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Commentary vol. 156 no. 1 July-Aug., 2023. Wilfred Reilly, “A Great Man, Warts and All.”.
The New York Times Book Review May 28, 2023, Garner, Dwight. , “The Content of His Character.”. p. 12(L).
New Statesman vol. 152 no. 5718 May 26, 2023, Owolade, Tomiwa. , “The patriotic preacher: Martin Luther King was no saint, but a deep faith in America drove his mission to redeem its soul.”.
The Economist May 13, 2023, , “Martin Luther King was among the greatest Americans—and the most misunderstood.”. p. NA.
Commonweal vol. 150 no. 8 Sept., 2023. Lloyd, Vincent. , “How We Misremember MLK.”.
School Library Journal vol. 66 no. 11 Nov., 2020. Goldstein, Lisa. , “EIG, Jonathan. Some Pigtails.”.
Enough About Me
Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent, King: A Life, which The New York Times hailed as the "definitive" biography of Martin Luther King Jr. King: A Life was awarded the New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is presented annually to the nation's best work of history or biography. King was also nominated for the National Book Award.
Jonathan's previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
He served as consulting producer for the PBS series "Muhammad Ali," which was directed by Ken Burns. Esquire magazine named Ali: A Life one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time.
Jonathan's first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
His fourth book, The Birth of the Pill, will be staged soon as a theatrical production by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago.
Jonathan began his writing career at age 16, working for his hometown newspaper, The Rockland County (N.Y.) Journal News, studied journalism at Northwestern University, and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
He's appeared on the Today Show, NPR's Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But his greatest claim to fame, according to his parents, is that his name once appeared in a Jeopardy question (which was solved correctly for $200).
He lives in Chicago with his wife and children and shares office space with the laundry machines.
QUOTED: "it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older."
"I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater."
Martin Luther King, founding father: Jonathan Eig on his epic new biography
This article is more than 10 months old
A life of Muhammad Ali led the author to his new book, then a prize-winning predecessor played guide and adviser
Charles Kaiser
Sun 21 May 2023 02.00 EDT
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Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr was only published last week, but it has already been hailed by the Washington Post as “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation”. The documentarian Ken Burns described it as “kind of a miracle” and the New York Times declared it “supplants David J Garrow’s [Pulitzer-winning] 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross, as the definitive life of King”.
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In a remarkable act of generosity, Garrow opened his files to Eig and acted as his consultant. Garrow now agrees with other critics, calling Eig’s book “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” and “the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years”.
Eig is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written five other highly regarded books, including bestselling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. This week, Eig chatted about how his book on King came about and what he hopes readers will take from it.
The Guardian: I read somewhere that the new book came out of your work on Ali.
Eig: Yeah, it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older.
The Guardian: When I wrote The Gay Metropolis I started with the oldest people I could find. Did you do that?
Eig: 100%. It was like actuarial tables: factor for age and health and go after those who are the most frail. I hate to be crude about it, but that’s exactly what I did. Basically I was calling everybody all at once.
The Guardian: How long did this one take?
Eig: This one was six years. That’s full-time work, like 60 hours a week for six years.
The Guardian: You had access to thousands of FBI files that weren’t available to previous biographers. How did that come about?
Eig: I got somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 new documents. Donald Trump signed an order to release documents that were gathered during congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination. And I think accidentally that also led to the release of all the MLK FBI stuff, because the Church committee [a 1975-76 Senate panel on government intelligence activities] investigated them both.
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I really think Dave Garrow was the only one who went through every file. I went through a lot of them and Garrow was kind of like the first reader and he would tell me what was important and I, of course, looked through a lot on my own. But I don’t really know that too many other people were out there looking at this stuff.
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The Guardian: You did more than 200 interviews. Why were there so many people who knew King who were much more forthcoming than they had been before?
Eig: Because they were older and because Coretta [Scott King, King’s wife] was gone. They were more comfortable saying things that they wouldn’t have said before. Certainly when it came to talking about Dorothy Cotton [one of King’s mistresses], people were really reluctant to say anything while Coretta was alive.
The Guardian: I always tell my young friends writing a great book is all about what you leave out. Do you agree?
Eig: (chuckling) Yeah. Even at 600-something pages! I left out a lot. At one point – I’ll be honest – I asked Colin Dickerman [his original editor] if I could do a three-volume work. I wanted to do one from childhood to Montgomery and then from Montgomery to maybe Selma and then Selma to death. Wisely, Colin disabused me of that idea. I’m trying to give the reader not just a good book but a readable book. I told my wife, I want people to cry at the end of this book – and they’re not gonna cry if I’ve put them to sleep!
The Guardian: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you wrote your first book, about Lou Gehrig?
Eig: It took me a couple of books to figure out that journalists’ archives are really valuable … When you find a good interview a journalist did with one of your subjects, go to his archives and see if the notes are there, see if the tapes are there.
I got David Halberstam’s notes from his interview with King and he describes King taking his kids to the swimming pool and his daughter falls and scrapes her knee. And King grabs a piece of fried chicken and rubs it on her knee and says, “You know, chicken is the best thing for a cut.” It’s just a sweet little moment that didn’t make Halberstam’s story. But it was in his notebook.
King speaks near the Reflecting Pool in Washington, on 17 May 1957.
View image in fullscreen
King speaks near the Reflecting Pool in Washington on 17 May 1957. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The Guardian: You describe King as one of America’s founding fathers. I’d never seen that before.
Eig: Yeah. It was my idea. It was inspired somewhat by reading some of the 1619 Project. They talk about the idea that Black activists were seeking to force the country to live up to the words of the founding fathers. And that’s what kind of triggered it for me. I think you can make an argument that King more than anyone else is a founding father. He’s trying to create the nation as it was meant to be.
The Guardian: The great Texas journalist Molly Ivins said something similar: “There’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the constitution of the US. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the constitution. They left out poor people and Black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our constitution to everyone in America.”
Eig: Yeah, I, I like that.
The Guardian: What would you most like people to feel from reading your book?
Lyndon Johnson speaks, in August 1967.
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Eig: I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater.
I certainly want people to appreciate just how radical he was. A lot of people reduce him to this very safe figure who was all about peace, love and harmony. But he was challenging us in ways that made a lot of people uncomfortable, which is partly why the FBI came down on him the way they did.
The Guardian: The thing that I think is probably most forgotten about him is that he was as anti-materialism as he was anti-militarism. Would you agree?
Eig: That’s right. And it drove Coretta crazy because he would never even buy nice stuff for the house. And of course he left no money behind when he died. So he took it really seriously.
