Tattletale

Ralph David Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest adviser from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement to the Memphis motel where King was slain. He cradled the dying King in his arms and succeeded him as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Now Abernathy, 63, who was forced out as SCLC's president in 1977, has spilled the most intimate secrets to which his close association made him privy in his autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down.

The book, published by Harper & Row this month, confirms long-circulated reports of King's philandering. According to Abernathy, on the night before the murder of King on April 4, 1968, he consorted with one woman in a private Memphis home, with a second -- a woman legislator from Kentucky -- in his motel, and then got into an early-morning fight with yet a third woman who had been looking for him during the night. King "knocked her across the bed," Abernathy writes.

This account is disputed by Adjua Abi Naantaanbuu, a Memphis barber who acknowledges cooking dinner for Abernathy, King and his assistant, Bernard Lee, on the evening in question. She contends that Abernathy, having fallen unconscious while drinking, occupied her bedroom until about 3:45 a.m., when she and King put an ice pack on his neck to wake him. Said she: "If there was any sex going down in my bedroom, it was by Abernathy himself." The former Kentucky lawmaker, Georgia Powers of Louisville, was at the Lorraine Motel that night but declined to comment.

Abernathy claims that he would have avoided sexual matters "had others not dealt with the matter in such detail." Previous accounts of King's philandering, says Abernathy, have not provided an explanation of his behavior. Abernathy does not do much better, merely observing that King "had a particularly difficult time" fending off women.

Why would Abernathy add an unsavory note to the memory of King's murder? He complains that King's other aides saw him as "no more than an appendage to Martin," so he may have wished to underscore his leading role in SCLC. His declared purpose, however, was "to render justice to the dead without causing too much unnecessary pain to the living."

Many of King's other friends and associates banded together last week to ! demand that Abernathy "repudiate" his account of King's last hours. Among those signing a wire of protest were Jesse Jackson, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and SCLC's current president, Joseph Lowery. They speculated that "to sell books" someone other than Abernathy wrote the offending passages. But Harper & Row spokesman Steve Sorrentino insists that "the book is entirely Abernathy's words." In Memphis on a promotion tour, Abernathy, who has had two strokes and suffers from glaucoma, declared, "I am not a Judas. I have written nothing in malice and omitted nothing out of cowardice."