King Reported With Women on Last Night

Martin Luther King Jr. spent part of the night before his assassination with two women and fought with a third, according to the memoirs of the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, his best friend and chief aide.

“And The Walls Came Tumbling Down,” published this month, chronicles Abernathy’s life as a preacher and civil rights activist.

Detailing the night before King’s April 4, 1968, assassination in Memphis, Tenn., Abernathy wrote that after King’s “I have been to the mountaintop” address in Memphis, King, Abernathy and a colleague went to the home of a friend of King’s.

Abernathy said King and the woman came out of the bedroom after 1 a.m., according to an advance copy of the book.

Later, at the Lorraine Motel where King was shot, King got together with a Kentucky state legislator to whom he was close, Abernathy wrote. He added that King did not return to the room he shared with Abernathy until after 7 a.m.

Later that morning, King asked Abernathy to mediate a dispute between King and another young woman King knew well who apparently had come looking for King in the middle of the night and couldn’t find him, the book said.

In an ensuing argument, King shouted at the woman and “knocked her across the bed,” Abernathy wrote.

In his book, Abernathy explained why he felt compelled to write of “my friend’s weakness for women.”

“Much has been written” about the subject, he said, and he wanted to “make some attempt to render justice to the dead without causing too much unnecessary pain to the living.”

King “believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation,” Abernathy wrote.

“He was . . . a man who attracted women, even when he didn’t intend to, and attracted them in droves,” Abernathy added. “He was a hero--the greatest hero of his age--and women are always attracted to a hero.”

Stoney Johnson, a spokesman at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, said he believes that King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and other family members have not yet read Abernathy’s book.