King is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Jonathan Eig's new biography examines the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
MAY 16, 20235:10 AM ET
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NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to biographer Jonathan Eig about King a Life. "One of the interesting things about King is that he's a protest leader who really does not like conflict," Eig says.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The life of Martin Luther King is one of the most famous in American history. But in that life, one thing is easy to overlook - how young he was. King became a nationally known civil rights leader in his mid-20s. When he gave the famous "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington in 1963, he was in his early 30s, though his voice suggested the gravity of long experience.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history.
INSKEEP: We know that cadence, the drawn-out words precisely pronounced, the pauses between each phrase. The biographer, Jonathan Eig, found a recording of a voice with a similar cadence, one that King grew up hearing. It's an oral history of his father, Martin Luther King Sr.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARTIN LUTHER KING SR: I was born in the midst of segregation at its height. And I was able to see many injustices leveled upon my people.
INSKEEP: Jonathan Eig spends a lot of time on Martin Luther King Jr's youth in his biography "King: A Life." We learned that King's father grew up with a different name, Michael King, and adopted the name that his son later made famous. It was part of the father's self-invention after growing up as a sharecropper's son.
JONATHAN EIG: He's working on a farm. His father and mother are stuck in poverty, unable to escape the white landowner in Stockbridge, Ga., and Martin Luther King Sr., at age 12, walks barefoot out of Stockbridge toward Atlanta to make himself a new life and begins teaching himself to read and write, setting the groundwork to become a preacher, to become an activist and to raise one of the greatest activists in American history.
INSKEEP: What did it mean that Martin Luther King Jr., unlike his father, was able to grow up in relative prosperity in a prosperous part of Black Atlanta?
EIG: One of Dr. King's friends told me that he thought Martin Luther King's - was really exceptional in that he did not seem to be bruised by racism in quite the same way that so many of his peers were. He had a little bit of a buffer, growing up on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, growing up in this preacher's family. You know, he had a bicycle. He had a pet. He had a dog. He lived in relative comfort. And because his family was so prominent, he was able to see a lot more opportunity than maybe some other people who were going to school with him had at that time.
INSKEEP: What were some aspects of the father's character that deeply affected the son?
EIG: Well, he was a very difficult man. He was very stubborn. He was violent at times. He - you know, he used the belt to spank his children in public sometimes, out in the yard. And if one of the neighbors came by and yelled, he'd spank that kid, too. So he was a difficult man who set very high standards for all three kids. And he also really was overly protective. And when Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott and his home was bombed, Martin Luther King Sr. was there the next day saying, you're coming home with me. I'm not letting you stay here in this kind of - risk your life in this danger. And it was very difficult for Martin Luther King Jr. to stand up to his father. He struggled with that all his life.
INSKEEP: Is that something that affected his approach to people later on?
EIG: It really did. One of the interesting things about King is that he's a protest leader who really does not like conflict. He is always going out of his way to avoid conflict with people who are his elders, who seem to be his superiors in some ways, people like Roy Wilkins at the NAACP or A. Philip Randolph. And then that plays out, too, when he becomes a negotiator with presidents. And he really doesn't like conflict. He has to push himself really out of his comfort zone to argue, to debate, to really challenge some of the leaders of this country.
INSKEEP: I'm amazed at the amount of education this young man sought at such a young age, given that his father had had virtually none.
EIG: Right. He skipped grades and went to Morehouse, you know, two or three years younger than most of his classmates, then went to seminary and went to get his doctorate at Boston University, always the youngest in his class. And his father really was against it. His father thought to be a preacher, you don't need all that education. Morehouse was enough, Daddy King thought. But Martin always wanted to exceed his father. He wasn't comfortable with the way his father preached. He didn't like the emotionalism. He didn't like that country-style preaching. And young Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to show that he could go beyond, just like most of us want to go beyond our - you know, our parents. We want to see, you know, how far we can go beyond what they've established for us, right?
INSKEEP: How did King Jr. emerge as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955?
EIG: This is one of the miraculous moments in American history where the right person happens to be in the right place at the right time. And Martin Luther King Jr. was not looking to become a leader. He was looking to get his church in shape and perhaps move on to a bigger church or to a job as a college professor. But when the Montgomery bus boycott began, they were looking for somebody who could serve as the spokesman. He wasn't even asked to become the president yet. He was just asked to be the spokesman because he hadn't been around long enough to make enemies. So people thought he might be able to unite the community, and they already knew that he was a terrific speaker. So King steps up to the podium at Holt Street Baptist Church on December 5, 1955, and gives this incredible speech. And it's the first time that most people in Montgomery have heard him. And suddenly he inspires them in a way that is just profound. They're ready to walk. They're ready to march. They're ready to do it as long as required.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KING JR: If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.
(APPLAUSE)
KING JR: If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.
(APPLAUSE)
INSKEEP: I'm just thinking of the pressure this person then faced in the years that followed - seen as the representative in some ways of an entire race, under FBI investigation, under threat, under violent threat, repeatedly arrested, finally assassinated. What, if anything, in his youth prepared him to withstand that pressure?
EIG: The Bible. I'd have to say it was his faith in God. And he said it over and over again, that God called on him to do this, that called on all of us to live up to the words of the teachings in the Bible, that we're here to serve God. We're here to try to make the world a better place, and it's not about ourselves. And that's not to say he didn't feel the pressure. He was hospitalized for depression numerous times. And he suffered. He knew that his own government was out to destroy him. They were tapping his phones. They were listening to his conversations in hotel rooms. He still did the work, and he still doubled down. He never backed off of his convictions. He stuck to what he believed in and was willing to risk everything for it.
INSKEEP: Jonathan Eig is the author of the new biography "King: A Life." Thanks so much.
EIG: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jonathan Eig
Eig in 2019
Eig in 2019
Born April 26, 1964 (age 59)
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Occupation
Journalistbiographer
Alma mater Northwestern University
Subjects
American historysports
Spouse Jennifer Tescher
Children 3
Jonathan Eig (US: /ˈaɪɡ/; born April 26, 1964) is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.[1]
Biography
Eig was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Monsey, New York. He is Jewish.[2] His father was an accountant and his mother was a stay-at-home mom and community activist. Eig began working for his hometown newspaper when he was 16. He attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1986 with a bachelor's degree. After college he worked as a news reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Eig has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago and lectures at Northwestern. He has written as a freelancer for many outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and online edition of The New Yorker. He is married to Jennifer Tescher and has three children. He lives in Chicago.
Eig appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in May 2010.[3] He has appeared in three PBS documentaries—Prohibition, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali—made by Ken Burns and Florentine Films. [4]
In 2016, Eig appeared on AMC's The Making of the Mob: Chicago, talking about Al Capone.
