of the injustices under democratic capitalism. True, two of his trusted advisers had belonged to the Communist party years before, but King had friends across the political spectrum.

Allegations of King's sexual immorality, however, are historical fact. The FBI taped numerous episodes in King's hotel rooms, and because of the Freedom of Information Act biographers could study, the transcripts firsthand. After his recent revelations about King's sexual liaisons, Ralph Abernathy was denounced by King supporters for disloyalty, not for lying.

King's moral weaknesses provided a convenient excuse for anyone who wanted to avoid his message. Because of those weaknesses, some Christians may still be tempted to discount the genuineness of his faith. I certainly once dismissed him. (These Christians might want to review the list of outstanding people of faith in Hebrews 11, a list that includes such moral deviants as Noah, Abraham, Samson, and David.) But now I can hardly read a page from King's life, or a paragraph from his speeches, without sensing the centrality of his Christian conviction.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44