martin luther king biography 2023

The New Definitive Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

“King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig, is the first comprehensive account of the civil rights icon in decades.

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By Dwight Garner

• Published May 8, 2023 Updated May 28, 2023

KING: A Life , by Jonathan Eig

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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 fiancée.

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 “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; ‌they 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. More about Dwight Garner

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Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability

By Kelefa Sanneh

Not long ago, a Tennessee state representative named Justin J. Pearson delivered a familiar-sounding speech at a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson had recently taken part in a gun-control protest on the floor of the state’s House, in violation of legislative rules. He and a fellow-representative were expelled, but the commissioners in Shelby voted to reinstate him. Pearson is only twenty-eight, but his Afro evokes the Black Power era of the late nineteen-sixties, and the preacherly cadence he sometimes uses reaches back even further than that. “We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate, until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he said at the meeting, thrusting his index finger for emphasis. He was quoting the Old Testament (Amos 5:24: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), but really he was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who put a version of that phrase at the center of his speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. President Lyndon B. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker; the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. The 2014 film “ Selma ” reverently dramatized his voting-rights activism; some people these days focus on his anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War; others emphasize his advocacy of integration, and his vision of a time when Black children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The proof, and the price, of King’s success is that everyone wants a piece of him.

The first biography of King was published in 1959, a few years after the Montgomery bus boycott, his first big victory. It was written by Lawrence D. Reddick, who was not a neutral observer—he had helped King write his first book, “ Stride Toward Freedom .” The historian David Levering Lewis published a thoughtful King biography in 1970, which captured the pessimistic mood that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Lewis portrayed King as a gifted preacher who “moralized the plight of the American black in simplistic and Manichaean terms” but “failed” in his broader effort to promote “economic and political reform.” Between 1988 and 2006, Taylor Branch published the three-volume history “ America in the King Years ,” which ran to nearly three thousand pages; in 1989, Branch was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Rather than preëmpting future books about King, the trilogy seemed to inspire more of them. The latest is “ King: A Life ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Eig, whose previous book was a biography of Muhammad Ali. Eig wants to give readers an alternative to the “defanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected; notes from Reddick; and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, as well as the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault.

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What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, and one that can’t help but be admiring, given how much King accomplished, and how quickly he did so—he was thirty-nine when he was killed. Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it. King viewed nonviolent protest as both a moral imperative and a political winner, because it made protesters look good and segregationists look bad. This sense of how things would play on newspaper front pages and television screens, this exacting attention to appearances, marked King as a distinctly contemporary activist—a master of the viral moment. It also marked him as an unapologetic practitioner of what’s now known as “respectability politics”: the idea that a group is more likely to be treated with respect if its members behave respectably. Unlike King himself, respectability politics does not have a great reputation; the term is used primarily by critics of it who worry that this approach tends to “rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence,” in the words of one NPR report . This is the most paradoxical aspect of King’s long, glorious afterlife: fifty-five years after his death, he is almost universally respected, but his lifelong devotion to the politics of respectability is not.

“Nepotism” would be an unduly censorious word for the family dynamic that shaped King’s life, though not an inaccurate one. When he was born, in 1929, his maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, an Atlanta institution. Two years later, his father took over, thereby becoming one of the most prominent Black leaders in the city. (At the time, King and his father were both named Michael; the father renamed them both a few years later, in honor of the German theologian.) King was born rich and famous, at least by the standards that prevailed in Atlanta’s Black community. Eig writes that he and his siblings “were watched wherever they went and expected to behave.” Accordingly, King was intent on living up to expectations. When he was eighteen, during the second of two summers that he spent in Connecticut picking tobacco, he and some friends were pulled over by the police during a night out. When he called home to tell his parents, he also told them, perhaps strategically, that he had decided to become a preacher, like his father.

He was clearly gifted, with a resonant voice and a knack for rhythm and repetition—Eig compares him to “a talented jazz musician,” in part because he could make other people’s riffs sound like his own. King collected an armful of college degrees, including a theology Ph.D. from Boston University which became a source of controversy in 1989, when researchers discovered that his dissertation was partially plagiarized. He could have accepted a position with his father at Ebenezer, but he chose instead to move to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was in search of a new leader.

King played no role in Rosa Parks’s decision, in 1955, to refuse to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus, but shortly after she was arrested he joined local Black pastors who were organizing a bus boycott. He delivered his first real protest speech at a church meeting on December 5, 1955, employing those twin similes he later made famous. “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he said. He was putting prophetic language in service of a proposal that was actually a compromise: a system of self-segregation, in which white and Black riders would have an equal chance to seat themselves, filling up the bus front to back and back to front, respectively. It was only after the companies refused that King and his allies shifted to a demand—full integration—as bold and clear as his rhetoric.

The Montgomery boycott was impressive partly because of the efficiency with which King and other leaders mobilized to help boycotters get to and from work, and partly because of the astonishing abuse that they withstood, including a bombing at King’s house. But the boycott may have been less consequential than the work of a team of lawyers, associated with the N.A.A.C.P., who sued the city on behalf of four Black bus riders who had been subject to segregation. The boycott put pressure on the city government, but it’s unclear whether it influenced the two district-court judges who struck down the Montgomery ordinance requiring bus segregation, or the Supreme Court Justices who summarily affirmed that decision, ending the era of bus segregation. On December 20, 1956, King announced the Supreme Court’s ruling by paraphrasing an old abolitionist preacher: he reassured his listeners, not for the last time, that “the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.” The next morning, he became one of the first people to ride an integrated bus in Montgomery.

The triumph in Alabama transformed King from a local leader into a national figure, and in certain quarters a superhero—some of his allies turned the saga into a comic book, “ Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story ,” illustrated by Sy Barry, who went on to draw “The Phantom.” Eig, in his biography, shows how King viewed Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolence as an extension of the Christian ethic of sacrificial love. But there remains something mysterious and mesmerizing about King’s calm certainty, which reproduced itself in the minds of his followers. In one of his most popular sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” King delivered a startling warning to anyone opposed to the liberation of Black people in America: “Be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.” Any ordinary leader can promise his followers deliverance; it takes an extraordinary one to promise them tribulation.

During a disappointing anti-segregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, King encountered a wily chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who understood his strategy; after King was arrested, Pritchett arranged to have someone pay his bail, so that he would be involuntarily released. “These fellows respond better when I am in jail,” King said, years later, referring to the politicians he was trying to pressure. In Birmingham, he had a better—that is, worse—adversary: Bull Connor, the city’s public-safety commissioner, who kept King imprisoned long enough to compose “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his most celebrated essay, and whose brutal tactics were captured in a widely circulated photograph of a police dog lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy. King and his allies recruited children to their protests, on the theory that they could go to jail without missing work. In “Eyes on the Prize,” the indispensable public-television documentary from 1987, one of King’s allies, the Reverend James Bevel, recalled borrowing a police bullhorn to calm rowdy demonstrators, because he wanted to avert a riot. “If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement,” he told them.

For King, the civil-rights movement consisted of almost nothing but difficult choices. (The strategy of keeping adults out of jail by sending kids in their stead was controversial then, and would probably be even more controversial now.) What’s amazing is how, in the course of a decade, he got so many of them right, relying more on instinct than on any formal decision-making process within his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he pressed ahead with the March on Washington, even though President John F. Kennedy told him that it was “a great mistake,” and the result was the most celebrated demonstration in American history. He was at the White House when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but still risked upsetting Johnson by protesting the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Selma, Alabama; the protests spurred the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. At one point, King wrote to a friend, half complaining, “People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.”

Thirty years ago, a scholar named Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham published “ Righteous Discontent ,” a great book about a different group of Black Baptist leaders. Higginbotham told the story of the Church’s Women’s Convention, which was founded in 1900 and became one of the most effective Black advocacy organizations in the country. Higginbotham noticed that the group’s appeals combined “conservative” and “radical” rhetoric, and her book popularized a term for this approach: “the politics of respectability.” It was a wide-ranging strategy, encompassing everything from legal work to children’s toys—the Convention sold Black dolls, meant to “represent the intelligent and refined Negro of today,” as opposed to the “disgraceful and humiliating type that we have been accustomed to seeing black dolls made of.” The women who led this movement valued good behavior for its own sake. (One spoke about “the poison generated by jazz music and improper dancing.”) But they also viewed it as a tool to use in their struggle for equality. Higginbotham quoted the minutes from a 1910 meeting, in which the leaders acknowledged that “a certain class of whites” was refusing to make space for Black passengers to sit down on streetcars, and urged Black passengers not to try and squeeze in. The advice took the form of a moral commandment: “Let us at all times and on all occasions, remember that the quiet, dignified individual who is respectful to others is after all the superior individual, be he black or white.”

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Often, Higginbotham noted, respectability politics meant encouraging “middle-class ideals and aspirations” among the broader Black public. If propriety was part of the solution to Black oppression, then perhaps impropriety was part of the problem. “Respectability’s emphasis on individual behavior served inevitably to blame blacks for their victimization and, worse yet, to place an inordinate amount of blame on black women,” Higginbotham wrote. (A Women’s Convention report from 1913 declared that Black women who failed to run orderly households were “an enemy to the race.”) But Higginbotham concluded that these tactics were effective, and probably indispensable. “The politics of respectability afforded black church women a powerful weapon of resistance to race and gender subordination,” she wrote. The notion of respectability may have been entangled with these oppressions, too—but, then, so was everything else.

This is the Black Baptist world that King was born into: his mother, Alberta Williams King, was the organ player at Ebenezer and served for more than a decade as the president of the church’s Women’s Committee. (In 1974, she was playing the organ when a deranged worshipper shot and killed her.) Like the Black Baptist women who helped pave his way, King stressed the importance of “dignified” behavior; he knew that claims of Black incivility or criminality were often used to justify segregation. During the Montgomery boycott, organizers trained activists to be polite, to avoid confrontation, and not to respond in kind when they were cursed at, as they almost always were. And when King announced the boycott’s end he urged his supporters to respond with “calm dignity and wise restraint,” stressing that “if we become victimized with violent intents, we will have walked in vain.” King was a towering political figure, but he was also a pastor, necessarily concerned with personal virtue as well as social change. In 1957, addressing a crowd of demonstrators in Washington, he delivered a rousing speech centered on a firm demand: “Give us the ballot.” But, even then, he added a note of rebuke, warning of the danger of resentment. “If we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns,” he said, “the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.” This was political advice, calculated to keep the support of white moderates, but it was also spiritual advice: a way of urging the activists in the crowd to be guided by the force of agape, or Christian love, and to conduct themselves accordingly.