Reception
In 2019, Men's Health magazine named Eig's book Ali: A Life the 23rd best sports book of all time.[5] In 2020, Esquire magazine called Ali one of the 35 best sports books ever written.[6] Esquire also called Eig's book Luckiest Man one of the 100 best baseball books of all time.[7]
Eig's first book was Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005). Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season was his second book. For his third book, Get Capone, Eig discovered thousands of pages of never-before-reported government documents on the government's case against Capone. The Birth of the Pill (2014), Eig's fourth book, told the story of the renegades who invented the first oral contraceptive.[citation needed]
In a 2017 review of Ali: A Life, Joyce Carol Oates, writing for The New York Times, said: "This richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time in our beleaguered American history…. As Muhammad Ali's life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography. Much in its pages will be familiar to those with some knowledge of boxing but even the familiar may be glimpsed from a new perspective in Eig's fluent prose; for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel — a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters who prevail through decades and who help to define the singular individual who was both a brilliantly innovative, incomparably charismatic heavyweight boxer and a public figure whose iconic significance shifted radically through the decades as in an unlikely fairy tale in which the most despised athlete in American history becomes, by the 21st century, the most beloved athlete in American history."[8]
In 2023, Eig published a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., King: A Life. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Dwight Garner stated that it "supplants David J. Garrow's 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King".[1]
Published works
Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005)
Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (2007)
Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster (2010)
The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (2014)
Ali: A Life (2017)
King: A Life (2023)
Awards
2005: Casey Award for best baseball book of the year, Luckiest Man[9]
2014:: Washington Post "Best Books of the Year" for The Birth of the Pill[10]
2015: Society of Midland Authors, non-fiction book of the year, The Birth of the Pill[citation needed]
2017: NAACP Image Awards, finalist, Ali: A Life[11]
2017: William Hill Sports Book of the Year, best sports book, finalist, Ali: A Life[12]
2018: Plutarch Award, best biography, finalist, Ali: A Life[13]
2018: PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, Literary Sports Writing, winner for Ali: A Life[14][15][16]
2018: The Times Biography of the Year], Sports Book Awards, London, for Ali: A Life[17]
2018: Sports Book of the Year, British Sports Book Awards, for Ali: A Life[18]
2018: New York Times Notable Book, for Ali: A Life
2023: New York Times Notable Book, for King: A Life
2023: National Book Awards, long list for King: A Life
2023: National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, finalist for King: A Life[19]
2024: New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize for King: A Life[20]
QUOTED: "King ... is worth reading."
King, a Life
By JONATHAN EIG Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 669 pages
IN HIS NEW biography of Martin Luther King, the journalist Jonathan Eig promises to focus on telling the story of the man and not the icon. King does, of course, go into great detail on the triumphs of the civil-rights movement. The successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which kicked off King's career as an activist in 1956, is the almost sole focus of chapters 14 to 17. The book also features a long and sympathetic account of the early 1960s freedom rides and the lunch-counter sit-ins. From Brown v. Board in 1954 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Eig documents one of the epochal eras of American history with depth and even some poetry as King details the way in which this consensus national hero worked his will and made his mark. But it is to Eig's credit that his 669-page tome also includes a good deal of controversial and negative material largely absent from the MLK biographies I was assigned as a college man two decades ago. Perhaps most notably, King's long-running problem with plagiarism is tackled openly and honestly. This issue was, apparently, far longer in duration and more serious than I had previously known. According to Eig and his sources, King "borrowed" his first sermon, at Atlanta's legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church, from a text by then-popular preacher and motivational speaker Harry E. Fosdick. The recovered Fosdick monograph is titled "Life Is What We Make It." King's sermon was called "Life Is What You Make It." Essentially the same thing was true of King's first major paper at Crozer, his seminary in Pennsylvania. In one passage, the young divine copies "all but one word" from a passage in the theological text Prophecy and Religion.
As has been known (if only selectively reported) since 1990, King's dissertation did not break from this unfortunate pattern. "Substantial portions were plagiarized," with most of the stand-out introduction "copied... verbatim from a book called The Theology of Paul Tillich." A different 50 to 60 sentences were directly copied from a thesis written at the same institution (Boston University's Divinity School) just three years earlier.
Rather remarkably, King and the earlier writer (a Dr. Boozer) not only knew each other but had the same primary dissertation adviser, who apparently noticed none of this. King seems to have toned down the plagiarism in later years after finding his own voice, and how it should affect King's standing among intellectuals is up to each scholar to decide for herself. But Eig forthrightly provides the tools needed to make that decision.
Eig also goes into King's adventures with women, featuring a female friend of MLK's at one point describing his approach to dating and sex as akin to "a competitive sport." In this, it should be noted, King appears to have been a fairly typical high-status man of his time. The 1950s-'70s Mad Men era was a boom time for male philandering. Eig follows many others before him in establishing the context here, bluntly describing how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson chased (and caught) women beside their wives at a far faster pace than his biographical subject.
Eig is careful to show the ways in which King was indeed a man of his time. For example, while he was relatively enlightened for a pre-Griswold v. Connecticut Southern Baptist minister, King was no feminist and strongly disapproved of women working. On one occasion, he noted, 'When a woman has to work, she does violence to motherhood... depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection." King thought even of his own wife, the brilliant and conservatory-educated Coretta Scott King, largely in these terms, "primarily in terms of being a home-maker and a mother." The great man certainly did not keep these opinions close to the vest, writing a witty agony-aunt advice column for Ebony at one point that would be un-publishably non-PC by today's standards--and which was full of advice that the hard right today would unironically adore.
For example, the late-1950s King told a woman with a wayward spouse not only to seek counseling rather than divorce but also "to consider what role" her own nagging and complaining played in the affair. King was also a homophobe. Contacted by a gay man, he told the desperate young fellow that his feelings were "culturally acquired" rather than "innate" and were a serious "problem"--and again recommended a stringent course of therapy.
All that said, Eig's biography is not primarily a negative one. "Martin Luther King did a lot of good things" may be among the least controversial statements of all time. Eig not only makes the accurate point that MLK's civil-rights revolution was a national triumph of which all Americans can and should be proud; he also (intentionally or not) contrasts it with the very different "woke" movement of today.
Unlike modern self-declared social-justice warriors, who often seem to despise Western culture, the leading activists of King's era are depicted as high-IQ preachers and lawyers who saw the United States of their time as a racially unfair but fundamentally good society. What they wanted, in a word, was in: a chance to enjoy the benefits of post-World War II American freedom to the same extent as their countrymen. By today's standards, the life-worlds that produced these men (and women) and these desires were often staggeringly normal and bourgeois.
While Eig's book at no point minimizes racism--how could it?--a young Martin Luther King is described as having grown up in a middle-class black Atlanta community that billed itself as "Sweet Auburn: the (best) Negro street in the world." The headquarters buildings of the Atlanta Daily World, one of the first and most successful black newspapers, were nearby. So were at least two solidly performing black colleges.
