The historian David J. Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for “Bearing the Cross,” his 1986 biography of Martin Luther King Jr. His research and insight into King’s life must be taken seriously.

And what he now has reported about the slain Civil Rights leader is shocking -- and causing historians to debate the value of the new information.

Last week, Garrow published an article in a British magazine stating he had discovered FBI claims that King had witnessed a friend rape a woman. King’s response to the assault, according to recently released government surveillance summaries from the 1960s: he “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”

Some historians have criticized Garrow’s decision to bring attention to the FBI reports, seeing as the bureau at that time was actively trying to discredit King.

To be sure, the Civil Rights leader’s pedestal has received some chips and cracks in the decades since his murder in 1968, including revelations that he had committed adultery. But these new revelations are something else altogether.

Garrow’s report appeared in the British magazine Standpoint, apparently because he couldn’t find a “non-partisan” U.S. publication to publish it. American historians and news outlets are now trying to figure out the best way to approach the stunning allegations.

“What do you do when a great hero is alleged to have done something awful?” Rutgers University history professor David Greenberg wrote in Politico. He added: “It’s easy to wonder if a desire to shield King’s reputation, or to avoid Twitter blowback, could be at work. Even discussions of history, it seems, are becoming ever more politically polarized."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the American publications that declined to publish Garrow’s new research, and it produced a long essay explaining its decision. “What Garrow found was explosive,” wrote deputy managing editor Leroy Chapman Jr. “There was a documented rape King might have witnessed ... Mistresses, prostitutes, orgies and a love child were referenced. King speaking crudely, objectifying women.”

The Journal-Constitution ultimately decided that the FBI summaries were not enough, considering the bureau’s concerted efforts to undermine King. “It was documented long ago,” Chapman pointed out, “that the FBI’s surveillance had produced a recording of King with women that had been delivered to him, accompanied with a message that encouraged King to commit suicide or face exposure.”

Garrow appears convinced that the newly discovered FBI summaries are not disinformation, even though he told the Washington Post two years ago that “the number one thing I’ve learned in 40 years of doing this is just because you see it in a top-secret document ... doesn’t mean it’s all accurate.”

The FBI report that reveals King allegedly witnessed a rape are based on audiotapes from bugs placed in King’s hotel rooms in the 1960s. The tapes themselves remain unavailable to historians and the public. Garrow has not heard them. Many of them may not even exist anymore.

In his report in Standpoint, Garrow dispassionately lays out the FBI’s surveillance of King and what the bureau’s summaries say about it. When one woman “shied away from engaging in an unnatural act,” a summary states of one recorded incident in a hotel room, King supposedly told her it would “help your soul.”

“Garrow’s overall assessment is measured,” Greenberg noted in Politico. “Nowhere does he renounce the esteem for King that can be seen in his three important books on the minister’s life.”

Garrow does state, however, that “without any doubt the uppermost issue raised by the new documents concerns just how fundamental a reconsideration of Martin Luther King’s historical reputation will take place when the complete trove of still-sealed FBI tape recordings and attendant transcripts is released for public review.”

The government recordings on which the summaries are based will remain sealed until 2027.

Read Garrow’s report.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.