King knew that the appearance of propriety was especially important for someone in his position. According to some of his friends, including Harry Belafonte, the love of King’s life was Betty Moitz, a white woman whom he dated while at seminary, in Pennsylvania; King’s father was one of many people who told him that an interracial marriage would fatally compromise his ability to be a leader, and the couple split before he graduated. He met Coretta in Boston, where she was a conservatory student. He was, of course, a great talker, and she did not recoil when he asked her if she thought that she could be a “good preacher’s wife.” This was an important church role, although not a coequal one, and Coretta later remembered that King once explained the difference in stark terms. “You see, I am called,” he told her, “and you aren’t.” One of King’s associates, Hosea Williams, reported that King could be cruel to Coretta—he recalled hearing him tell her to “shut up” on numerous occasions. And King’s constant travel would have been difficult for her even if he had been faithful.

Some of King’s associates knew about his affairs, and so did the F.B.I. During one of King’s trips to New York, the Bureau recorded him speaking to women in four different cities. Among the women in King’s life was Georgia Davis Powers, who later became the first woman and the first Black person elected to the Kentucky Senate, and who published a memoir in 1995 that detailed her relationship with King. She thought that they were merely friends and allies until the day King’s brother, A.D., told her, “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met.” Eig’s book makes clear just how closely the F.B.I. was watching King, apparently in the hope of collecting enough damaging information to prosecute him, intimidate him, or drive him to suicide. (William C. Sullivan, the head of domestic intelligence, sent King audio recordings of him with women, along with a note that said, “There is but one way out for you.”) The Bureau’s vendetta against King inevitably affects the way we view its report that, one night in early 1964, a pastor friend of King’s “forcibly raped” a woman during a hotel gathering; a handwritten addendum specifies that “King looked on, laughed, and offered advice.” The report is based on audio recordings that are due to be made public in 2027, and which may help us better understand how wide the gap between the public and the private King really was.

The criticism of respectability politics goes beyond the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. Ideas about who was and who wasn’t respectable helped shape the leadership of King’s movement, and sometimes constrained it. The activist and organizer Ella Baker served as the interim executive director of the S.C.L.C. in the late fifties, but said that she was never allowed to function as a true leader there, because “masculine and ministerial ego” prevented it. Bayard Rustin, one of the architects of the civil-rights movement, was widely known to be gay, and in 1960, after Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., threatened to spread a false rumor that King and Rustin were lovers, King accepted Rustin’s resignation from the S.C.L.C. This, perhaps, was respectability politics at its most coldly political and its least preacherlike. (King did not appear to have strong convictions about homosexuality.) King wanted to make sure that his movement commanded broad respect, so he had to pay close attention to what was considered respectable.

In the years after Higginbotham’s book came out, the phrase “respectability politics” entered common usage, often as a way to describe Black luminaries and leaders who urged other Black people to behave better—to be worthy heirs of King’s legacy. In “ The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics ” (2012), for example, the political scientist Fredrick C. Harris chastised Hampton University, a historically Black institution, for prohibiting its business-school students from wearing “braids, dreadlocks, and other unusual hairstyles”—a way of “policing the personal behavior of ‘wayward’ blacks.” Harris and others also criticized Bill Cosby, who in a 2004 speech pronounced that “the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” and President Obama , who declared, during his 2008 campaign, that in Black communities “too many fathers” had “abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” Harris thought that this kind of focus on personal responsibility made it sound as if Black people no longer faced “social barriers,” and so made it harder to dismantle those barriers.

Most politicians find it useful to deliver occasional admonitions amid all the promises. These leaders probably overestimate the effect of their moral exhortations. But critics of respectability politics probably do, too. Was Obama’s Presidency really hobbled by his promotion of family values, or by his infrequent remarks about the problems he saw in a community that he regarded as his own? The Black legal scholar Randall Kennedy has written perceptively in defense of what he calls “progressive black respectability politics,” insisting that Black people ought to have high hopes and high standards, for both themselves and their country. In the Black Lives Matter era, respectability politics has returned in a more upbeat and perhaps more patronizing form, with proliferating celebrations of “Black girl magic” and “Black excellence.” (The idea, it sometimes seems, is to do what parents are nowadays taught to do: praise the good behavior and ignore the bad.) And platforms like Twitter have made it easy to call out people who fail to hold respectable opinions or to use respectable language. Eschewing respectability politics altogether would mean ceasing to have strong views about how other people should behave, which would require even more self-control than King asked of his followers.

Respectability is an enduring concept, but a shifting one: you can disapprove of King’s infidelity and also lament the way Rustin was treated, just as you can find a ban on dreadlocks to be ill-judged without opposing dress codes altogether. In the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King found that his lifelong devotion to respectability may have cost him the respect of a new generation of leaders and followers. In 1967, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton published “ Black Power: The Politics of Liberation ,” which argued that the civil-rights movement was over, and deservedly so. “The traditional approaches failed,” they wrote, adding that “black people must make demands without regard to their initial ‘respectability,’ precisely because ‘respectable’ demands have not been sufficient.” This had become the conventional wisdom; the year before, the Times had announced, on its front page, that “the civil rights movement is falling into increasing disarray.” Major riots in Los Angeles, in 1965, and in Detroit and Newark, in 1967, were doubly damaging to King, linking his movement to violence while also illustrating the limits of his control over it. For his part, King widened his campaign, publicly opposing the Vietnam War, which he had previously declined to criticize, and taking aim less at specific laws than at poverty and inequality more broadly. “Racism is genocide,” King said at a press conference in Chicago, where he discovered that it was much easier to galvanize resistance to a cruel police chief than to a faceless landlord accused of neglecting his property. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, in particular, alienated President Johnson, and many of the moderates who had supported King’s earlier campaigns. “I figure I was politically unwise but morally wise,” King said, and the fact that he felt he had to choose between these two different kinds of wisdom was itself proof that his options were narrowing.

In Eig’s book, King’s death feels foreordained, and perhaps it felt that way to him, too. He had been not just threatened and bombed but also punched in the face (by a white man affiliated with the American Nazi Party) and stabbed in the chest (by a Black woman who was, in King’s word, “demented”); as a teen-ager, he had attempted suicide, and as an adult he was hospitalized a number of times for what was usually described as “exhaustion,” though many who knew him said that he struggled with depression. Despite these portents, it’s still disquieting to read his death-haunted final speech, delivered in Memphis, where he was supporting striking sanitation workers. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.” The next night, on his motel balcony, King was shot by James Earl Ray, a convicted felon and a committed segregationist. King was pronounced dead at a local hospital, about an hour later.

To many Black Power advocates, King’s Christian faith in the curvature of the moral universe seemed naïve. What proof is there that stoic suffering and good behavior will bring justice closer? King’s speeches often relied on anaphora, which could have hypnotic power. “How long? Not long,” he said, over and over again, addressing a crowd in Selma, in 1965. “How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” This was a rousing message of determination, and maybe also an acknowledgment that even an extraordinary leader can’t ask his followers to suffer with dignity indefinitely. King’s version of nonviolence really was radical: he persuaded people not only to forswear rioting or bad behavior but to forswear self-defense—and willingly allow themselves to be jailed, beaten, maybe even killed. This political strategy probably had an expiration date; King’s early success created a sense of accelerating progress that was impossible to sustain.

Yet even now many political leaders find themselves inspired by King’s language, and by his ability to frame political conflicts in a way that made it obvious which side was deserving of respect and which was not. The idea of King as a failure has not aged well: it is hard to argue that the civil-rights leaders who came after him were more effective. In the years since his assassination, we have found different ways to define “respectable,” and different forms of respectability politics. But it’s still not clear that we have learned to live without it. ♦

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By James Carroll

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By Doreen St. Félix

A major new bio of Martin Luther King Jr. balances saint and sinner

Jonathan eig’s ‘king: a life’ is deeply, freshly reported and moves with the narrative energy of a thriller.

In December 1964, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35, he was the youngest person and only the second Black American ever to receive the award, which recognized his emergence as the global face and resounding voice of the civil rights movement.

Yet throughout the Norway trip, King struck his companions as depressed and distracted. By then, he had become aware that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was secretly tapping phones at hotels and even homes of friends where he stayed during his travels. Hoover’s stated objective was to find out if King was under the influence of communists, but in the process the FBI uncovered evidence of prolific marital infidelity that it threatened to use to humiliate King and destroy his moral standing and political clout.

For more than 40 years, the historian David J. Garrow has been documenting this campaign of surveillance against King, breaking new ground but also stirring controversy with his recent hints that more damning evidence about King’s behavior with women may lie in still-classified FBI files. In 1987, Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for “ Bearing the Cross ,” an 800-page biography that wove his FBI reporting into a dense account of the internal politics of the civil rights movement. Arriving a year later, Taylor Branch’s majestic “ Parting the Waters ,” which would be followed by two voluminous sequels, set a more admiring portrait of King against a sweeping tableau of a changing America in the late 1950s and ’60s.

Weighing in at a somewhat less hefty 669 pages, Jonathan Eig’s new book, “ King: A Life ,” might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography, an attempt to reconcile Garrow’s sinner with Branch’s saint, infused with the narrative energy of a thriller. A former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written best-selling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali, Eig conducted more than 200 interviews, including with scores of people old enough to have known or observed King, and pieced together numerous accounts gathered by other journalists and scholars, some of them never published before.

Eig begins the book with a revealing portrait of “Daddy King,” Martin Luther King Sr., the domineering, self-made preacher whom his famous son spent his life both emulating and trying to escape. In taped interviews for a never-published memoir, King Sr. — christened Michael at birth — recounted a harrowing upbringing as the child of struggling sharecroppers in rural Georgia. His own father, Jim King, was a nasty alcoholic who regularly beat his Bible-fearing wife, Delia. At 14, Michael tried to intervene in a marital fight and Jim King threatened to kill him, whereupon Michael fled to Atlanta in his bare feet. Unpolished but fiercely ambitious, he slowly built a reputation as a Baptist minister and set his sights on marrying Alberta Williams, the well-born daughter of A.D. Williams, the head of Atlanta’s long-established but then financially struggling Ebenezer Baptist Church.

After marrying Alberta and succeeding A.D. Williams at Ebenezer, King Sr. built up the church’s congregation and coffers and charmed Atlanta’s Black elite. But at home, he could be a controlling and violent figure, particularly toward his two sons — Michael, as Martin Luther King Jr. was also named at birth, and his younger brother, A.D. Eig blames the psychological wounds inflicted by Daddy King for A.D.’s difficult adulthood, which was marked by struggles with alcohol and ended when he drowned in a swimming pool shy of his 40th birthday. For King Jr., Eig suggests, fear of his father’s volcanic moods strengthened his childhood attachment to his nurturing mother and maternal grandmother, Jennie Williams, and later made the brave public protester privately conflict-averse, particularly in dealing with fellow civil rights leaders.