Perhaps most notably, to modern eyes, the huge majority of families included two married parents. Recall that the "shocking" 1963 rate of black illegitimacy that prompted Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his eponymous Report in 1965 was 23 percent; today's figures are 35 percent for whites and a bit over 70 percent for blacks. MLK is described as "fortunate to have grown up in a loving household, with educated parents in a stable marriage." He was by no means alone: On his block and throughout this entire area of Atlanta, male heads of household were "business owners," porters for the still-novel national railroads and airlines, and upper servants--all expected to remain married to their wives and to support their families. The pillar-of-the-community church pastored by the father of Martin Luther King Jr. offered a full-service day care for families in which both parents did choose or were forced to work. King's Sweet Auburn sounds, in many ways, like a better and more stable place than many black--and not a few white--'hoods today. The black men and women who emerged from this early-modern United States--MLK first among them--were, in the huge majority, functional and honest tax-paying citizens who demanded their due place at the general American table, not its reduction to kindling.
Interestingly, many of King's more extreme later-life views seem to have been shaped not by his upbringing in black communities but rather by radical white advisers, such as Stan Levison, a probable Communist whom the FBI thought "did not turn up at (King's) elbow by happenstance." In a darkly hilarious moment chronicled by Eig, Levison critiques the portion of one of King's books dealing with "Negro self-improvement." This simply should not be a chapter, the white activist argued (mostly successfully).
"Rather than urging Negroes to 'hold up the mirror'" and pursue character development, "Stan" argued that the total focus of the movement should be on laws mandating social equality. "Few people understand" that--for example--relatively high levels of black illegitimacy are entirely the down-river effect of slavery, went Levison's pitch. This argument, which happens to be empirically wrong, is still heard almost verbatim today. It is a pity that King heeded it.
All told, Martin Luther King was not a perfect man. He was sometimes ill-advised, unchaste (in his terms) with women, and, let us say, poor at crediting primary sources on the note cards for his books and speeches. But he nevertheless was the Essential Man when it came to the rights revolution inside the United States, something Eig illustrates well. As with Washington and Lincoln (who liked the ladies, too), and King's friend Bayard Rustin (who did not), we should understand the human inside the legend--but not tear down the statues anytime soon.
King sums all of this up and is worth reading.
Reviewed by WILFRED REILLY
WILFRED REILLY, a political science professor at Kentucky State University, is the author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Reilly, Wilfred. "A Great Man, Warts and All." Commentary, vol. 156, no. 1, July-Aug. 2023, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A757241678/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=51e940c6. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait."
"Eig's book is worthy of its subject."
KING: A Life, by Jonathan Eig
Growing up, he was called Little Mike, after his father, the Baptist minister Michael King. Later he sometimes went by M.L. Only in college did he drop his first name and began to introduce himself as Martin Luther King Jr. This was after his father visited Germany and, inspired by accounts of the reform-minded 16th-century friar Martin Luther, adopted his name.
King Jr. was born in 1929. Were he alive he would be 94, the same age as Noam Chomsky. The prosperous King family lived on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. One writer, quoted by Jonathan Eig in his supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable new biography, ''King: A Life,'' called it ''the richest Negro street in the world.''
Eig's is the first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. Garrow's 1986 biography ''Bearing the Cross'' as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently in The Spectator. It also updates the material in Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy about America during the King years.
King and his two siblings had the trappings of middle-class life in Atlanta: bicycles, a dog, allowances. But they were sickly aware of the racism that made white people shun them, that kept them out of most of the city's parks and swimming pools, among other degradations.
Their father expected a lot from his children. He had a temper. He was a stern disciplinarian who spanked with a belt. Their mother was a calmer, sweeter, more stable presence. King would inherit qualities from both.
One of the stranger moments in King's childhood, and thus in American history, occurred on Dec. 15, 1939. That was the night Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and other Hollywood stars converged on Atlanta for the premiere of ''Gone With the Wind,'' the highly anticipated film version of Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel.
''Gone With the Wind'' was already controversial in the Black community for its placid and romantic depiction of slavery. To the dismay of some of his peers, King's father allowed his church's choir to perform at the premiere. It was only a movie, he thought, and not an entirely inaccurate one. Choir members wore slave costumes, their heads wrapped with cloth. ''Martin Luther King Jr., dressed as a young slave, sat in the choir's first row, singing along,'' Eig writes.
King was a sensitive child. When things upset him, he twice tried to commit suicide, if halfheartedly, by leaping out of a second-story window of his house. (Both times, he wasn't seriously hurt.) He was bright and skipped several grades in school. He thought he might be a doctor or a lawyer; the high emotion in church embarrassed him.
When he arrived in 1944 at nearby Morehouse College, one of the most distinguished all-Black, all-male colleges in America, he was 15 and short for his age. He picked up the nickname Runt. He majored in sociology. He read Henry David Thoreau's essay ''Civil Disobedience'' and it was a vital early influence. He began to think about life as a minister, and he practiced his sermons in front of a mirror.
He was small, but he was a natty dresser and possessed a trim mustache and a dazzling smile. Women were already throwing themselves at him, and they would never stop doing so.
He attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he fell in love with and nearly married a white woman, but that would have ended any hope of becoming a minister in the South. Eig, who has also written artful biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, describes how several young women attended King's graduation from Crozer and how -- as if in a scene from a Feydeau farce -- each expected to be introduced to his parents as his fiancȨe.
King then pursued a doctorate at Boston University. (He nearly went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland instead, a notion that is mind-bending to contemplate.) He was said to be the most eligible young Black man in the city.
In Boston he fell in love with Coretta Scott, he said, over the course of a single telephone call. She had attended Antioch College in Ohio and was studying voice at the New England Conservatory; she hoped to become a concert singer. Their love story is beautifully related. They were married in Alabama, at the Scott family's home near Marion. They spent the first night of their marriage in the guest bedroom of a funeral parlor, because no local hotel would accommodate them.
The Kings moved to Montgomery, Ala., in 1954, when he took over as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. A year later, a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to white passengers on a Montgomery bus. Thus began the Montgomery bus boycott, an action that established the city as a crucible of the civil rights movement. The young pastor was about to rise to a great occasion, and to step into history.
''As I watched them,'' he wrote about the men and women who participated in the long and difficult boycott, ''I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.''
By this point in ''King: A Life,'' Eig has established his voice. It's a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current. He does not dispense two-dollar words; he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum; he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him.
By the time we've reached Montgomery, King's reputation has been flyspecked. Eig flies low over his penchant for plagiarism, in academic papers and elsewhere. (King was a synthesizer of ideas, not an original scholar.) His womanizing only got worse over the years. This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait.
Many readers will be familiar with what follows: the long fight in Montgomery, in which the world came to realize that this wasn't merely about bus seats, and it wasn't merely Montgomery's problem. Later, the whole world was watching as Bull Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, sicced police dogs on peaceful protesters. In prison, King would compose what is now known as ''The Letter From Birmingham Jail'' on napkins, toilet paper and in the margins of newspapers. Later came the 1963 March on Washington and King's partly improvised ''I Have a Dream'' speech.
