“It would make his future hard for him.”īut Betty recalls that time, and the young King, with fondness anyway. “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. Almost all of King’s friends, including Barbour, tried to discourage him from staying with Betty, knowing what an interracial relationship would mean for his future. It worked.įrom the start, Moitz and King’s relationship was anything but carefree. They didn’t, but I left my business card anyway, and eventually, one of those people found someone who might know Betty, and that person sent me an address, to which I sent a letter. That endnote took me on two cross-country flights, spurred dozens of calls to wrong numbers and knocks on countless doors of people I thought might have known Betty. Garrow was the first biographer to discover Betty’s last name, and, fortunately for me, buried it in a heavyweight endnote at the back of the book. As I wrote my own book about King, I wasn’t satisfied with such a short description of such an apparently devastating relationship. In a way, I never recovered from that quote.
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