Yet it was also defiance of Daddy King that drove the two pivotal choices that put King Jr. on the path to greatness. After reluctantly agreeing before his college graduation to go into the family business and become a preacher, King resisted his father’s pressure to join him in the Ebenezer pulpit. Instead, he went to seminary school in Pennsylvania and then to divinity school in Boston, where he acquired the scholarly underpinnings for his gospel of nonviolent resistance and earned the degree that allowed him to be known thenceforth as Dr. King. Ignoring his father’s appeals to return to Atlanta, King then applied for an open position at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., a small but snobbish congregation that was willing to overlook the 25-year-old’s youth because of his erudite credentials and preaching style.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Eig treats it less comprehensively than cinematically. In dealing with the defining decade of King’s life, between 1955 and 1965, Eig skips over many details of civil rights strategy and infighting covered in previous biographies in favor of vivid reconstructions of the most dramatic turning points. He conjures up the mass meeting where King, chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott because he was a newcomer with no local enemies, finds “a new voice” and makes his first rousing protest speech. (“If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong…”) Eig reconstructs the road to the March on Washington, as King workshops the “I Have a Dream” speech in sermons out of town, and puts the reader inside the solitary-confinement cell where King scribbles on napkins, toilet paper and the margins of newspapers to craft his defiant “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

Eig covers the thornier aspects of this period in King’s public life with a light critical touch. He is mostly sympathetic to the way President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy dealt with King, despite their slow embrace of the civil rights cause, their political opportunism in making sympathetic calls to King’s wife, Coretta, and their persistent enabling of Hoover’s surveillance campaign. Similarly, Eig all but gives King a pass for his well-documented habit of plagiarism in his academic writings, suggesting that it was forgivable for a preacher who was used to drawing on multiple influences in composing sermons.

Eig is less circumspect, however, and most telling, in dealing with the messy details and physical and emotional toll of King’s complicated private life.

King’s struggles with monogamy had begun by the time he went to seminary school after graduating from college at 19. Still dating a Black girl from Atlanta whom his parents hoped he would marry, he fell in love with a White woman named Betty Moitz, whose mother worked at the school. King eventually ended the relationship for the sake of his professional ambitions, but he never got over Moitz, according to his friend Harry Belafonte. A decade and a half later, when the FBI started wiretapping his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington and the home of his lawyer Clarence Jones, agents sometimes listened in on phone calls to several different mistresses in one day. Meanwhile, King carried on a long affair with one of his top aides at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dorothy Cotton, whose residence in Atlanta would often be his first stop when he returned from his travels, before he went home to his wife and four children.

According to Garrow, FBI records under court-ordered seal until 2027 also contain a report that King was present at orgies organized by a fellow Black preacher, and that during one he was heard laughing and commenting while the preacher raped a female parishioner. Stanley Pottinger, a former Justice Department official who has listened to some of the tapes on which these reports are based, told Eig that the conversations in the crowded rooms were difficult to make out. “I think it’s questionable evidence,” Pottinger concluded, without categorically dismissing the possibility of a bombshell that one day might permanently alter the public’s perception of King.

Against this tangled backdrop, Eig does a particularly nuanced job of conjuring up the mind-set of Coretta Scott King in the years before she emerged as a forceful activist in her own right. The elegant Alabama native was studying at a music conservatory in Boston when King met her on a blind date and immediately sized her up as the ideal partner for the places he was going. Piecing together Coretta’s reflections over the years — from audiotapes recorded shortly after King’s assassination to interviews she gave for a posthumously published memoir — Eig shows us a woman proud of her family and her husband’s accomplishments but wistful about her forfeited professional ambitions. Despite having been confronted with evidence of her husband’s unfaithfulness, and having endured occasional ugly scenes where King dressed her down in public, Coretta chose to compartmentalize. “I’m not saying Martin was a saint,” she recalled the year before she died. “Nobody is perfect. But as far as I’m concerned, our marriage was a very good marriage, and it was like that all the way to the end.”

For all his reporting efforts, however, Eig can’t provide similar access to King’s interior life. Unlike some historical figures, King wasn’t in the habit of keeping journals or writing confessional letters. In his two best-known books, “ Stride Toward Freedom ” and “ Where Do We Go From Here? ,” he deals with self-doubt in a mostly philosophical way. He never provides convincing answers to the query that Eig’s account invites: How did King ultimately judge himself, as a leader and as a man?

In recent years, Black scholars such as Peniel Joseph and Michael Eric Dyson have paid particular attention to the last three years of King’s life, when he diverged most strikingly from the comforting caricature that Eig laments in the book’s introduction. This was the period when a frustrated King widened his agenda to a more militant fight for fair housing and jobs in Chicago, to full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War, and to preparations for a class-based Poor People’s Campaign. Eig clearly did a lot of reporting on this more radical side of King. Most notably, he uncovered an original transcript of an interview for Playboy that King gave to Alex Haley, the author who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography, which suggests that Haley took answers out of context and even fabricated responses to make King sound far more critical of Malcolm than he actually was.

Yet in the book, Eig deals only briskly with the complex and evolving rivalry between King and Malcolm X over the years, and devotes scarcely more than 50 pages to those fraught last three years between his detailed reconstructions of the Selma march in 1965 and the assassination at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968. In a brief chapter titled “Black Power,” Eig conjures up the challenge King faced during this period from a rising generation of more militant Black youth. But he doesn’t grapple with how relevant their critiques of King’s hopeful focus on integration and nonviolence look today, in an America so addicted to racial grievance, gun culture and militaristic policing.

Perhaps because he wants “King: A Life” to have a timeless quality, Eig doesn’t engage in speculation about what King might say or do if he were still among us. But that question isn’t merely academic. Like the parables he preached on Sundays, King’s words and legacy no longer exist in a historical vacuum: They’ve become touchstones for fierce contemporary debate. Just last month, Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson cited King’s example of civil disobedience as inspiration for their protests in support of gun-control legislation and against their ensuing ugly ouster from the legislature. But in a month or so, if the Supreme Court as expected strikes down affirmative action on college campuses, conservatives will remind us of King’s call for a society where people are not judged “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation, Eig’s won’t and shouldn’t be the last — for America will never definitively be over the battles that King so nobly, if sometimes imperfectly, fought.

Mark Whitaker is the author of “ Saying It Loud: 1966 — The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement .” Previously, he was managing editor of CNN and editor of Newsweek.

By Jonathan Eig

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 669 pp. $35

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Review: Biography opens new windows into the life of MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. once characterized the times in which he lived as “life’s restless sea.” His own turbulent voyage on that sea has been well documented. We know its ports of call by heart: the Montgomery bus boycott; failure in Albany, Ga.; triumph in Birmingham, Ala.; “I Have a Dream”; Selma, Ala.; Chicago; Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam; the Poor People’s Campaign; death at 39; “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” They are set in stone on the Tidal Basin and inscribed in the American memory. These are the chapters of every King biography—and the challenge to every biographer.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 688p $35

Jonathan Eig’s new biography, King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King. Billed as the first major biography of King in decades, it follows Taylor Branch’s magisterial 3,000-page trilogy, completed in 2006. It benefits from the revelatory contributions of historian David Garrow, whose use of F.B.I. records through the Freedom of Information Act opened new windows into the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Eig has probed F.B.I. sources, telephone recordings and unpublished memoirs in order to produce a moving, and in places beautiful, account of King’s life.

Eig has probed recently released F.B.I. sources, telephone recordings and unpublished memoirs in order to produce a moving, and in places beautiful, account of King’s life. His biography reads King’s life as a single story with its own inevitability of plot and character. It is driven by the expected events, of course, but even more by the character of its protagonist. It displays the complexities of a public life whose private spaces were hidden from view. Eig narrates the mysteries of King largely without theory or explanation, as if to say, “Reader, you decide.”

His protagonist first appears as a talented, smooth young man who is making his way in academia and among friends by means of a charming personality. Young King is so intent on pleasing his authoritarian father that he enters the Baptist ministry. He is so intent on satisfying his professors that he plagiarizes his papers. He is so good with words, especially the words of others which he skillfully adapts to his own style, that he pleases everyone who hears him. Scholars have attempted to rationalize his practice of borrowing. Eig simply refers to it as a “bad habit” or an “old habit.”

Eig does not attempt to shield the reader from King’s “habits.” But he also displays a depth and solidity to King that confounds our understanding of the habits themselves. Suddenly propelled to the leadership of the civil rights movement at age 26, King maintains absolute fidelity to his assigned role. Whenever he is tempted to please or accommodate others—whether sheriffs, judges or his own father—he refuses. Whenever an easy way out or an inauthentic choice beckons, he invariably chooses the hard way of principled resistance.

In Birmingham, he breaks a judicial injunction against marching, puts on his overalls and leads the charge. Despite a lifelong aversion to conflict, he develops a high tolerance for disorder and makes social conflict his bread and butter. He soldiers on in dangerous situations despite multiple death threats. He believes in something called “America” but stubbornly resists the American fetish of anti-communism and flatly refuses to abandon colleagues with communist ties. He burns his bridges to his greatest political benefactor, L.B.J., by condemning Johnson’s war. It is a decision for which he will be condemned by every civil rights organization except his own and by every major news outlet in the country, including The New York Times.

The principles by which King fought and served came from another region of his life. When asked why he opposed the war in Vietnam, he consistently cited his vocation as a minister of the Gospel. He was formed by the raw spiritual power that pulsed through his father’s church. He was formed a second time by the Christian personalist theology he learned at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, where he earned a doctorate in systematic theology. At home with sermonic language, he cast the civil rights movement in the mirror of biblical events and characters. His fundamental positions on violence, freedom, human dignity and hope were birthed in the sanctuaries and classrooms of his younger days.

With such commitments, he should not have been perceived as a threat to the nation.

At the insistence of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized a tap on King’s home and office telephones. Taps were already in place on the phones of King’s closest advisors, Stanley Levison, Bayard Rustin and others. Hoover would later install an F.B.I. informant in King’s Atlanta office. His ostensible motive was to track communist infiltration of the civil rights movement. The taps never revealed a communist influence on King or his organization. What they did reveal, however, was something more salacious—and, to Hoover, the Kennedys and L.B.J., entertaining. They documented yet another contradiction.

King’s network of extramarital affairs is not new information. What is new in Eig’s book is the extent of his sexual contacts and their centrality in the routines of his private life. These increasingly dangerous liaisons became meat and drink to Hoover in his effort to discredit King and destroy his movement. Sixty years on, they have become the routine matter of King biographies.

King suffered from 13 years of unrelenting conflict. The word we would use today is trauma.

Hoover’s campaign to ruin King did not alter his public role, but it did break his spirit. The revelation of King’s sexual activities may turn out to be the most controversial element in this book. But there is worse. Most of what we have of King’s private life comes courtesy of one of the most shameful programs of domestic espionage in American history: a fanatical attempt to subvert racial justice in the United States. What was done to King and his movement was not an example of governmental “overreach” or the “dirty tricks” that would come into vogue a decade later. That we can know word-for-word what a national leader said on any given day on any given telephone call is a legacy of something far more comprehensive—and sinister.