During these years, King was imprisoned on 29 separate occasions. He never got used to it. He had shotguns fired into his family's house. Bombs were found on his porch. Crosses were burned on his lawn. He was punched in the face more than once. In 1958, in Harlem, he was stabbed in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. He was told that had he even sneezed before doctors could remove it, he might have died.
Eig is adept at weaving in other characters, and other voices. He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC, and of men like Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy. He shows how King was too progressive for some, and vastly too conservative for others, Malcolm X central among them.
As this book moves into its final third, you sense the author echolocating between two other major biographies, Robert Caro's multivolume life of Lyndon Johnson and Beverly Gage's powerful recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director.
King's relationships with John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were complicated; his relationship with Johnson was even more so. King and Johnson were driven apart when King began to speak out against the Vietnam War, which Johnson considered a betrayal.
The details about Hoover's relentless pursuit of King, via wiretaps and other methods, are repulsive. American law enforcement was more interested in tarring King with whatever they could dig up than in protecting him. Hoover tried to paint him as a communist; he wasn't one.
King was under constant surveillance. Hoover's F.B.I. agents bugged his hotel rooms and reported that he was having sex with many women, in many cities; Çîthey tried to drive him to suicide by threatening to release the tapes. King, in one bureau report, is said to have ''participated in a sex orgy.'' There is also an allegation, about which Eig is dubious, that King looked on during a rape. Complete F.B.I. recordings and transcripts are scheduled to be released in 2027.
Eig catches King in private moments. He had health issues; the stresses of his life aged him prematurely. He rarely got enough sleep, but he didn't seem to need it. Writing about his demeanor in general, the writer Louis Lomax called King the ''foremost interpreter of the Negro's tiredness.''
King loved good Southern food and ate like a country boy. When the meal was especially delicious, he liked to eat with his hands. He argued, laughing, that utensils only got in the way.
Once, when his daughter skinned her knee by a swimming pool, he took a piece of fried chicken and jokingly pretended to apply it to the wound. ''Let's put some fried chicken on that,'' he said. ''Yes, a little piece of chicken, that's always the best thing for a cut.''
Eig has read everything, from W.E.B Du Bois through Norman Mailer and Murray Kempton and Caro and Gage. He argues that we have sometimes mistaken King's nonviolence for passivity. He doesn't put King on the couch, but he considers the lifelong guilt King felt about his privileged upbringing, and how he was driven by competitiveness with his father, who had moral failures of his own.
He lingers on the cadences of King's speeches, explaining how he learned to work his audience, to stretch and rouse them at the same time. He had the best material on his side, and he knew it. Eig puts it this way: ''Here was a man building a reform movement on the most American of pillars: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the American dream.''
Eig's book is worthy of its subject.
Audio produced by Kate Winslett.
KING: A Life | By Jonathan Eig | Illustrated | 669 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for the Times since 2008. His new book, ''The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading,'' is out this fall. Audio produced by Kate Winslett.
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PHOTO: Martin Luther King Jr. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE TAMES/THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR12, BR13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The New York Times Company
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Garner, Dwight. "The Content of His Character." The New York Times Book Review, 28 May 2023, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A750921954/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61e958fd. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Jonathan Eig's biography of King gives us the person, not the icon."
"He was an imperfect man, but as this book convincingly shows--he was also a great one."
King: The Life of Martin Luther King
Jonathan Eig
Simon & Schuster, 688pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
More than 100 schools in the US are named after Martin Luther King Jr. His statue stands next to the National Mall in Washington DC, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. In 1983 Ronald Reagan approved an annual national holiday that marks King's birthday on 15 January.
King was not only canonised posthumously; he was intermittently cherished in his lifetime. In December 1963 he was named Time magazine's Man of the Year. A year later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: aged 35, he was the youngest person to receive the prize, and the second black American (after the UN mediator Ralph Bunche). In a 1964 Gallup poll the American public viewed King as the fourth most-admired man in the world, behind Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower.
But by 1966 his name had slipped out of the top ten, and 63 per cent of those Gallup surveyed that year viewed him negatively. Most Americans supported the Vietnam War, but King vociferously opposed it. The civil rights movement, which he led with great moral probity, was increasingly seen as an excuse for rioting and mindless violence. Files declassified in 2017 and 2018 showed that King was not a saint but a man who had extramarital affairs; they also showed he was treated with deep suspicion by J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Jonathan Eig's biography of King gives us the person, not the icon. King's grandfather Jim King never learned to read or write, never owned property and never voted. By the time King's father was born in 1899, the Jim Crow laws--which mandated the separation of the races in schools, hospitals, theatres, hotels and prisons, on public transport and at water fountains--were already firmly established across the American South. Under Jim Crow, all the services reserved for black people were markedly inferior. Between 1885 and 1930 more than 4,000 black people were lynched.
King grew up in a middle-class household, but as a black boy he was forbidden from swimming in the public pools or playing in the parks of his home city, Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Martin Luther King Sr, was a Baptist minister; so too was his maternal grandfather AD Williams. Both of these men presided over the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. As Eig writes, "Black Baptists outnumbered white Baptists in Georgia. Black culture and black political activism rose from the pews and pulpits of the black church."
This proved crucial to King's identity and trajectory: "Black Baptist preachers," says Eig, "frequently imparted the radical message that all people were free and equal under God's laws ... that the racial hierarchies invented by men to justify slavery were false and craven, that the savagery of the Ku Klux Klan and the segregation laws of the South were abominations in the eyes of God, and that God would never love one group of people more than another based on the colour of their skin."
At 15, King enrolled at Morehouse College, where Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" provided his first encounter with the theory of nonviolent resistance, a philosophy that would underpin his activism. King delivered his first sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1947 when he was 18, and a year later he was formally ordained and became an assistant pastor there. But he had wider horizons.
At Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania he read Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Rousseau and Mill. By this time in his youth, he was already a ladies' man. On the morning of his graduation in 1951, he phoned a mentor, Reverend J Pius Barbour, to tell him that, as Eig writes, "several women were planning to attend the graduation ceremony, each one expecting to be introduced to King's parents as his fiancee".
Having moved to Boston to study for a doctorate, he met a budding concert singer called Coretta Scott in 1952, and they married the following year. At Boston University he indulged in plagiarism--in 1990 research revealed that parts of his dissertation's introduction had been copied from the book The Theology of Paul Tillich but he nevertheless became Dr King in June 1955.
King made his name as a nationally significant figure in Montgomery, Alabama, where he moved in 1954 to be the minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In December 1955 an alliance of ministers including King decided to endorse a bus boycott after the seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white person. A few days later King gave a speech at Holt Street Baptist Church, which, according to Eig, signalled a transformative moment in his career. He discovered "that his purpose was not to instruct or educate; his purpose was to prophesise. With a booming voice and strident words, he marked the path for himself and for a movement."
