From Rev. Anthony A.W. Motley, pastor of Atlanta’s Lindsay Street Baptist Church.
I’m sure the Jerusalem Times had a field day with King David and especially his son Solomon. Looking at any of these historical figures’ personal lives through 2019 “#MeToo” novement lenses is to completely ignore the cultural realities of that historical period.
Furthermore, no amount of information, including the very scandalous reports about King David printed right there in the Scriptures, has the least bit of an effect on David’s sterling career and legacy as Israel’s greatest king or as “a man after God’s own heart.”
The same is true with Dr. King! There are no reports of Dr. King ever ordering another man’s assassination like David’s instructions concerning Uriah, or in a fit of anger killing an Egyptian police officer who was brutally beating a Hebrew slave, as did Moses.
Let’s just admit that we all have skeletons in the closet of our own personal lives that must be separated from our professional contributions to history!
What Dr. King did to change the quality of life for all Americans and citizens of the world for the better can only be measured by eternal standards.
David Garrow’s shallow comment that reading about those FBI tapes changed his mind about Dr. King and that he thought that there were 10 to 12 women, rather than 40-plus, completely misses the point. My God, look at the personal lives of Vincent Van Gogh or Leonardo Da Vinci or Thomas Jefferson.
It sounds like David Garrow is playing politics by rethinking his admiration for King in light of these new revelations, to give himself credibility in today’s “#MeToo” environment. No one’s buying that.Shame on him for missing the whole point! We all have “feet of clay.”
From The Washington Post’s Retropolis blog:
Garrow’s willingness to believe that the FBI summaries are accurate is being questioned by other historians. At the time the reports were made, the FBI was engaged in a years-long disinformation campaign to undermine King’s standing and at one point encouraged him to kill himself.
“I would question the veracity of an anonymous, handwritten note on an FBI report,” said Yale historian Glenda Gilmore, who has worked extensively with FBI reports on civil rights activists. Files such as these contain “a great deal of speculation, interpolation from snippets of facts, and outright errors.”
Johns Hopkins University historian Nathan Connolly, who has also examined FBI files, said, "I would be deeply suspicious."
That the allegations "can just be put out there by a historian as if it happened is obviously the height of being archivally irresponsible," Connolly said.
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