Hoover’s efforts shadow the final third of the biography, as does their effect, which was King’s worsening depression. Sometimes called “fatigue” or “exhaustion,” for which King was repeatedly hospitalized, its clinical name is depression. Its symptoms are everywhere in King’s final years. His friend Ralph David Abernathy attempted to minister to it; his staff worried and quietly worked around it. It marred his final sermons with uncharacteristic fatalism and maudlin fixations on death, including the famous “Drum Major Instinct” sermon in which he fantasized about his own funeral.

King suffered from 13 years of unrelenting conflict. The word we would use today is trauma . By the end of his mission, he was buffeted by violence in the cities, conflict over Vietnam, desertion by his allies, the accelerating presence of Black Power and his growing irrelevance to America’s racial conflict. But none of these bore down upon him—and into him—like Hoover’s efforts to desecrate his person.

Eig notes that in the unpublished memoir by King’s wife, Coretta, she refers to her husband as “a guilt ridden” man. Throughout his public life, he was vexed by privileges not shared by the majority of his people; consequently, he refused a salary, drove a modest car and lived in a Black, middle-class neighborhood. But this other life, the private one, brought him low.

In this context, we must also remark on the strength and dignity demonstrated by Coretta Scott King. No single chapter is devoted to her, but her resilience—and resentment—is woven throughout the story. From the beginning she understands herself as capable of an important, policy-related role in the movement. But aside from her performance at musical concerts, she is usually relegated to background support and care of the children. Eig remarks that she bore up under her husband’s infidelity perhaps because she understood the enormous personal and symbolic importance of her support.

The day after her husband’s death, she flew to Memphis to retrieve his body. Three days later, she returned and led 40,000 marchers through the city in support of striking sanitation workers. On Mother’s Day, 38 days after her husband’s assassination, she marched with 3,000 people in support of the Poor People’s Campaign. On June 19 at the Lincoln Memorial she said the time had come to form “a solid block of woman power.” Picking up her husband’s burden, she added, “Love is the only force that can destroy hate.”

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “A Prophet’s Power,” in the September 2023 , issue.

Richard Lischer is an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School. His most recent book is Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir (Oxford University Press).

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Excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s Acclaimed New Biography, King: A Life

In this excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s acclaimed new biography, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s days as a BU graduate student come to life

Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) was seen by his BU peers as “a charismatic figure, urbane, sociable,” writes author Jonathan Eig in King: A Life .

“ I’m Going to Kill Jim Crow ”

In 1951, martin luther king, jr., with degrees from morehouse college and crozer theological seminary under his belt, steered his chevy north from atlanta to begin his phd studies in systematic theology at bu..

At the time, he was thinking about a career in academia, perhaps after working as a preacher in a small town, writes Jonathan Eig in his new biography, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

During his time at BU’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, King (GRS’55, Hon.’59), known then as M.L., was recognized as a leader. He attended sermons by Howard Thurman (Hon.’67), dean of Marsh Chapel from 1953 to 1965 and the first Black dean at a mostly white American university, who became his mentor. (The two watched Jackie Robinson play in the 1953 World Series on TV at Thurman’s home, according to Eig.)

“King found lasting inspiration in Thurman’s beliefs on integration, community, and the interrelatedness of all life,” Eig writes. “‘There is but one refuge that one man has anywhere on this planet,’ wrote Thurman. ‘And that is in another man’s heart.’”

He would also meet his future wife, a New England Conservatory of Music opera student named Coretta Scott (Hon.’69), in Boston. After King finished his studies, he and Coretta left the city for Montgomery, Ala., “soon to be the crucible for the civil rights movement,” Eig writes. “After saying he wanted a job that would place him on the front lines of the fight against segregation, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been granted his wish.”

The following is an excerpt from Eig’s book, described as the first definitive biography of King in decades.

King: A Life excerpt

King earned a bachelor of arts degree in divinity from Crozer and graduated as valedictorian, winning a $1,200 scholarship for graduate study. His parents rewarded him with a car, a green Chevrolet with Powerglide, the new two-speed automatic transmission that allowed for quick, smooth acceleration without the use of a clutch.

But if Martin Sr. and Alberta King had hoped to see their son driving the Chevy around Atlanta, smoothly accelerating from home to church, and perhaps soon hauling grandchildren in the back seat, they were disappointed. In the fall of 1951, King took the car from Atlanta to Boston, where he enrolled at Boston University in pursuit of a doctorate.

Daddy King hadn’t been happy with his son’s decision to go to seminary. He had more reason to complain now that his son seemed intent on an academic career. M.L. knew better than to argue with his father. “Oh, yes,” he would say vaguely when listening to something he didn’t want to hear and didn’t wish to debate. He knew by now that he didn’t need to persuade his father to get his way. If there were any doubt that M.L. had his mind on a career beyond the pulpit, he confirmed it in his application to Boston University. “For a number of years, I have been desirous of teaching in a college or school of religion,” he wrote. “It is my candid opinion that the teaching of theology should be as scientific, as thorough, and as realistic as any other discipline. In a word, scholarship is my goal.”

Boston University was a historically Methodist school, with a predominantly white faculty and student body. Daddy King, despite reservations about his son’s decision, agreed to pay all of M.L.’s graduate school expenses not covered by his scholarship. Perhaps he was relieved that M.L. had chosen Boston University and not the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which had been among his top choices, and which might have set his life and career on a dramatically different path.

King chose BU, in large part, for the chance to study with Edgar S. Brightman, known for his philosophical understanding of the idea of a personal God, not an impersonal deity lacking human characteristics. [Brightman (STH’10, GRS’12) was the Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at GRS.] “In the broadest sense,” Brightman wrote, “personalism is the belief that conscious personality is both the supreme value and the supreme reality in the universe.” To personalists, God is seen as a loving parent, God’s children as subjects of compassion. The universe is made up of persons, and all personalities are made in the image of God. The influence of personalism would support King’s future indictments of segregation and discrimination, “because personhood,” wrote the scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp Jr., “implies freedom and responsibility.”….

…. In Boston, where he began to introduce himself as Martin, he didn’t take long to find new romances. His approach to women at times resembled a competitive sport, according to Dorothy Cotton [Wheelock’60], the civil rights activist who would later become close to King. He would “try to make sure he could win the girlfriend of the tallest…handsomest guy on campus,” Cotton said. “And that became a bit of a habit, I feel.”

One day, while he was eating lunch at a Sharar’s Cafeteria, he spotted a fair-skinned African American woman, seated alone. King got up from his seat and approached her.

“You’re not eating your beets,” he said. The young woman looked up and said she hated beets.

King said he felt the same way and asked if he could join her for lunch. Her name was LaVerne Weston, and she was a Texas native who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She and King bonded over the cafeteria’s failure to offer an alternative to beets with the chicken platter. LaVerne admired King’s natty wardrobe and warm personality. He talked a lot and bragged a bit, but he asked good questions, and he listened, too. It was obvious that he was flirting, but LaVerne wasn’t interested. King was too short for her taste.

“I’m going to kill Jim Crow,” King told her….

…. After his first semester at BU, King and one of his friends from Morehouse, Philip Lenud, a student at the Crane Theological School, affiliated with Tufts University, rented an apartment at 397 Massachusetts Avenue, a South End rowhouse. The place was piled high with books. Morehouse pennants hung on the wall above the sofa. Lenud, an Alabama native, did most of the cooking; King washed the dishes. King made frequent phone calls home, reversing the charges. The apartment became a hub for young intellectuals and artists. King hosted a weekly potluck supper for a group he called the Dialectical Society or, sometimes, the Philosophical Club. The men smoked pipes. Graduate students read their papers aloud. Spirited discussions followed. They recorded the minutes and reviewed them at subsequent meetings. At first the meetings were attended exclusively by Black men, but they diversified over time, accepting women and the occasional white person. King was more than comfortable taking a leadership role. With the Philosophical Club, peers saw King already as a leader and a charismatic figure, urbane, sociable, and pleased to be at the center of attention.

King (left) returned to Boston in 1964 to donate his personal papers to BU, a collection that’s housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. A massive crowd gathers on Marsh Plaza (right) for a memorial service for King on April 5, 1968, the day after he was assassinated. Photos by Boston University Photography

“Martin was the guru,” said Sybil Haydel Morial [Wheelock’52,’55], who grew up in New Orleans, attended Boston University, and went to parties as well as casual gatherings at King’s apartment. She would become an educator, an activist, and wife to the first Black mayor of New Orleans, Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial. “He was the leader of it,” she said of King. “He was so even-tempered and so self-possessed and so humble…. And he had a car!”

Boston was not free from racism by any stretch. The Red Sox would not integrate their team until 1959, although Sam Jethroe integrated the Boston Braves in 1950, before that team moved to Milwaukee. Public schools remained segregated in practice. But it was far better than in the South, Sybil Morial said. Boston had art and theater and integrated colleges. From September 21 to September 23, 1951, the Boston Garden hosted an all-star jazz concert with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Sarah Vaughan, and the Nat King Cole Trio, whose recording of “Too Young” had topped the charts that summer. The Boston Celtics, with Chuck Cooper, had one of the first racially integrated teams in the National Basketball Association. Boston also had a seemingly endless array of ambitious young Black men and women from prosperous families. King attended services at Twelfth Baptist Church, a congregation that had been founded by free people of color in 1840, served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and had a long history of organized protest.

“It was thrilling because everything was open,” Morial said. “Those of us from the South loved the freedom of the North.” The young men and women often discussed whether to remain in the North, or “Freedomland,” as Morial called it. At first, Morial said, most of her acquaintances in Boston vowed to stay in the North, but their views shifted as they began to miss home and began to see signs that cultural and political reform might be possible in the South. Even in Boston, King felt pulled to return to the South, in part because Boston’s Black community was “spiritually located in the South,” as the scholar Lewis V. Baldwin writes. “I am going back where I am needed,” King said in Boston.

Excerpted from King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) by Jonathan Eig with permission from the publisher.

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There is 1 comment on Excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s Acclaimed New Biography, King: A Life

In 1951, Martin Luther King, Jr. left Atlanta with a green Chevrolet, a valedictorian’s scholarship, and aspirations for academia. Opting for Boston University, King pursued a doctorate, embracing personalism under Edgar S. Brightman’s tutelage. Despite tensions with his father and scholarly pursuits, King found love in Boston, encountering Coretta Scott. His apartment became a hub for intellectual discourse and camaraderie. Boston offered a taste of freedom, cultural richness, and integrated spaces. Yet, the call to the South persisted, revealing King’s commitment to where he felt needed. Boston, a chapter in King’s journey, shaped his vision for a future marked by leadership, scholarship, and activism. #DNAQuarcoo #MLKLegacy #BostonUniversity #Terrier #CivilRightsLeader

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Martin Luther King Jr.

