Mlk gay

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Quinton E. Baker, February 23, 2002. Interview K-0838. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

You knew Martin Luther King. You met Martin Luther King or at least spoke with him.

QUINTON E. BAKER:

Yes.

CHRIS McGINNIS:

Did he ever verbalize or, I guess you could assume acknowledge the role of homosexual people within the black civil rights movement? Because really, I guess when you ran into him, it may have just been strategy sessions and general meetings and that kind of thing.

QUINTON E. BAKER:

Yeah, you know.

CHRIS McGINNIS:

Obviously, one of his people organized the March on Washington.

QUINTON E. BAKER:

Yeah, I know more of his, of the people around him, more so than Doctor King and no I didn't get a meaning. No, I deliberate that the feeling that I got was that Medic King was not very comfortable with the gay people in the movement, and I realize he wasn't very comfortable with Bayard Rustin, and so that is to some

Martin Luther King Jr.’s View on Gay Marriage 

By Jason Carson Wilson

Jury’s out on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s view of the GLBT group, CNN.com reports. King’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, stated in 2005 while campaigning for a constitutional gay marriage ban that she believed he didn’t “take a bullet for same-sex marriage.”

Coretta Scott King—King’s late widow and Bernice’s mother—probably disagreed. Scott King was a gay rights advocate with a gay aide.

Coretta wasn’t the only one with a gay friend. Martin King worked closely with openly gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Rustin is credited with organizing King’s 1963 march on Washington D.C., at which he gave the historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

Aside from King and Rustin’s association, there’s little evidence of the iconic civil rights leader’s attitude about gay and woman loving woman people. A 1958 Ebony magazine advice column just might grant a hint:

“I am a boy,” an anonymous writer wrote King. “But I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls. I don’t want my parents to recognize about me. What can I do?”

King stressed being gay wasn

David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., has unearthed information that may forever change King’s legacy.

In an 8,000-word article published in the British periodical Standpoint Magazine on May 30, 2019, Garrow details the contents of FBI memos he discovered after spending weeks sifting through more than 54,000 documents located on the National Archive’s website. Initially sealed by court order until 2027, the documents ended up being made available in recent months through the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Proceed of 1992.

The most damaging memos describe King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file utter he encouraged the attacker to continue.

King was once thought of as a saint beyond reproach. After his death, it eventually emerged that he was a womanizer.

If these FBI memos are precise – and I possess good reason to think they are – we now have to inquire the unthinkable: Was King an abuser? And what might this mean for his legacy?

Other outlets balk

The FBI files contained some other notable information.

Garrow writes that King may contain fathered a daughter with

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin (right) and Walter Naegle, 1986. Credit: Photo courtesy of Walter Naegle/Estate of Bayard Rustin.

Episode Notes

Bayard Rustin was a champion of the Inky civil rights movement—mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. But because he was same-sex attracted and out, he faced bigotry inside and outside the movement. The FBI and Sen. Strom Thurmond tried to destroy him. But he persisted.

Episode first published January 10, 2019.

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From Eric Marcus: Bayard Rustin was a key behind-the-scenes leader of the Black civil rights movement—a proponent of nonviolent protest, a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the principal organizer of the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And he was gay and open about it, which had everything to do with why he remained in the background and is small known today in comparison to other leaders of the civil rights movement.

My earliest memory of anything having to do with the civil rights movement is indelible, because it’s one of the rare memories I have of my father, who died in 1970. He was lying on the sofa in the living room of our small apartment watching