There were times I knew we were under surveillance by the FBI when we were together. Later, when I tried to get copies of any information the FBI had relating to me, it took four years of repeated requests before I received anything. Officials finally sent me fifty-five of the eighty-two pages in which my name was mentioned. I was unable to get any information about the time period of my involvement with Dr. King. The first entry on the papers I received was dated April 1968, after King’s death. Typed lines on about three-quarters of the pages I received were blacked out. The official explanation for the deletions was that the information was: (1) related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency, (2) could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, or (3) could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source. I do not accept the FBI’s explanations.
Why am I telling all this now? If Dr. King had been an ordinary man, the telling of my story wouldn’t make much difference. However, Dr. King was no ordinary man. His life will be studied by scholars long after I’m gone.
Others have written about me, and the FBI has files relating to my life. Some published accounts differ from what I know to be the truth. In Carl Rowan’s book, Breaking the Barriers, he refers to a 1977 official Justice Department task force report which he said included what was purported to be Mrs. Georgia Davis’s account of what happened the night before King was killed. No one from a Justice Department task force ever interviewed me. I have not made any public statements about what happened until now.
In Ralph David Abernathy’s autobiography, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down, he refers to my relationship with King. I was surprised when I received a call from the Associated Press after Abernathy’s book was released. It had always been my constant fear that one of King’s close associates would talk about our relationship, but I couldn’t believe it was Ralph who had actually done it. Then, when I finally read the account, I was further discouraged that he had not told the whole truth. Ralph was King’s closest friend and confidant. Perhaps, due to his own illness and the toll the intervening years had taken on him, he was no longer able to remember things as they had happened.
When Dr. King’s life is researched, I want the part relating to me to be available in my own words. It is my own history as well, both the good and the bad.
I am writing my story now as honestly as I know how, because I am the only living person who knows exactly what happened.
GEORGIA, WON’T YOU PLEASE SIT DOWN?
“Jimmie, do you see those dark clouds? The world is coming to an end,” I warned my three-year-old brother one day. I was eight.
He looked up, saw the stormy sky, and began to scream, then to run. I was taking care of him and every day when we took our walk, he would dawdle, stopping to pick up glittering rocks, playing in the pudding-like mud, moving at his own slow pace. That day, since I had grown more and more restless, I decided he would move at my pace.
It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that I made such a decision. Of course, I felt ashamed of having scared my little brother, but I never have been a patient person.
Many years later, while seeking election to the Kentucky State Senate, my need to navigate my own course according to my own time table became immediately apparent to friend and foe alike.
I had three big negatives to overcome in my bid for the Senate. Kentucky is largely a rural state and I was from the city of Louisville. I was also Black and no person of color had ever been elected. Finally, Kentucky government was run in the tradition of the Good Ole Boys Club, and I was a woman. However, I was undaunted and plunged ahead.
During my twenty-one years in the Senate, my inability to suffer idle talk was reflected in an admonition very much like the one I had given my little brother: Don’t you see those dark clouds over Kentucky? Why are we wasting so much time when there are so many problems, so much to he done?
I realize now that these are the questions which have dominated and illuminated my life, in and out of politics, from the very beginning.
I was born in a two room wooden shack built by my father in Jimtown, formerly Jim Crow Town, a colored settlement one mile east of Springfield, Kentucky. Poor Black people, mostly sharecropping field hands and by-the-day farm workers, lived in the rural county on small plots of land. Most, like us, had tiny green gardens toward the back of the property where they could raise their own vegetables.
My parents, Ben and Frances Montgomery, had both grown up in rural Kentucky—he in Bloomfield, and she sixteen miles away in Springfield. They were married when he was nineteen and she fifteen; her father had given them the land by dividing his own small plot.
While Pop went out and worked on nearby farms to support us, Mom had babies. First came my brother Joseph Ben, and then me. My parents named me “Georgia Lee,” but the doctor wrote “George” on my birth certificate. This confusion over the male and female versions of my name seems ironic now, an omen of things that were to come. In truth, I never wanted to be a man. I did, however, always want the position, the control, and the power I saw that only men enjoyed. With this mind-set, I was driven by pride and ambition and sometimes tortured by the passions of my heart until, finally, I was validated by a successful career in the White, male-dominated field of politics.
Pop’s mother, Grandma Annie, was married to Joseph Montgomery when Pop was born, but Joseph was not Pop’s father. The truth is, we don’t know for sure who Pop’s father was, but we do know he was a White man. Pop’s Black heritage didn’t show. He had fine, chiseled features and straight, ash-blond hair.
Grandma Annie worked as a cook for Charley Thompson, a prosperous farmer. Some said he was Pop’s father. Others said it was Dr. Ben Gore, a medical doctor for whom Grandma Annie had also worked. Still others said his father was Hal Muir, a wealthy banker who lived in Bloomfield. Grandma Annie never would discuss who actually was Pop’s father, not even with Pop.
Because of the events which followed, I tend to believe that Hal Muir was my grandfather. After Joseph Montgomery died, Grandma Annie couldn’t support her children alone, so she placed them around wherever she could. It tore Grandma Annie apart to give up her children, but poor people, then as now, do what they have to in order to survive.
Pop was seven at the time. He was sent to live with Hal Muir in the Muir’s large, red brick home which sat on acres of land. Pop’s room was in the basement; he lived there until he married my mother.
By the time Pop was twelve, he had learned to fix an automobile and to drive the Muir’s big black sedan. For the next seven years, he drove the Muirs and their four daughters around Bloomfield, where people gossiped that he was Hal Muir’s son.
Though they never lived together as a family again, there was a strong bond of love between Pop and his mother, and he didn’t lose touch with her even though he was living with the Muirs. When I knew Grandma Annie, she was a cook at the old Talbott Tavern Hotel in Bardstown. She wore a white-bibbed apron all the time, at work and on the streets. When we came for a visit, we often found her rocking in her worn mahogany chair on the porch of her little house. Of course, when we went to look for her at the hotel, Pop would go to the back door. Blacks didn’t go through the lobby, and even though other people thought he was White, Pop always knew what he was.
Although Grandma’s own life was hard, her sister, Celia Mudd, was prosperous. Aunt Celia had been a slave owned by the Lankester family. When the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, Aunt Celia was only twelve years old. She stayed with the Lankesters and worked for them until