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 25, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington , which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act . King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day , a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia , the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College , the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music . The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church .

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church . This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial —a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The speech and march cemented King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named “Man of the Year” by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

In the spring of 1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act , which guaranteed the right to vote—first awarded by the 15th Amendment—to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated . He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray , an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” “Why We Can’t Wait,” “Strength to Love,” “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” and the posthumously published “Trumpet of Conscience” with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

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King: A Life Hardcover – May 16, 2023

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A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post | Chicago Tribune | Time A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 | One of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2023 One of The New Yorker 's essential reads of 2023 | A Christian Science Monitor best book of the year | One of Air Mail 's twelve best books of 2023 A Washington Post and National Indie Bestseller | One of Publishers Weekly 's best nonfiction books of 2023 | One of Smithsonian magazine's ten best books of 2023 “Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “[ King is] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” ―Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post “No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome.” ―Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer Hailed by The New York Times as “the new definitive biography,” King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date May 16, 2023
• Dimensions 6.5 x 2.06 x 9.56 inches
• ISBN-10 0374279292
• ISBN-13 978-0374279295
• See all details

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Praise for King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Editorial reviews.

“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades . . . and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently . . . [Eig’s is] 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 . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Book Review Editors' Choice) " King: A Life might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography [. . .] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . Eig does a particularly nuanced job of conjuring up the mind-set of Coretta Scott King in the years before she emerged as a forceful activist in her own right . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” ―Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post "[Eig] is an indefatigable researcher, and King is based on a vast array of material, old and new . . . Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery . . . [His] style is journalistic, with brief paragraphs driving the narrative forward . . . Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right." ―Eric Foner, London Review of Books "No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . The result is not mythology but a portrait of a man who was all too human―making his remarkable moral choices and struggles relatable to his fellow mortals. In repositioning King as one of America’s true Founding Fathers, Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome." ―Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer "A sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life . . . Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King . . . He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it." ―Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker "Outstanding . . . [Eig] shows who King really was behind the famous speeches and celebrity . . . Eig offers an intimate, multidimensional biography . . . Most importantly, Eig weaves Coretta Scott King’s impressions of her famous husband throughout the book in ways that free her from the traditional housewife image depicted in Time magazine portraits . . . King: A Life forces readers to view King as more than a martyr, icon, or saint ― to see him for who he was, instead of who people thought he was, or wanted him to be." ―Ousmane Power-Greene, The Boston Globe "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 . . . [ King: A Life ] is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus. It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself. . . . Eig makes [King's] courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws." ― The Economist "Eig’s monumental work, the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, challenges the image of him as a peaceful advocate of incremental change. There’s plenty of new detail, including from recently declassified F.B.I. files, allowing King to emerge as a complex, humane figure." ―J. Howard Rosier, The New York Times "Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader . . . Eig’s balanced treatment of King’s manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass." ―Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs "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 . . . 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, Commonweal "Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated . . . [ King ] stirs a whirlwind of exhilarating feelings . . . Essential . . . A beautiful book that requires every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom, economic justice, and equality." ―Michael K. Honey, Jacobin "Drawing on recently released FBI files, telephone recordings and interviews for this first full-scale biography in decades, Eig acknowledges King's frailties and failures, as well as his radical critique of economic inequality and the war in Vietnam . . . Eig enriches [the] familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories." ―Glenn C. Altschuler, Minneapolis Star Tribune " King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King . . . A moving, and in places beautiful, account of King’s life." ―Richard Lischer, America "In this biography, his sixth book, Eig writes like an Olympic diver who jackknifes off the high board, slicing the water without a ripple. He performs with sheer artistry, like Picasso paints and Astaire dances." ―Kitty Kelley, Washington Independent Review of Books “Definitive . . . Monumental . . . An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.” ― Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[A] sweeping biography. Eig gives a rousing recap of King’s triumphs as a civil rights leader . . . [A] complex, nuanced portrait . . . Eig’s evocative prose ably conveys his bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory . . . An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King’s relevance to today’s debates over racial justice." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The most comprehensive MLK biography to date . . . Eig refuses to ‘defang’ King, instead pushing Americans to recognize the radical nature of his demands for justice and his resistance to not only racism but militarism and capitalism.” ― Booklist (starred review) "Mining a trove of materials―many only recently available―augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights . . . [Eig] recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance . . . Engrossing . . . A must for readers interested in moving beyond clichéd catchphrases to see a more complete and complex King." ― Library Journal (starred review) "Groundbreaking . . . King is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it’s like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room." ―Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times "Jonathan Eig's book comes at a crucial time for our country. With the gains we've made for civil rights and workers’ rights under constant threat, Eig reminds us that, in Dr. King’s own words, ‘progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.’" ―Sherrod Brown, United States senator from Ohio and author of Desk 88 "The first major biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in over a generation, King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human―and humane―King, whose contradictions, frailties, and shortcomings worked in tandem with his brilliance, resilience, and genius to fundamentally transform American democracy and the world. King brilliantly recovers the defiantly courageous, radically democratic, and revolutionary anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war activist who inspired as much hate and revulsion as he did love and compassion. A resounding triumph." ―Peniel E. Joseph, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Sword and the Shield "Greatness and opacity more often than not seem to go hand in hand: the most important among us seem out of reach, inscrutable, indifferent to our entreaties for human detail beyond the sensational or salacious. But here, Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being―not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" ―Ken Burns “Jonathan Eig's book is the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years. Digitization and the web have made a slew of new documentary resources available, and Eig has mined them superbly. He is thus able to paint the first 25 years of King's life more richly than ever before, and to offer fuller portraits of three of the most important people in King's adult life: his wife Coretta and his closest male and female companions, Ralph Abernathy and Dorothy Cotton. The result is a great leap forward in our biographical understanding.” ― David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama "Finally, a biography of King that takes seriously Coretta Scott King's political, intellectual and personal contributions." ― Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks “With the detective mind of an historian, the lyrical precision of a poet, and the techniques of a master storyteller, Jonathan Eig makes Martin Luther King, Jr. come alive as a complex personality. He retrieves King’s extraordinary gifts, incurable optimism, and amazing heroism as a leader while not ignoring his frailties, doubts, and vulnerabilities. This book is a perceptive and necessary contribution to the biography genre in King studies.” ― Lewis V. Baldwin, author of The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Jonathan Eig’s King is an exemplary masterclass in biography: Eig's knowledge of the subject matter is scholarly, his discovery of new and untapped historical sources is relentless, and his prose is gripping. This is a captivating story of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: a child scarred by pervasive racism, a man haunted by racist violence and death threats, a minister hunted by his own federal government, a human being afflicted by all-too-common human frailties, and a citizen who somehow managed to have an uncommon Christian faith and the courage to speak truth to power. Eig’s King is not just a welcomed contribution to MLK biography, but also a call to confront our own humanity, and a summons to bear witness against the societal evils that plagued King’s time and persist in our own." ―Dr. Lerone A. Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University "Jonathan Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is destined to be a classic. Eig elegantly depicts King’s life with a sensitivity and intimacy making him more than a static icon. In this biography filled with exhaustive interviews and wonderfully written vignettes, King is placed in the context of community, family, and friends, showing his powerful strengths and his all too human flaws. Most importantly, Eig depicts King’s single-minded commitment to radically transforming the United States from an unjust republic based on a hierarchy of race and wealth to one that encompasses the dreams of all God’s children. I hope it is read by everyone." ―Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America " King is a deeply absorbing, powerful lens for examining the Civil Rights Movement. Jonathan Eig’s compelling look back reveals a complex leader, driven by his faith and an unflinching determination to stamp out racial injustice, yet dogged by personal conflicts and relentless secret government efforts to discredit him." ―Karen Gray Houston, author of Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy

About the Author

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 16, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374279292
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374279295
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.24 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 2.06 x 9.56 inches
• #4 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
• #20 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)
• #31 in Black & African American Biographies

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Jonathan eig.

Jonathan Eig is the author of six books, including four New York Times best sellers. His most recent book is King: A Life, which the Times called a "the definitive biography" of Martin Luther King Jr. and a book "worthy of its subject." Prior to that, Eig wrote "Ali: A Life," which has been hailed as one of the best sports biographies of all time. Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and was a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize. Eig served as a senior consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, 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. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

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New biography of Martin Luther King Jr. undercuts a widely cited quote about Malcolm X

Bill Chappell

Martin Luther King Jr. never said he thought Malcolm X "has done himself and our people a great disservice," a biographer says. The two civil rights leaders with opposing views on nonviolence met only once, in March of 1964. Henry Griffin/AP hide caption

Martin Luther King Jr. never said he thought Malcolm X "has done himself and our people a great disservice," a biographer says. The two civil rights leaders with opposing views on nonviolence met only once, in March of 1964.

It's a biting piece of criticism aimed at Malcolm X that for decades was attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. But a new biography of King suggests history books about these two men may need to be rewritten — because King never actually said the words.

King never said he felt "Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice," author Jonathan Eig told NPR, despite that famous quote appearing in a 1965 interview with Alex Haley, for Playboy magazine.

"This is really important," Eig said, "because we've been teaching kids this quote from the Playboy interview."

Black Power Scholar Illustrates How MLK And Malcolm X Influenced Each Other

The words King and Malcolm X said about each other are vital to understanding the relationship between two leaders who took different approaches to confronting systemic and deadly racism in America. Their rivalry was played up during their lives and in the years that followed, despite their overlapping goals.

"I would say they were engaged in an awkward dance, but they were listening to the same music," Eig said.

Biographer calls it 'journalistic malpractice'

Eig says he realized the interview's original transcript didn't contain the widely cited quote as he was reading through archives at Duke University while researching his book, King: A Life , which comes out on Tuesday. ( Eig spoke with NPR's Steve Inskeep about the new biography.)

Eig's discovery was recently reported by The Washington Post .

It's "journalistic malpractice," Eig said, to misrepresent what King thought about Malcolm X in this way.

"There's more to it," Eig said, "but what King actually said was that he disagreed with some of Malcolm's views, maybe with many of them — but that he was aware that his way wasn't the only way. And it sounded like he was much more open to exploring that relationship than the Playboy interview made it out to be."

Eig was asked whether he feels Haley or his editors were responsible for the inconsistencies.

"I feel pretty strongly that it's Haley who made this change, because it happens early in the process," after an audio tape recording of the interview was transcribed but before Haley submitted a draft to Playboy .

While journalists sometimes edit quotes to clarify an interview subject's remarks, it's a delicate task — and it does not entail adding language out of whole cloth.

"We don't know for sure that Haley typed that draft, but we do know that his byline was on the story," Eig said. For drastic changes like the ones he found, Eig said, "I can't believe that Haley would have signed off on that without having seen it. I think either way, it's journalistic malpractice."

