Jury’s out on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s view of the GLBT community, 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 lesbian people. A 1958 Ebony magazine advice column just might give 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 know about me. What can I do?”
King stressed being gay wasn’t uncommon, but needed “careful attention.”
“The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired,” King wrote. “You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.”
Federal Bureau of Investigations surveillance, writings and speeches do not reveal condemnation of gays and lesbians.
Photo: mlkonline.net
