King was on the road when two of their children, Marty and Dexter, had their tonsils removed. Preoccupied by his travel commitments, he did not call home to ask how the surgery had gone.21 Nor was he around much to help Coretta recuperate after the births of each of their four children.22 In years to come she would say that she had yielded to his being absent so much for the greater cause of civil rights. But she admitted, wistfully, her regret at having been deprived a full family life.
Then there was the constant tension over money and the lack of it to buy what she thought they should have. King was a natty dresser but otherwise stuck to a Gandhi-like vow to live plainly. As an advocate for the downtrodden, King thought he should own as little as possible. He wanted few possessions. His cramped, cluttered office at SCLC headquarters on Auburn Street in Atlanta reflected his lack of interest in material trappings. A reporter for the Baltimore Sun visited King in the office in June 1965. He described it as having “dingy green walls and a bare floor.” King sat in a creaky swivel chair behind an old wooden desk.
Had he not denounced riches, he could have been a wealthy man. Honoraria from his speaking engagements poured in at the rate of $200,000 or more a year. But he kept only a tiny fraction for himself. The rest he diverted to the SCLC treasury. He allowed himself an income of $10,000 to $12,000 a year: $4,000 from Ebenezer Church, $2,000 in parsonage allowance, and at most $6,000 in speaker’s fees that he retained for himself. He accepted only a one-dollar annual salary from the SCLC (qualifying his family for a group insurance plan). In spite of Coretta’s strong objection, he donated all of his $54,000 in Nobel Prize money to the movement. She had pleaded with him, vainly, to set aside $20,000 to start a fund for their children’s education.23
Ultimately, he did bow to Coretta’s repeated demands that they own a house rather than rent. In 1965 they bought a modest bungalow on Sunset Street in the lower-middle-class Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta. The house had a two-car garage. But the Kings had just one car, a 1960 Ford, to park in it.
Reports of King’s marital infidelity threatened to fray his relations with Coretta all the more. How much she knew of the allegations is not clear. There is no evidence that she was aware of his affair with Georgia Davis, much less that he had invited her to Memphis.
Had Davis been his only lover outside marriage, he more easily could have kept Coretta in the dark. But there were others, according to various accounts. In his memoir Abernathy acknowledged King’s (and his own) “extramarital relations.”24 King’s two most authoritative biographers, Taylor Branch and David Garrow, claim that King had longtime mistresses, whom they don’t name, in Atlanta and Los Angeles.25
That many women took a fancy to her husband was no surprise to Coretta. It didn’t hurt that he was funny and charming. His effect on women was magnetic and powerful for another reason. In the eyes of some women he was a hero, an eloquent, courageous fighter for African Americans. In her memoir Coretta would quote him, tellingly, as having described women as “hero-worshipers.”26 If hints about her husband’s extramarital dalliances reached Coretta’s ears, she blanked them out. Or so she said, and Abernathy agreed. He would write, “She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.”27 The thoughts might have entered her head anyhow. Without admitting knowledge of King’s philandering, Coretta artfully evaded the issue. As quoted by Garrow, she stated: “If I ever had suspicions . . . I never would have even mentioned them to Martin. I just wouldn’t have burdened him with anything so trivial.”28
Certainly, she could not have been entirely clueless. As far back as 1957, the rumor circulated in Montgomery that he was unfaithful to his wife. That year, the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier newspaper printed a gossipy blurb saying that “a prominent minister in the Deep South, a man who has been making the headlines recently in his fight for civil rights” risked creating a scandal by being caught “in a hotel room with a woman other than his wife.” The man’s identity, though undisclosed, was obvious to many in civil rights circles.29
Years later, an audiotape revealing King’s sexual conduct at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1964, with a woman other than his wife wound up in Coretta’s hands. The tape was the twisted handiwork of the FBI as part of the bureau’s secret, multiyear bugging operation against King. It began as a misguided investigation of King as a communist. It had mutated into an illegal, runaway smear campaign to damage King’s reputation and blackmail him into quitting the movement. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered the tape sent anonymously to the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta.30 Without listening to it, a staff member had forwarded it on to the Kings’ house. Coretta had listened, along with her husband. Later she declared that she could not identify the man caught on the tape as King.31
If doubts about King’s fidelity caused her lasting heartache, she did not admit as much in her memoir. The tone was overwhelmingly reverential toward her husband. In a ghostwritten autobiography based on interviews with her and published in 2017, eleven years after her death, she is quoted as having stated that she did not have a single “instance of proof of Martin’s infidelity.”32
But