Author Interviews

Jonathan eig's new biography examines the life of martin luther king jr..

The "disservice" quote about Malcolm X spread far beyond the pages of Playboy . It's included in The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. , which was assembled from King's words by historian Clayborne Carson.

When asked for comment about the discrepancy, Carson told NPR, "I'm certainly troubled by Haley's apparently unethical decision to distort King's statement about Malcolm X."

It was likely, Carson added, that King's feelings toward Malcolm X had softened by early 1965.

It's the latest question about Haley's writings; others have included accusations that he plagiarized portions of his seminal 1976 work, Roots: The Saga of an American Family . Haley settled one of those claims as a court case neared conclusion.

The Mothers Who Raised Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin

Here's what the 1965 article said.

In the interview published weeks before Malcolm X was assassinated, Haley quoted King as saying:

He is very articulate, as you say, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views . . . I have often wished that he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery demagogic oratory in the black ghettoes, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

Here's what the transcript says

In the original transcript, King's line about "fiery" oratory wasn't directed specifically at Malcolm X. It came slightly earlier in the interview, in reply to a broader question from Haley asking King to give his "opinion of Negro extremists who advocate armed violence and sabotage."

Haley then asked about Malcolm X — and in a major discrepancy, the word "disservice" isn't part of King's answer, according to the records:

PLAYBOY: Dr. King, would you care to comment upon the articulate former Black Muslim, Malcolm X? DR. KING: I have met Malcolm X, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views, as I understand them. He is very articulate, as you say. I don't want to seem to sound as if I feel so self-righteous, or absolutist, that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. But I know that I have so often felt that I wished that he would talk less of violence, because I don't think that violence can solve our problem. And in his litany of expressing the despair of the Negro, without offering a positive, creative approach, I think that he falls into a rut sometimes."

King praised Malcolm X's integrity

Playboy published Haley's interview with King in its January 1965 issue. On Feb. 21 of that year, Malcolm X was assassinated. His death came as signs of a potential thaw between the two civil rights leaders emerged.

Code Switch

Malcolm x's public speaking power.

"Malcolm X used King as a foil [and] tried to provoke his audiences by mocking King as a chicken, as an Uncle Tom, even," Eig said. "And it played well for his audiences because it made him seem like the more threatening. It also scared white people, which, you know, I think Malcolm wanted to do."

King acknowledged his rival's taunts and their disagreements over nonviolence. But he also said he could understand that a man whose life was shaped by despair, hate and violence would refuse to integrate himself into a racist social order.

On Feb. 5, 1965, Malcolm X visited Selma, Ala., meeting with Coretta Scott King while her husband was being held in jail.

Throughline

'black moses' lives on: how marcus garvey's vision still resonates.

"He spoke at length to my wife Coretta for about his personal struggles and expressed an interest in working more closely with the nonviolent movement, but he was not yet able to renounce violence and overcome the bitterness which life invested in him," King said .

It was Malcolm X's intelligence and drive, King said, that allowed him to shape himself and turn away from an early life of crime.

"It was a testimony to Malcolm's personal depth and integrity that he could not become an underworld czar, but turned again and again to religion for meaning and destiny. Malcolm was still turning and growing at the time of his brutal and meaningless assassination."

His death, King said, "was an unfortunate tragedy."

Correction May 15, 2023

A previous version of this story said that Alex Haley's interview with Malcolm X appeared in the January 1965 issue in Playboy. In fact, the interview was with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and major leader of the Civil Rights Movement. After his assassination, he was memorialized by Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

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In Focus: Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Days after his 1968 assassination , a campaign for a holiday in King’s honor began. U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan first proposed a bill on April 8, 1968, but the first vote on the legislation didn’t happen until 1979. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King , led the lobbying effort to drum up public support. Fifteen years after its introduction, the bill finally became law.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan ’s signature created Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service as a federal holiday. It’s celebrated annually on the third Monday in January. The only national day of service, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first celebrated in 1986. The first time all 50 states recognized the holiday was in 2000.

See Martin Luther King Jr.’s life depicted onscreen in the 2018 documentary I Am MLK Jr. or the Oscar-winning movie Selma .

Quick Facts

Where did martin luther king jr. go to school, philosophy of nonviolence, civil rights accomplishments, "i have a dream" and other famous speeches, wife and kids, fbi surveillance, later activism, assassination, who was martin luther king jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and civil rights activist who had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, beginning in the mid-1950s. Among his many efforts, King headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Through his nonviolent activism and inspirational speeches , he played a pivotal role in ending legal segregation of Black Americans, as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 . King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honors. He was assassinated by James Earl Ray and died on April 4, 1968, at age 39. King continues to be remembered as one of the most influential and inspirational Black leaders in history.

FULL NAME: Martin Luther King Jr. BIRTHDAY: January 15, 1929 DIED: April 4, 1968 BIRTHPLACE: Atlanta, Georgia SPOUSE: Coretta Scott King (1953-1968) CHILDREN: Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter, and Bernice King ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Martin Luther King Jr. was born as Michael Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. His birthday was January 15, 1929.

His parents were Michael Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. The Williams and King families had roots in rural Georgia. Martin’s maternal grandfather, A.D. Williams, was a rural minister for years and then moved to Atlanta in 1893. He took over the small, struggling Ebenezer Baptist Church with around 13 members and made it into a forceful congregation. He married Jennie Celeste Parks, and they had one child who survived, Alberta.

Michael Sr. came from a family of sharecroppers in a poor farming community. He married Alberta in 1926 after an eight-year courtship. The newlyweds moved to A.D.’s home in Atlanta. Michael stepped in as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church upon the death of his father-in-law in 1931. He, too, became a successful minister and adopted the name Martin Luther King Sr. in honor of the German Protestant religious leader Martin Luther . In due time, Michael Jr. followed his father’s lead and adopt the name himself to become Martin Luther King Jr.

A middle child, Martin Jr. had an older sister, Willie, and a younger brother, Alfred. The King children grew up in a secure and loving environment. Martin Sr. was more the disciplinarian, while Alberta’s gentleness easily balanced out their father’s strict hand.

Although they undoubtedly tried, Martin Jr.’s parents couldn’t shield him completely from racism. His father fought against racial prejudice, not just because his race suffered, but also because he considered racism and segregation to be an affront to God’s will. He strongly discouraged any sense of class superiority in his children, which left a lasting impression on Martin Jr.

Growing up in Atlanta, King entered public school at age 5. In May 1936, he was baptized, but the event made little impression on him.

In May 1941, King was 12 years old when his grandmother Jennie died of a heart attack. The event was traumatic for the boy, more so because he was out watching a parade against his parents’ wishes when she died. Distraught at the news, young King jumped from a second-story window at the family home, allegedly attempting suicide.

King attended Booker T. Washington High School, where he was said to be a precocious student. He skipped both the ninth and eleventh grades and, at age 15, entered Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1944. He was a popular student, especially with his female classmates, but largely unmotivated, floating through his first two years.

Influenced by his experiences with racism, King began planting the seeds for a future as a social activist early in his time at Morehouse. “I was at the point where I was deeply interested in political matters and social ills,” he recalled in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr . “I could envision myself playing a part in breaking down the legal barriers to Negro rights.”

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the time, King felt that the best way to serve that purpose was as a lawyer or a doctor. Although his family was deeply involved in the church and worship, King questioned religion in general and felt uncomfortable with overly emotional displays of religious worship. This discomfort had continued through much of his adolescence, initially leading him to decide against entering the ministry, much to his father’s dismay.

But in his junior year, King took a Bible class, renewed his faith, and began to envision a career in the ministry. In the fall of his senior year, he told his father of his decision, and he was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church in February 1948.

Later that year, King earned a sociology degree from Morehouse College and began attended the liberal Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. He thrived in all his studies, was elected student body president, and was valedictorian of his class in 1951. He also earned a fellowship for graduate study.

Even though King was following his father’s footsteps, he rebelled against Martin Sr.’s more conservative influence by drinking beer and playing pool while at college. He became romantically involved with a white woman and went through a difficult time before he could break off the relationship.

During his last year in seminary, King came under the guidance of Morehouse College President Benjamin E. Mays, who influenced King’s spiritual development. Mays was an outspoken advocate for racial equality and encouraged King to view Christianity as a potential force for social change.

After being accepted at several colleges for his doctoral study, King enrolled at Boston University. In 1954, while still working on his dissertation, King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama. He completed his doctorate and earned his degree in 1955 at age 25.

Decades after King’s death, in the late 1980s, researchers at Stanford University’s King Papers Project began to note similarities between passages of King’s doctoral dissertation and those of another student’s work. A committee of scholars appointed by Boston University determined that King was guilty of plagiarism in 1991, though it also recommended against the revocation of his degree.

First exposed to the concept of nonviolent resistance while reading Henry David Thoreau ’s On Civil Disobedience at Morehouse, King later discovered a powerful exemplar of the method’s possibilities through his research into the life of Mahatma Gandhi . Fellow civil rights activist Bayard Rustin , who had also studied Gandhi’s teachings, became one of King’s associates in the 1950s and counseled him to dedicate himself to the principles of nonviolence.

As explained in his autobiography , King previously felt that the peaceful teachings of Jesus applied mainly to individual relationships, not large-scale confrontations. But he came to realize: “Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.”

It led to the formation of King’s six principles of nonviolence :

• Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
• Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
• Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
• Nonviolence holds that suffering for a just cause can educate and transform.
• Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
• Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.

In the years to come, King also frequently cited the “ Beloved Community ”—a world in which a shared spirit of compassion brings an end to the evils of racism, poverty, inequality, and violence—as the end goal of his activist efforts.

Led by his religious convictions and philosophy of nonviolence, King became one of the most prominent figures of the Civil Rights Movement . He was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and played key roles in several major demonstrations that transformed society. This included the Montgomery Bus Boycott that integrated Alabama’s public transit, the Greensboro Sit-In movement that desegregated lunch counters across the South, the March on Washington that led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in Alabama that culminated in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

King’s efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 when he was 35.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

King’s first leadership role within the Civil Rights Movement was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956. The 381-day protest integrated the Alabama city’s public transit in one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history.

The effort began on December 1, 1955, when 42-year-old Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home after an exhausting day at work. She sat in the first row of the “colored” section in the middle of the bus. As the bus traveled its route, all the seats in the white section filled up, then several more white passengers boarded the bus.

The bus driver noted that there were several white men standing and demanded that Parks and several other African Americans give up their seats. Three other Black passengers reluctantly gave up their places, but Parks remained seated.

The driver asked her again to give up her seat, and again she refused. Parks was arrested and booked for violating the Montgomery City Code. At her trial a week later, in a 30-minute hearing, Parks was found guilty and fined $10 and assessed $4 court fee.

