Martin Luther King Jr. and the love he lost

In 1973 R&B group Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes had a hit single titled The Love I Lost. This song went to number 7 on Billboard's top 100 chart and number 1 on the soul chart. I thought of this tune today after reading a story about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a love he lost from his college days. The tale is quite tragic because there was only one reason 19 year old Dr. King and Betty Moitz could not marry and that is because he was black and she was white. It might sound strange today where people of different backgrounds marry without a second thought but in days gone by interracial dating and marriage was frowned upon.

With all due respect to the late Coretta Scott King and the four children she had with Dr.King, this story needs to be addressed. It is a part of the slain civil rights leader's history and impacts all that took place once this relationship was over. According to Politico contributor Patrick Parr he first read about the couple in a 1986 King biography by David Garrow titled Bearing the Cross. The book details how Martin King and Betty Moitz met when both attended Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania. At the time. King was a divinity student who graduated in May of 1951.

In Bearing the Cross, Garrow quotes a close friend and mentor of Dr. King at the time. Rev. Pius J. Barbour said the relationship had left King as a “man with a broken heart" who never recovered. We know that the civil rights leader later met and married Coretta Scott King. No one truly knows if he carried a torch for Betty and he is not here to tell us. Barbour and other friends of King's at the time warned him that the relationship with a white woman could be dangerous. Patrick Parr wanted to know much more than the tidbits in the book and decided to search for answers. He says his quest took him on two cross-country flights and led to dozens of phone calls to wrong numbers as he searched for Betty Moitz.

He also said that he knocked on a number of doors seeking people who might have known Betty but no one did. He always left his business card and eventually, one individual found someone who might know Ms. Moitz. That person sent Parr an address that he sent a letter to and he got results. Patrick Parr had a year-long correspondence with Betty Moitz and one very long phone conversation in 2016. Moitz said that she and Dr.King were madly in love but she understood why they could not marry.

The couple met when King was a student at Crozier and Betty Moitz’s mother and grandmother both worked as dietitians at the college. The family lived on campus, but Moitz, attended the Moore College of Art. She would visit her mother often and that's how she happened to meet Martin Luther King Jr. who hailed from Atlanta. The couple had to downplay their romance in public and also around Dr.King's sister. ML as Betty referred to King did not want news of the interracial relationship to get back to his mother. This sounds like a lot of pressure when the teens should have simply been enjoying their time together.

Betty shared that she did not notice anyone expressing disapproval of the romance. She said they may have escaped some scrutiny because she had a dark complexion from tanning and dark hair. At one point she was actually told by an African American woman that she could "pass" (for black). In a biography about the civil rights leader in 1964 titled What Manner of Man, author Lerone Bennett, quoted Dr. King as saying the following about Betty: “She liked me and I found myself liking her. But finally I had to tell her resolutely that my plans for the future did not include marriage to a white woman.”

This may sound as if MLK was toying with Ms, Moitz's affections and did not truly care, but this statement could have been a cover to mask his true feelings. He may have desired the relationship to seem casual but there are witnesses who attested to the fact that he was smitten with his college sweetheart. Classmate Marcus Wood said that the more he and others pointed out that a black southern preacher with a white wife would not work, the more King clung to the idea of remaining with Betty.

Another classmate, Horrace Whitaker said he did not like talking to MLK about breaking up with Betty because everyone saw how much he loved her. This is really tragic that two people who cared so much for each other were pulled apart by the attitudes of the times in which they were living. Had King married Betty would the interracial marriage have been an asset or a liability? Would his white wife have been a target by racists or would blacks have rejected the preacher because he did not marry one of his own?

Dr.King died at age 39 in 1968 and Betty Moitz lived to be 89 and passed away in 2018. She reportedly was happily married and had children. Moitz did not say in her interview of she continued to care for the one who got away. We will never know how history would have played out had they been able to act on their feelings and get married. Face to Face Africa posed the question of whether or not it would have mattered if King married Betty and asks how this would have affected the civil rights movement? Perhaos everything played out as it should have but alas we shall never know for sure.