Aide Says King Spent Final Night With Two Women

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent parts of the night before his assassination with two women and then fought physically with a third, according to the memoirs of the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, King’s top aide.

“And The Walls Came Tumbling Down,” published this month by Harper & Row, chronicles Abernathy’s life as a preacher and civil rights activist, including his many years as King’s closest friend and confidant in the movement.

Abernathy explains that he felt compelled to write of “my friend’s weakness for women” and devotes a portion of one chapter of the 610-page book to King’s alleged extramarital affairs.

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

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.

Abernathy does not name any women with whom King allegedly was involved. He says extended travels during the civil rights movement were a reason for King’s extramarital liaisons.

Abernathy also praises his friend as the epitome of courage, saying had King “been a coward rather than a truly brave man . . . we might still be riding in the back of buses and eating in segregated restaurants.”

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