The local NAACP chapter had been looking to challenge Montgomery’s segregated bus policy and had almost made 15-year-old Claudette Colvin the face of the campaign months earlier. She similarly refused to give up her bus seat to a white man on March 2, 1955, but after organizers learned Colvin was pregnant, they feared it would scandalize the deeply religious Black community and make Colvin, along with the group’s efforts, less credible in the eyes of sympathetic white people. Parks’ experience of discrimination provided another opportunity.

On the night Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon , head of the local NAACP chapter, met with King and other local civil rights leaders to plan a Montgomery Bus Boycott. King was elected to lead the boycott because he was young, well-trained, and had solid family connections and professional standing. He was also new to the community and had few enemies, so organizers felt he would have strong credibility with the Black community.

In his first speech as the group’s president, King declared:

“We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

King’s skillful rhetoric put new energy into the civil rights struggle in Alabama. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began December 5, 1955, and for more than a year, the local Black community walked to work, coordinated ride sharing, and faced harassment, violence, and intimidation. Both King’s and Nixon’s homes were attacked.

In addition to the boycott, members of the Black community took legal action against the city ordinance that outlined the segregated transit system. They argued it was unconstitutional based on the U.S. Supreme Court ’s “separate is never equal” decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Several lower courts agreed, and the nation’s Supreme Court upheld the ruling in a November 13, 1956, decision that also ruled the state of Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

After the legal defeats and large financial losses, the city of Montgomery lifted the law that mandated segregated public transportation. The boycott ended on December 20, 1956.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Flush with victory, African American civil rights leaders recognized the need for a national organization to help coordinate their efforts. In January 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy , and 60 ministers and civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to harness the moral authority and organizing power of Black churches. The SCLC helped conduct nonviolent protests to promote civil rights reform.

King’s participation in the organization gave him a base of operation throughout the South, as well as a national platform. The SCLC felt the best place to start to give African Americans a voice was to enfranchise them in the voting process. In February 1958, the SCLC sponsored more than 20 mass meetings in key southern cities to register Black voters. King met with religious and civil rights leaders and lectured all over the country on race-related issues.

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

That September, King survived an attempt on his life when a woman with mental illness stabbed him in the chest as he signed copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in a New York City department store. Saved by quick medical attention, King expressed sympathy for his assailant’s condition in the aftermath .

In 1959, with the help of the American Friends Service Committee, King visited Gandhi ’s birthplace in India. The trip affected him in a profound way, increasing his commitment to America’s civil rights struggle.

Greensboro Sit-In

By 1960, King was gaining national exposure. He returned to Atlanta to become co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church but also continued his civil rights efforts. His next activist campaign was the student-led Greensboro Sit-In movement.

In February 1960, a group of Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina , began sitting at racially segregated lunch counters in the city’s stores. When asked to leave or sit in the “colored” section, they just remained seated, subjecting themselves to verbal and sometimes physical abuse.

The movement quickly gained traction in several other cities. That April, the SCLC held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, with local sit-in leaders. King encouraged students to continue to use nonviolent methods during their protests. Out of this meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed and, for a time, worked closely with the SCLC. By August 1960, the sit-ins had successfully ended segregation at lunch counters in 27 southern cities. But the movement wasn’t done yet.

On October 19, 1960, King and 75 students entered a local department store and requested lunch-counter service but were denied. When they refused to leave the counter area, King and 36 others were arrested. Realizing the incident would hurt the city’s reputation, Atlanta’s mayor negotiated a truce, and charges were eventually dropped.

Soon after, King was imprisoned for violating his probation on a traffic conviction. The news of his imprisonment entered the 1960 presidential campaign when candidate John F. Kennedy made a phone call to Martin’s wife, Coretta Scott King . Kennedy expressed his concern over the harsh treatment Martin received for the traffic ticket, and political pressure was quickly set in motion. King was soon released.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In the spring of 1963, King organized a demonstration in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. With entire families in attendance, city police turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators. King was jailed, along with large numbers of his supporters.

The event drew nationwide attention. However, King was personally criticized by Black and white clergy alike for taking risks and endangering the children who attended the demonstration.

In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail , King eloquently spelled out his theory of nonviolence: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community, which has constantly refused to negotiate, is forced to confront the issue.”

1963 March on Washington

By the end of the Birmingham campaign, King and his supporters were making plans for a massive demonstration on the nation’s capital composed of multiple organizations, all asking for peaceful change. The demonstration was the brainchild of labor leader A. Philip Randolph and King’s one-time mentor Bayard Rustin .

On August 28, 1963, the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew an estimated 250,000 people in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. It remains one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in American history. During the demonstration, King delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech .

The rising tide of civil rights agitation that had culminated in the March on Washington produced a strong effect on public opinion. Many people in cities not experiencing racial tension began to question the nation’s Jim Crow laws and the near-century of second-class treatment of African American citizens since the end of slavery. This resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , authorizing the federal government to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing discrimination in publicly owned facilities.

Selma March

Continuing to focus on voting rights, King, the SCLC, SNCC, and local organizers planned to march peacefully from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery.

Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams , demonstrators set out on March 7, 1965. But the Selma march quickly turned violent as police with nightsticks and tear gas met the demonstrators as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The attack was televised, broadcasting the horrifying images of marchers being bloodied and severely injured to a wide audience. Of the 600 demonstrators, 58 were hospitalized in a day that became known as “ Bloody Sunday .” King, however, was spared because he was in Atlanta.

Not to be deterred, activists attempted the Selma-to-Montgomery march again. This time, King made sure he was part of it. Because a federal judge had issued a temporary restraining order on another march, a different approach was taken.

On March 9, 1965, a procession of 2,500 marchers, both Black and white, set out once again to cross the Pettus Bridge and confronted barricades and state troopers. Instead of forcing a confrontation, King led his followers to kneel in prayer, then they turned back. This became known as “Turnaround Tuesday.”

Alabama Governor George Wallace continued to try to prevent another march until President Lyndon B. Johnson pledged his support and ordered U.S. Army troops and the Alabama National Guard to protect the protestors.

On March 21, 1965, approximately 2,000 people began a march from Selma to Montgomery. On March 25, the number of marchers, which had grown to an estimated 25,000 gathered in front of the state capitol where King delivered a televised speech. Five months after the historic peaceful protest, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act .

Along with his “I Have a Dream” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speeches, King delivered several acclaimed addresses over the course of his life in the public eye.

“I Have A Dream” Speech

Date: august 28, 1963.

King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington. Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, he emphasized his belief that someday all men could be brothers to the 250,000-strong crowd.

Notable Quote: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“Give Us the Ballot” Speech

Date: may 17, 1957.

Six years before he told the world of his dream, King stood at the same Lincoln Memorial steps as the final speaker of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Dismayed by the ongoing obstacles to registering Black voters, King urged leaders from various backgrounds—Republican and Democrat, Black and white—to work together in the name of justice.

Notable Quote: “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law... Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.”

Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

Date: december 10, 1964.

Speaking at the University of Oslo in Norway, King pondered why he was receiving the Nobel Prize when the battle for racial justice was far from over, before acknowledging that it was in recognition of the power of nonviolent resistance. He then compared the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement to the ground crew at an airport who do the unheralded-yet-necessary work to keep planes running on schedule.

Notable Quote: “I think Alfred Nobel would know what I mean when I say that I accept this award in the spirit of a curator of some precious heirloom which he holds in trust for its true owners—all those to whom beauty is truth and truth, beauty—and in whose eyes the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.”

“Our God is Marching On (How Long? Not Long)” Speech

Date: march 25, 1965.

At the end of the bitterly fought Selma-to-Montgomery march, King addressed a crowd of 25,000 supporters from the Alabama State Capitol. Offering a brief history lesson on the roots of segregation, King emphasized that there would be no stopping the effort to secure full voting rights, while suggesting a more expansive agenda to come with a call to march on poverty.

Notable Quote: “I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’... How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” Speech

Date: april 4, 1967.

One year before his assassination, King delivered a controversial sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church in which he condemned the Vietnam War. Explaining why his conscience had forced him to speak up, King expressed concern for the poor American soldiers pressed into conflict thousands of miles from home, while pointedly faulting the U.S. government’s role in escalating the war.

Notable Quote: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Speech

Date: april 3, 1968.

The well-known orator delivered his final speech the day before he died at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. King reflected on major moments of progress in history and his own life, in addition to encouraging the city’s striking sanitation workers.

Notable Quote: “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

While working on his doctorate at Boston University, King met Coretta Scott , an aspiring singer and musician at the New England Conservatory school in Boston. They were married on June 18, 1953, and had four children—two daughters and two sons—over the next decade. Their oldest, Yolanda, was born in 1955, followed by sons Martin Luther King III in 1957 and Dexter in 1961. The couple welcomed Bernice King in 1963.

Although she accepted the responsibility to raise the children while King travelled the country, Coretta opened their home to organizational meetings and served as an advisor and sounding board for her husband. “I am convinced that if I had not had a wife with the fortitude, strength, and calmness of Corrie, I could not have withstood the ordeals and tensions surrounding the movement,” King wrote in his autobiography.

His lengthy absences became a way of life for their children, but Martin III remembered his father returning from the road to join the kids playing in the yard or bring them to the local YMCA for swimming. King also fostered discussions at mealtimes to make sure everyone understood the important issues he was seeking to resolve.

Leery of accumulating wealth as a high-profile figure, King insisted his family live off his salary as a pastor. However, he was known to splurge on good suits and fine dining, while contrasting his serious public image with a lively sense of humor among friends and family.

Due to his relationships with alleged Communists, King became a target of FBI surveillance and, from late 1963 until his death, a campaign to discredit the civil rights activist. While FBI wiretaps failed to produce evidence of Communist sympathies, they captured the civil rights leader’s engagement in extramarital dalliances. This led to the infamous “suicide letter” of 1964, later confirmed to be from the FBI and authorized by then-Director J. Edgar Hoover , which urged King to kill himself if he wanted to prevent news of his affairs from going public.

In 2019, historian David Garrow wrote of explosive new allegations against King following his review of recently released FBI documents. Among the discoveries was a memo suggesting that King had encouraged the rape of a parishioner in a hotel room, as well as evidence that he might have fathered a daughter with a mistress. Other historians questioned the veracity of the documentation, especially given the FBI’s known attempts to damage King’s reputation. The original surveillance tapes regarding these allegations are under judicial seal until 2027.

From late 1965 through 1967, King expanded his civil rights efforts into other larger American cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. But he met with increasing criticism and public challenges from young Black power leaders. King’s patient, non-violent approach and appeal to white middle-class citizens alienated many Black militants who considered his methods too weak, too late, and ineffective.

