It looks the historian has had a change of heart or maybe some $$$,$$$ came his way. It’s probably all very true, but why now.
And the leaker /author/historian could have kept his mouth shut and just wrote a salacious book with these details.
His last book on MLK, Jr had great reviews and he is celebrated as a heavily footnoted and well sourced, according to those who have read “Bearing the Cross”
5.0 out of 5 starsHistorical Literary Saga
(2016) Never before in my life have I read such an outstanding recount of the civil rights movement in America as I have in the pages of David Garrow’s “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “. Garrow doesn’t attempt to make Dr. King into a civil rights “super hero”. Instead, he paints the portrait of a leader who was so committed to championing the causes of the Afro-American.
Garrow brilliantly relates the strengths and weaknesses of MLK. I was left with a much stronger, positive image of Dr. King, while understanding that he was far from being a saintly man, despite his being an ordained preacher. Based on Garrow’s writing, I am left with several deep impressions of Dr. King:
1. He sincerely was dedicated to the concept of nonviolent protest against racial discrimination, segregation, voting rights, civil rights, poverty, and the Vietnam War.
2. King worked himself to the point of illness and total exhaustion to support the causes he believed in.
3. He was a man with a huge heart, willing to listen to those who opposed and attacked him, and giving of his time and energy to those in need of his spiritual support.
4. King understood that the SCLC needed his leadership, but was an ineffective administrator whose unwillingness to sever ties with certain people weakened the organization financially and other non-spiritual matters.
Garrow devotes considerable attention to FBI Directot J.Edgar Hoover. He discusses the wiretaps of Dr. King’s personal and professional phone lines. He writes about his obsession with MLK’s extra-marital affairs. Garrow states that the FBI seemed more interested in Dr. King’s travels than in the constant threat of physical violence directed at Dr. King and the SCLC marchers and demonstrators.
2. King worked himself to the point of illness and total exhaustion to support the causes he believed in.