Allegedly MLK’s White Girlfriend Speaks Out After All These Years

Those of us who study black history have always heard rumors of an alleged relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. (then known as “ML”) and a white woman in his younger days.

Well, a historian has found this woman and published a book about it, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, which delves more deeply into their relationship ... just in time for the 50th anniversary of King’s murder.

In an excerpt for Politico, Patrick Parr says he’d first been intrigued by this young white woman after reading a 1986 biography of King, Bearing the Cross by David Garrow. In it, Garrow describes a serious love affair between King and this woman named Betty while King was a 19-year-old studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa. (he’d graduated from Morehouse that same year).

Parr quotes the Rev. Pius J. Barbour to have said that King “never recovered” from this relationship and that its unraveling left him a “man with a broken heart.”

In the adapted excerpt, Parr admits that he searched high and low for Betty (last name Moitz), whom he eventually found. He writes:

    From the start, Moitz and King’s relationship was anything but carefree. Almost all of King’s friends, including Reverend Barbour, tried to discourage him from staying with Betty, knowing what an interracial relationship would mean for his future.

    “I thought it was a dangerous situation that could get out of hand, and if it did get out of hand it would smear King,” his Crozer classmate Cyril Pyle recalled in a 1986 interview. “It would make his future hard for him.”

Moitz, who recently died at the age 0f 89, told Parr that she and King were “madly, madly in love, the way young people can fall in love.”

He outlines how the two met—King was a student and Moitz’s grandmother and then mother both worked as dieticians at Crozer. The family lived on campus, and Moitz, who studied at the Moore College of Art, would come to visit her mother often. And that’s where she met a brilliant young man from Atlanta. Who was actually quite conservative in his youth.

“Crozer was known as a very radical religious institution,” she told Parr, “so I was surprised to hear from ML himself [that he] had more conservative beliefs.”

“He would talk, and talk and talk,” Moitz said.

At first they discussed his time in the South and how different it was from the idealized culture within the seminary. He didn’t yet know how but, according to Moitz, “one thing ML knew at age 19 was that he could change the world.”

Parr writes that many of King’s classmates and friends knew of the affair—some supportive (one even saying Moitz was so tan she could “pass”), and some, like Cyril Pyle, his classmate from Panama, not so much: “I knew about it, thought it was bad, but I didn’t want to get involved.”

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