Politics came to her rather than the other way around. In 1962, when she was thirty-eight, Louisville mayor Wilson Wyatt recruited her to help with clerical duties in his campaign for governor. She could neither type nor take shorthand well, but Wyatt hired her anyway. In her memoir she would note that she entered politics as the Wyatt campaign’s “token black” to broaden his appeal to African American voters.10 Wyatt lost the election anyhow.
Davis emerged from the Wyatt campaign with an itch for more politics. Over the next few years she worked on campaigns to elect Democratic candidates for governor and mayor. She gained a reputation as a crack political operative, with a savvy that she applied next to the state’s civil rights movement. As head of an advocacy group in Kentucky, the Allied Organization for Civil Rights, she organized protests and lobbied lawmakers to combat racial segregation.
It was Davis’s work as a civil rights activist that led her to King. They did not meet until 1964. Like many Americans, she had become aware of him during the Montgomery bus boycott. She had seen him on television and admired him greatly. Hearing him talk, identifying with his commitment, she perceived a deep connection to her own feelings and convictions.
In March 1964, King came to Kentucky to lead a march and speak at a rally in Frankfort, the state capital. Davis was an organizer of the event to build support for a desegregation bill before the legislature. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson was the other speaker.
Davis and her brother, a funeral home director, met King at the airport. She would recall: “My heart quickened as I saw him move toward us. The first thing I noticed was his small stature. I was surprised. From his image on television or perhaps the one in my own mind, I had envisioned him being taller. His skin was a mahogany brown, and he wore a trimmed mustache above his full, shapely lips. His dark brown eyes looked straight into those of whomever he was addressing.”11
King and Davis rode in her brother’s black funeral limousine to the capital building. On the way Davis briefed King about the pending civil rights bill and the plan for the day’s march and rally. He commended the plan, saying that the key to civil rights progress was a strategy of mass protests and economic boycotts. She would remember being struck by the “clarity of his words and thoughts.”12
In March 1967, King was back in Louisville for an SCLC board meeting. By then Davis had become acquainted with King’s brother A.D., through her civil rights activity. Davis, who was then separated from her second husband, was working as a volunteer with a local civil rights group, the Kentucky Leadership Conference, which operated under the auspices of A.D.’s church.
Without explaining why, A.D. asked Davis to come to his office at the church. “Martin has been thinking about you and wants to meet you at the Rodeway Inn,” she would remember A.D. saying to her.13 She replied, “I’ll think about it.”
She slept with King that night. They would be together several more times. He sent her an airline ticket to join him while he was attending meetings in Chicago. They stayed in an apartment.14 He and Abernathy spent a night at her house in Louisville in May 1967. It was during the Kentucky Derby, when the hotels of Louisville were booked. She asked him to speak to a voter registration rally at the Green Baptist Church on August 3, 1967. He agreed. They were together in Louisville again at that time.15
Years later, when she puzzled over why she had become his lover, she would admit to herself that she was not physically attracted to him. “He just wasn’t my type,” she would say.16 She would say that she enjoyed his company, that he was charming and funny, full of jokes. He would mimic other preachers to hilarious effect. He seemed joyful and relaxed with her.17 She was flattered by his interest in her. She would put it this way: “I was middle-aged and not feeling very attractive when Martin Luther King, the leader of the civil rights movement, the man who fought so valiantly to make the dream of all black people a reality, wanted to be with me.”18
That King would have found her attractive, despite her feeling otherwise, was not surprising. Short, bright-eyed, shapely (she would describe herself as having a “full chest”), she had a winsome smile, a gentle, lilting voice, and a mirthful cackle of a laugh.19 From her King sought a soothing companion, and she must have satisfied that need. “He wanted compassion,” she would say. “He wanted to be cuddled.”20
Yet they retained a certain formality in their manner toward each other. Many of King’s close friends called him Martin or M.L., but she always addressed him as Dr. King. To honor her request, he autographed a copy of his book Where Do We Go from Here. In the inscription he wrote: “To my friend, Georgia Davis, for whom I have great respect and admiration, Martin Luther King, Jr.” When she looked back to her time with him, she would not think of it so much as a love affair but rather as a warm friendship between two people who were fond of each other.
Over the years, King turned to her as a lifeline to help his brother. The two brothers were close. A.D., who was seventeen months younger than King, had been best man at his wedding. But unlike his older brother, A.D. was a troubled soul. He had bowed to his father’s wishes that he become a preacher but did not find it much to his liking. Davis thought that A.D. had a low opinion of himself, an inferiority complex, which she attributed to his living in the shadow of a renowned brother.21 A.D. suffered from chronic alcoholism. When he was on a bender, he would drift into sordid nightspots where a Baptist preacher had no business
