Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

By this time, King had lowered his personal barriers to Jones, offering him the essential secrets of his private life. Unerringly, King chose to reveal himself to men and women who could absorb the news without developing blisters of uneasiness between themselves and him. They did not scorn him as a fallen preacher, nor lapse into paralyzing discomfort. These were people who tolerated or even applauded King’s demon delights as a humanizing revelation that bonded them even closer to him and his public purpose. Often they accepted King more easily than he accepted himself. They saw sexual adventure as a natural condition of manhood, or of great preachers obsessed by love, or of success, or of Negroes otherwise constrained by the white world, and they objected to King’s mistresses no more than to the scores of concubines who had soothed King David during the composition of his Psalms. Some of them grew tired of King’s insistence that it was a sin, and of his endless cycles from hedonism to self-recrimination and back. In any case, they adjusted—whether by sigh, sly wink, or eager imitation—and such adjustment defined an innermost circle around him: Abernathy, Walker, Young, Jones, Bernard Lee, and a small network of others, mostly preachers. These were his road buddies, the people he could travel with and let go.