Eig adds that King "reminded the people that their advantage was in their moral superiority. They would not burn crosses or pull white people from their homes ... They meant to reform American democracy, not overthrow it." He did this by advocating boycotts, marches and sit-ins, and directly persuading politicians. King also put his safety on the line; he was constantly at risk of assassination and was jailed 29 times.
In 1957 King and a group of ministers launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was not simply a political activist, but also a kind of moral guru. From 1957 to 1958 he wrote an advice column for Ebony magazine in which he defended interracial marriage and birth control, expressed opposition to both premarital sex and anti-Semitism, and described homosexuality as a "problem" that was "culturally acquired".
The March on Washington, in which King delivered his totemic "I Have a Dream" speech, was originally scheduled for October 1963. But it was moved forward to August to harness the momentum of protests earlier in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, in which the infamous police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor set dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protesters. The Washington march attracted an estimated 250,000 people: Mahalia Jackson and Bob Dylan sang, and King was the final speaker.
A year later the US Civil Rights Act was passed. It "banned segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin in the workplace". King expanded his activism from the South to the North where, as Eig writes, segregation "was a function of law, public policy and discriminatory business practices".
One of King's fiercest critics in the 1960s was another black American activist and orator: Malcolm X. King was an integrationist who promoted non-violent civil resistance; Malcolm was a separatist who championed change by "any means necessary" and dismissed King's 1963 rally as "the Farce on Washington". However, Eig reveals that King's famous criticism of Malcolm X, made in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1965, is more nuanced than previously thought. Playboy quoted King as saying, "I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice"--but the line does not appear in the interview transcript, in which King concedes, "Maybe [Malcolm X] does have some of the answer."
King stood against racism, militarism and economic inequality throughout the 1960s. His relationship with Johnson, president from 1963 to 1969, soured over King's fierce criticism of the Vietnam War. King's final campaign before his assassination, aged 39, in April 1968, was advocating better conditions for Memphis sanitation workers.
His politics were not always as radical as they seemed. Eig points out that King "condemned capitalism for generating massive economic inequality while arguing that the system could be reformed. He called for higher worker wages and strong unions, but he did not insist on equal pay for all workers." Quoting the scholar Tommie Shelby, he describes King as a social democrat rather than a Marxist.
Above all, King was an American patriot and Baptist minister. These positions shaped his outlook profoundly. They explain his support for integration and peace, and his opposition to segregation and inequality. The persuasive power of his oratory came in part from his attachment to the US's founding principles --his unarguable conviction that the nation had failed to live up to the moral standards it professed to believe and in part from his religiosity. His speeches were not just speeches, they were sermons.
Even as he grew more political, more powerful, and
more respected, he drew his authority from the Bible
and relished every opportunity to speak from a pulpit.
"In the quiet recesses of my heart," he said, "I am
fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher." His
mission, he said, was not simply to change the laws and
values of America but to redeem the nation's soul.
Martin Luther King loved sleeping with women other than his wife. He was not always honest. He was not keen on women in positions of authority when it came to civil rights activism. He was an imperfect man, but as this book convincingly shows--he was also a great one. The values he espoused and promoted illustrate he was very much an American hero. But it is through accepting his imperfections that we can better understand him as a human rather than a saint.
"This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter" by Tomiwa Owolade will be published in June by Atlantic
Caption: All too human: Martin Luther King at the Ebenezer Baptist Church pulpit, 1960
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Owolade, Tomiwa. "The patriotic preacher: Martin Luther King was no saint, but a deep faith in America drove his mission to redeem its soul." New Statesman, vol. 152, no. 5718, 26 May 2023, pp. 46+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A753428840/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=68ac2b1c. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Jonathan Eig's magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity."
King: A Life. By Jonathan Eig. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 688 pages; $35. Simon & Schuster; £25
SIX MONTHS after Florida's board of education banned "critical race theory " (CRT)—in essence, the study of structural racism—from its classrooms, Ron DeSantis, the governor, introduced legislation further restricting what his state's teachers could say about race. He invoked an unlikely ally: "You think about what MLK stood for," he told a crowd last year. "He didn't want people judged on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character." Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, invoked King too: CRT, he said, "goes against everything Martin Luther King junior taught us—not to judge others by the colour of their skin."
The phrase "content of their character", which King used in his "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the March on Washington of 1963, has become one of his best known. Out of context, it seems to advocate colour-blindness towards individuals above all else, even to suggest that policies which take account of racial inequities are themselves unfairly biased. That is a misunderstanding of King's views—and it is far from the only one in wide circulation. The reverence with which Americans of all political stripes view him today obscures how deeply divisive he was in his time.
King was a thorny, prophetic, demanding thinker. He struggled to balance his optimistic patriotism against self-doubt and, later in his life, against his creeping pessimism about America's ability to overcome its demons. Jonathan Eig's magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity.
His book will inevitably draw comparisons with "America in the King Years", a three-volume history by Taylor Branch. But that trilogy was sprawling and expansive—almost 3,000 pages long, and as much about America between 1954 and 1968 as about King. Mr Eig's is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus. It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself.
For though King was a great man, he was not a saint. He plagiarised, philandered, was unkind and sometimes cruel to his wife, and seems to have suffered from what is now recognised as depression. He was also funny, fond of good food and politically shrewd. A doting father, he had a gift for friendship and extraordinary reserves of patience and discipline. Mr Eig makes his courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws.
King was the product of a middle-class upbringing, and of a family ensconced in Atlanta's black bourgeoisie. His father, affectionately known as "Daddy King", was strong-willed and stern; he preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, making it one of the city's more prominent black churches. King attended Morehouse College, then as now one of America's best historically black universities, before moving on to seminary in Pennsylvania and graduate school in theology at Boston University.
Now remembered for his oratory , as a young seminarian, Mr Eig notes, "he earned As in his philosophy classes and Cs in public speaking." Mr Eig speculates that some of his northern, white professors "were not enthralled with the black Baptist style". The high marks in philosophy, however, are unsurprising: King was a student of ideas for his entire life. Written in 1963, his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is renowned for its moral force and lucid prose. It also bristles with allusions—to the Old and New Testaments, but also Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Buber and others. (It did not mention Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violent resistance was perhaps the single greatest influence on King's life and work.)
He found his voice as a political leader on December 5th 1955, when he was just 26 and a newly installed pastor in Montgomery, Alabama. At Holt Street Baptist Church that evening, four days after the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, he addressed a crowd of black Alabamans. They were concerned about the response that their boycott of Montgomery's buses might provoke from the city's whites.
