ROGER SIMON: No Heroes Left — the MLK Revelations.

Is the moral of it all the danger of having heroes?   They will betray us in the end.  That other great paragon on non-violence–Gandhi–had his issues.

At the beginning of this piece, I called these revelations disturbing.  They were more than that for me. I spent the summer of 1966  as a civil rights worker in Sumter, South Carolina living in a rooming house owned by MLK’s cousin, the local mortician. I never met King personally, although I met several family members and saw him speak twice.  He was certainly a hero to me then, probably more than anyone in our history, sad as that is to think now.  He still is for what he believed then and did then, but not for what he was.  Maybe  I should leave it there.  It’s the old Shakespearean dichotomy between the doer and the deed.

Related: “I hope Dr. King remains celebrated; I also hope that his sexual behavior (again, assuming this story is true) is not forgotten. And in the future, when someone on the Left advocates the abolition of Columbus Day, or the taking down of monuments to Washington or Jefferson or many less well-known figures, I hope that people bring up Dr. King, NOT in the spirit of ‘Whataboutism’, but in order to remind them that there is no incompatibility between celebrating the achievements of people in the past and acknowledging that those people had – as we all do – major flaws.”