Mr Eig explains that King "needed to embolden without embittering". He had to acknowledge his audience's justified anger yet persuade them to protest righteously and hopefully. Speaking without notes, he advanced a reassuring argument deeply rooted in American and Christian traditions. "We are not wrong," he declared. "If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong."
Like a mighty stream
They were not wrong—and that may have been the mid-century civil-rights movement's greatest strength. King's efforts to overturn legal segregation were at once radical, because African-Americans had been second-class citizens since America's founding, and based on straightforward American ideals. He understood that the country's promises of freedom and equality were hollow if geography or skin colour could invalidate them.
Moral suasion was not enough. King also led the most successful pressure campaign in American history, enduring beatings, bombings, imprisonment, scorn, the arms'-length caution of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's two-faced truculence, and illegal monitoring and harassment by the FBI . Within a decade of his address in Holt Street, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He signed the Fair Housing Act, outlawing discrimination in housing, a week after an assassin's bullet ended King's life in 1968.
Yet by the time King died many considered him yesterday's man. His opposition to the war in Vietnam alienated some of his compatriots. The civil-rights movement had splintered, as more radical voices, such as Stokely Carmichael's, grew louder. Many white Americans saw ending segregation as the movement's goal, when, for King, it was just the start: his aim was brotherhood and equality. As the 55 years since his death have shown, achieving those through policy is fiendishly difficult.
A difficult goal can be worth striving for, however. And it does King and his quest an injustice to suggest he called only for colour-blindness and not, as he put it in 1967, "a reconstruction of the entire society", perhaps involving the nationalisation of industry and a guaranteed basic income. Such ideas may be discomforting, including for those who would enlist King as an opponent of CRT: always sceptical of "the tranquillising drug of gradualism", he came to believe that most Americans "are unconscious racists". But those were still his views, even if expressing them could spell trouble for a teacher in Florida.
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"Martin Luther King was among the greatest Americans—and the most misunderstood." The Economist, 13 May 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748845676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59b749d4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Jonathan Eig has written a biography that points us to King at his best, to King convinced that words bear truth, that narrative moves us toward goodness, and that memory, well preserved, carries beauty that motivates and inspires."
"As it is with candles, so it was with him: the more light he gave, the less there was of him." This is how the novelist Charles Johnson imagines Martin Luther King Jr., a man whose self recedes as his commitment to the struggle for justice deepens. At the start of his public life, King put on a mask when he entered the spotlight; in the years immediately preceding his death, at age thirty-nine, there was nothing left except the mask. King the man was hardly there at all.
In Dreamer, Johnson's 1998 novel inspired by King's final months, the civil-rights leader takes a body double who embraces all that is human in a way that King the icon cannot. Where King is earnest, his body double is crude and cynical; where King is stoic and selfless, the other is flagrantly egotistical. Yet the two men so resemble each other that audiences cannot distinguish them: King becomes two men at once, holy and profane.
What Johnson conjured in fiction, Jonathan Eig meticulously documents in his new biography of King. The steadfast moral beacon whose image is now chiseled in stone on the National Mall was actually troubled and all too human. Appreciating the folds of King's character ought to inspire us to appreciate his leadership more, not less--so Eig would have it.
King liked to do impressions of his colleagues. He liked to tell jokes and to play jokes. In Memphis, just before his assassination, he called his mother and passed the phone to his brother mid-sentence, trying to trick her. (She noticed.) King could be lighthearted, but he was also dragged into melancholy, what today would likely be diagnosed as clinical depression. He was hospitalized for one of these spells when he learned he was awarded the Nobel Prize; he conducted a press conference from the hospital auditorium.
While King famously proclaimed, in his final speech, that God had allowed him to go to the mountaintop and glimpse the promised land, Eig shows that in reality it was his wife Coretta who enabled and guided the great orator's moral ascent. She was an activist before he was; she was outspoken on Vietnam before he was; she was forever giving him confidence when his spirits wavered. Plus, she was birthing and caring for four children and an extraordinarily busy household on a tight budget. (King donated all of his speaking fees to civil-rights work.) At the civil-rights movement's height, Coretta traveled frequently to sing at rallies, always checking in to make sure her children made it to their extracurriculars. When King was called away from the founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Coretta filled in for him.
As a father, King was engaged and playful--when he was around. He traveled so much that his young son, Martin Luther King III, longed to be a pilot when he grew up so they could travel together. When King was in Atlanta, a typical day included an hour or two in the evening with his family before he was off again, sometimes to a colleague's home to strategize, sometimes to one of his lovers' homes. Among his inner circle, King's adultery was no secret. Coretta found out, too, if not from gossip, then from the tape recording that the FBI sent, though she was reluctant to believe that King was unfaithful.
Using newly released records from the FBI, Eig demonstrates how what started as J. Edgar Hoover's usual obsession with chasing Communist shadows transformed into an obsession with King's sex life. How different the media norms were in those days: despite the FBI shopping evidence of King's adultery to many outlets, including those unsympathetic to King, the story never made it into print. The personal life of political figures was off limits.
One way we misremember King is to erase his humanity, making him all holy, all the time. Another way we misremember King is to mishear his message. It is tempting to focus on his famous phrases that sound uplifting and uncontroversial. This means turning away from King's own books and most of his articles, sermons, and speeches to focus primarily on his immortal oration delivered in 1963 before the Lincoln Memorial. Before two hundred thousand mostly Black marchers, King spoke of "the solid rock of brotherhood," the need to reject "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred," and the day when children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." In short, it is tempting to read King as an advocate for interracial solidarity and for colorblind public policy.
Moderates and conservatives who imagine themselves to be championing King's vision today perform a sleightof-hand. They take King's opposition to racism and his vision of a future without it to mean that he believed race is an aspect of the human condition that we ought to ignore. But this conclusion is absurd: King was a Black preacher, promoting justice for Black Americans, facing opposition not only from avowed white supremacists but also from white moderates (the addressees of his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by King, was designed to be a Black-led organization with white allies only in supporting roles.
The reason King is so frequently misread has less to do with his Black identity than with his Christian identity. Because he was a Christian, not only a preacher but a theologian, he was able to keep two time horizons in mind at once. There is God's time, so far in the future that we can only access it in our dreams. In that dream-time, as he proclaimed to the crowd, "little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." But that is not the time in which mere mortals live, and it is not the time in which politics operates. In this more familiar, worldly sense of time, Black folks need to join together to build political power and to lead attacks on racist laws and practices. When the phrase came into vogue, King had no trouble joining in the chorus shouting, "Black is beautiful."
For King, that mysterious realm of the divine conjured in dreams is tethered to the practical realities of our world by natural law. Human nature makes accessible some parts of God's law, and we notice that God's law is contrary to the world's law--for example, to the laws of the state of Alabama that required segregated seating on public transportation. From the initial mass meeting in Montgomery, when King stepped into the spotlight for the first time, he invited his audience to notice the mismatch between human and divine law, and to respond with collective action. In short, King was not advocating for race-blind public policy; he was advocating for an end to racist policies because they had no place in the Kingdom of God. To move in the right direction, toward that Kingdom, often requires race-conscious policies, and racial pride.
Some progressive devotees of King distinguish a later, "radical" phase in his political career, a phase that often corresponds to a shift in his primary audience from Black Christians to white secularists. But Eig shows that this narrative is too simple. Throughout his public career, King spoke and wrote as a Black Christian. His push for economic and housing justice in the last years of his life, which took a toll on his national popularity, was motivated by his belief that poverty ran against God's law. The same was true of his opposition to the Vietnam War, which sunk his popularity even more. The way these convictions flowed from King's Black Christianity was not always explicit: as his fame grew, he was surrounded by aides and ghostwriters who shared King's political conclusions but were uncomfortable with his theological reasoning. Indeed, Eig reminds readers that King's most famous speech on Vietnam, delivered at Riverside Church in 1967, was composed almost entirely by others.
King persisted in his convictions even when they weakened his standing in the eyes of the public. He rejected worldly political calculus as the final criterion of what course of action to pursue. For him, God had the last word, not human beings. It is incomplete to say that King held true to his convictions. He held true to God, and his moral convictions followed from that faith.
Today, in a significantly more secular cultural context, racial-justice advocates sometimes struggle to explain why we should step beyond the demands of worldly political calculus. If "abolish the police" polls badly, wouldn't it make sense to substitute another slogan, another policy goal? But then again, the slate of racial-justice issues today is quite different from the issues faced by King and his cohort.
Or is it? Eig is particularly effective at gently reminding readers that there are striking parallels between the way racial justice was framed in the 1950s and '60s and the way it is framed in the 2010s and '20s. In his 1963 book Why We Can't Wait, King called for reparations for the unpaid wages Black Americans should have earned during slavery. At a Chicago press conference in 1965, King talked about the way that contemporary racial inequities were a continuation of the U.S. slave system. After the 1966 Watts uprising, King told Mike Wallace that "a riot is the language of the unheard."
Particularly resonant is Eig's reminder that demands to end police violence were at the heart of the civil-rights movement. Yes, protesters wanted an end to segregation, but what drew thousands of protesters into the street and glued millions around the world to their television screens was police violence against unarmed Black Americans. And the police violence caught by cameras was only the tip of the iceberg: when the sun went down all over the South (and North), in cities and in the country, during traffic stops and in homes, police officers beat, maimed, and sometimes murdered Black Americans on the flimsiest of pretexts. Police officers were cruel, but so was the rest of the ostensibly even-handed justice system. We forget that King was often arrested not for breaking the laws of segregation but for breaking court injunctions against protesting segregation. The whole system was rotten.
The moral philosopher Susan Wolf once offered a provocation: we shouldn't aspire to become moral saints. In fact, the life of the moral saint may be very far from the good life. If a moral saint is someone who tries to be as good as possible with every action they take, then their extreme cultivation of the moral virtues might crowd out all the non-moral virtues. The moral saint cannot enjoy good music, books, or wine; that would take time and energy away from helping others and bringing justice to the world. The moral saint would have to be earnest and humorless, for humor requires detachment from the pursuit of goodness.
We are tempted to imagine King as a moral saint, exceedingly earnest with a single-minded focus on improving the world. That is not who King was. Nor does it describe Christian saints. It is only from a secularist perspective that saintliness is measured by maximizing good actions at each moment in time. In the hagiographical tradition, Christian saints have good days and bad days. They curse God and they repent. Their virtues battle their vices. Their saintliness comes about because of their commitment to bringing the shape of their life into conformity with the life of Christ, not moment-by-moment but as a whole. And saints necessarily fail at this: a saint imitates Christ, but a saint is not Christ. Nonetheless, a saint provides inspiration for those who, similarly, wish to model their lives on perfect goodness.
At his best, King approached this sort of saintliness. He allowed his commitment to the kingdom of God to trump worldly interests without forgetting about the world. He recognized, condemned, and mobilized against evil, whether it was the black and white of segregation laws or the insidious vice of moderation in the face of injustice. He used his unmatched gifts as an orator to move bodies and consciences.
At his worst, King forgot the difference between imitating Christ and becoming Christ. He took unseemly pleasure in redemptive suffering, which distracted from organizing for justice. He told his followers that the more pain they were in, the more justice would be achieved. When King embraced this fantasy of total selflessness, he turned to womanizing, he abandoned his family, he turned melancholic. It was as if his quest for saintliness precipitated the crude body double that Charles Johnson imagined for him, the anti-King who would claim "All narratives are lies.... Words are just webs. Memory is mostly imagination."
Jonathan Eig has written a biography that points us to King at his best, to King convinced that words bear truth, that narrative moves us toward goodness, and that memory, well preserved, carries beauty that motivates and inspires.
VINCENT LLOYD is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. His most recent book is Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press).
Caption: KING
A Life
JONATHAN EIG
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$16.99 | 688 pp.
Caption: Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at a press conference on June 8,1964.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Commonweal Foundation
http://www.cweal.org/
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Lloyd, Vincent. "How We Misremember MLK." Commonweal, vol. 150, no. 8, Sept. 2023, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767366827/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ac658f7a. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
EIG, Jonathan. Some Pigtails. illus. by Alicia Teba Godoy. 96p. (A Lola Jones Book) Albert Whitman. Oct. 2020. Tr $12.99. ISBN 9780807565643.
Gr 2-4--When Lola enlists her artist grandfather to braid her pigtails, his unique approach enchants her classmates, encouraging them to be just as creative with their hair styles. The school principal claims that students are violating the school's dress code and Lola, inspired by E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, decides to use her words and take action. Lola is friendly and resourceful, but doesn't have the personality to carry a chapter book series. The Charlotte's Web references become heavy handed, and the dialogue can be didactic and stilted. The cartoon style black-and-white illustrations have clean lines that should appeal to Disney fans. The full-color cover illustration depicts Lola with brown skin but doesn't mention Lola and her family's racial or ethnic background. Lola's friend Fayth is drawn with darker skin; every other character is white. Readers are told that Lola's mother is starting a new role as a supervisor for the local police department; this is presented as nothing more than an exciting new job. This easy acceptance stands out in a story about activism spotlighting a character of color. Readers should pass in favor of more nuanced chapter books such as Saadia Faruqi's "Yasmin" series, and Juana Medina's "Juana and Lucas" books. VERDICT Hampered by bland characters and a missed opportunity to incorporate contemporary topics more deeply into its activist motif, this is not recommended for purchase.--Lisa Goldstein, Brooklyn P.L.
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Goldstein, Lisa. "EIG, Jonathan. Some Pigtails." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 11, Nov. 2020, pp. 55+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A640012974/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13dc928f. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.