To address this criticism, King began making a link between discrimination and poverty, and he began to speak out against the Vietnam War . He felt America’s involvement in Vietnam was politically untenable and the government’s conduct in the war was discriminatory to the poor. He sought to broaden his base by forming a multiracial coalition to address the economic and unemployment problems of all disadvantaged people. To that end, plans were in the works for another march on Washington to highlight the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement intended to pressure the government into improving living and working conditions for the economically disadvantaged.

By 1968, the years of demonstrations and confrontations were beginning to wear on King. He had grown tired of marches, going to jail, and living under the constant threat of death. He was becoming discouraged at the slow progress of civil rights in America and the increasing criticism from other African American leaders.

In the spring of 1968, a labor strike by Memphis, Tennessee, sanitation workers drew King to one last crusade. On April 3, 1968, he gave his final and what proved to be an eerily prophetic speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in which he told supporters, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now… I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

While standing on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a sniper’s bullet on April 4, 1968. King died at age 39. The shocking assassination sparked riots and demonstrations in more than 100 cities across the country.

The shooter was James Earl Ray , a malcontent drifter and former convict. He initially escaped authorities but was apprehended after a two-month international manhunt. In 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

The identity of King’s assassin has been the source of some controversy. Ray recanted his confession shortly after he was sentenced, and King’s son Dexter publicly defended Ray’s innocence after meeting with the convicted gunman in 1997. Another complicating factor is the 1993 confession of tavern owner Loyd Jowers, who said he contracted a different hit man to kill King. In June 2000, the U.S. Justice Department released a report that dismissed the alternative theories of King’s death. Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998.

King’s life had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States. Years after his death, he is the most widely known Black leader of his era.

His life and work have been honored with a national holiday, schools and public buildings named after him, and a memorial on Independence Mall in Washington, D.C.

Over the years, extensive archival studies have led to a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of his life, portraying him as a complex figure: flawed, fallible, and limited in his control over the mass movements with which he was associated, yet a visionary leader who was deeply committed to achieving social justice through nonviolent means.

• But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.
• There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.
• Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
• The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
• Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
• Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
• The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.
• We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools.
• Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.
• I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
• The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but with no morals.
• I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.
• Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
• A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.
• At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
• Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
• In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

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Jonathan Eig's MLK Biography 'King: A Life' Is Among Nonfiction National Book Award Nominees

A comprehensive new biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, a memoir on family by the prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and an exploration of the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s are among 10 books on the nonfiction longlist of the National Book Awards

Jonathan Eig's MLK Biography 'King: A Life' Is Among Nonfiction National Book Award Nominees

NEW YORK (AP) — A comprehensive new biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, a memoir on family by the prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and an exploration of the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s are among 10 books on the nonfiction longlist of the National Book Awards.

The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, also released its poetry longlist Thursday, a day after announcing 10 nominees each in the categories of young people's literature and books in translation. Judges will next month reduce each list to five finalists, with the winners to be announced during a Manhattan dinner ceremony on Nov. 15. The foundation will unveil the fiction longlist on Friday.

Jonathan Eig's “King: A Life" is a nonfiction nominee, along with Nguyen's “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial,” Donovan X. Ramsey's “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era,” Ned Blackhawk's “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History” and Prudence Peiffer's “The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.”

The other nonfiction works on the longlist are Cristina Rivera Garza's “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice,” Christina Sharpe's “Ordinary Notes,” Raja Shehadeh's “We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir,” John Vaillant's “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” and Kidada E. Williams' “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction.”

In poetry, former National Book Award finalist Monica Youn is a nominee for “From, From,” Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal was cited for “West: A Translation” and Craig Santos Perez for the latest in his series on the indigenous Chamoru people, “from unincorporated territory (åmot)."

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Others on the poetry longlist are John Lee Clark's “How to Communicate,” Oliver de la Paz's “The Diaspora Sonnets,” Annelyse Gelman's “Vexations,” José Olivarez's “Promises of Gold,” Brandon Som's “Tripas,” Charif Shanahan's “Trace Evidence” and Evie Shockley's “suddenly we.”

Copyright 2023 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Martin Luther King Understood Solidarity

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Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that King and the freedom movement endured. But it largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr photographed on May 26, 1966. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

On May Day 2023, a young black man named Jordan Neely in the midst of a mental health crisis cried out that he was hungry and thirsty on a New York City subway. A white male former Marine named Daniel Penny threw him on the floor and choked him to death. Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis praised the man and compared him to the biblical Good Samaritan, saying, “Let’s show this Marine America’s got his back.”

Late at night on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr, interpreted the parable of the Good Samaritan quite differently, describing him as the member of a scorned caste who had risked his life to save a person of the dominant race who had been beaten and robbed and left to perish on the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. King told this story at Mason Temple to people who had risked a dreadful storm to support 1,300 black sanitation workers, part of the city’s working poor, who were engaged in a desperate months-long strike against the City of Memphis.

The workers and King himself were at a breaking point. A few days earlier at a demonstration, nonstrikers had broken windows, setting off a riot by vengeful white police who sent hundreds of demonstrators to the hospital and killed sixteen-year-old, unarmed Larry Payne. King’s nonviolent leadership and the strike’s success now hung in the balance.

King had been under unendurable stress for months. He encouraged his audience to have hope, but he also told strike supporters of his own terrors going down the Jericho Road, as people had stabbed, jailed, beaten, and repeatedly tried to kill him. At the end of his talk, he declared, “I really don’t know what will happen to me now” and virtually predicted his own death. But instead of fearfully standing aside, he told his audience to rally with him to the side of the sanitation workers, no matter the consequences to themselves.

The question was not what will happen to us if we take the dangerous path of extending our empathy to others, he said, but what will happen to the weak and vulnerable if we do not. “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” King declared.

The next day on April 4, 1968, an assassin murdered him.

More than fifty years later, Republicans have turned King’s Good Samaritan story upside down. Some praise Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager referred to as “a nice young man” by Donald Trump who, armed with an assault rifle, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them. (He was exonerated of any crime.) Like the South’s segregationist White Citizens Councils, “the Klan in business suits,” Republicans today urge hatred and violence committed by others to achieve their own political ends. In a posthumous article titled “Showdown for Nonviolence” in Look magazine, King warned that white politicians such as these could use racism to stir up “a kind of right-wing takeover . . . a Fascist development, which will be terribly injurious to the whole nation.”

Jonathan Eig’s new biography sounds a warning about the times we are in, taking us into the heart and soul of King as he goes down the dangerous and terrifying Jericho Road from his birth on January 15, 1929, to his death in Memphis. I wondered what more could be written after the tremendous accounts we already have of King, but it turns out there remains much more to say. Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated, from the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–56 to brutal episodes in Mississippi; St Augustine, Florida; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Chicago; and Memphis during the 1960s.

When King became an antiwar leader, right-wing paramilitary activists as well as segregationists put him in their crosshairs. Constantly confronting chaos and death chiseled him into a leader who felt frightened, often unsure of himself, and yet called on by the people and his devotion to what he felt was God’s command to speak out and organize for a better world.

As the spokesperson for a mass movement, King went seemingly everywhere and found himself in jail at least twenty-seven times in local movements. There he looked up from the bottom of a dark well to find allies, comrades, and ordinary people who kept pushing. The great black activist Ella Baker said King didn’t make the movement, the movement made King; this account helps us to understand that what she said is true. Sleeping four hours a night, constantly on the road speaking or reading or writing or organizing, King relentlessly moved forward. Starting with what he called “phase one” of the freedom movement, for civil and voting rights, he moved on to making greater demands and launch increasingly all-encompassing struggles for racial equality, peace, and economic justice, not only in the South but in the nation and the world.

King the Radical

Eig shows us how “the radical King,” in Cornel West’s terminology, came to be. Eig also draws on interviews he conducted over six years with some two hundred people who knew King and tells us even more than David Garrow told us decades ago in his King biography about the relentless, illegal FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage intended to take King out as a leader or induce King to retreat from public life or to commit suicide .

In his warped, racist view, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ludicrously seemed to consider one of America’s most famous Baptist ministers a communist or a dupe of communists. Eig documents the unrelenting emotional pressures the FBI and violent white supremacists placed on King. Eig captures recently released transcripts and FBI agent summaries of wiretaps as well as tapes of presidents Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy to show how Hoover tainted their views with his constant salacious and anti-communist propaganda. Hoover leaked wiretap reports to legislators, the media, the military, and anyone who would listen.

Before any reader expresses shock that King — a charismatic celebrity, on the road for often three hundred days of the year — had relationships with numerous women outside of his marriage to Coretta Scott King, we should be clear: the government had no business taping him. If it hadn’t, we would not have these details of his sex life. Hoover is now reaching back from the grave to scandalize King. Eig is shocked by some of what he discovered in newly opened FBI documents but writes that the bigger scandal is that the media did not bring Hoover’s campaign to a stop by exposing the FBI’s disgraceful and illegal campaign.

Often at his wit’s end, King had huge emotional needs; he exercised his male prerogatives in a patriarchal culture that he grew up with in the black church and seems to have searched recklessly for affection and intimacy with women despite the knowledge that the FBI was breathing down his neck. He also saw women as partners in the freedom movement — especially Coretta Scott King. She was at least as radical and at least as dedicated as her husband, stood with him bravely through bombings and death threats, and shored him up through every crisis. By her refusal to comment on King’s infidelities, she declared that their private love lives were not anyone else’s business. Eig documents Coretta King as not only a faithful wife and partner but as a courageous, principled force who made King’s leadership possible and pushed the movement to fight for peace as well as justice. Eig also acknowledges the importance of King’s longtime coworker and confidant Dorothy Cotton who stood by him in many campaigns.

Eig’s fast-paced and moving narrative of King’s life journey and the growing opposition against him impresses on the reader the extent to which the right-wing and racist crusades against King and other social democratic advocates distorted the politics of that era, as they do in our own times. Perhaps only a God-centric person such as King, who believed he had been called on to follow in the path of Jesus come what may, could have withstood the systemic and emotional forces in American life of racism, violence, war, and death.

Eig explains King’s roots in the black social gospel, as the son and grandson of poor and formerly enslaved ancestors who preached the gospel, and King’s deep belief in a personal God who guarantees ultimate justice. Step by step, as a young man growing up in the Great Depression, as a college and doctoral student incorporating the nonviolent teachings of Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi and the critique of capitalism by Karl Marx and social gospel theologians, King early on (not just at the end of his life) became committed to radical reconstruction of American society and the world. He wove the principles of democracy and freedom supposedly guaranteed by the American experience into a radical critique and a demand to resist the “three evils” of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

It’s a marvelous story. Eig’s account stirs a whirlwind of exhilarating feelings as well as visceral pain at remembering the violence and stress that King and his allies in the freedom movement endured. Eig’s account underlines that people should understand King not as a “civil rights leader” but as a radical who challenged all that remains wrong in American life.

In his last organizing effort, the Poor People’s Campaign, King sought to build a mass movement and left-of-center political coalition to demand that every person have full and equal access to the basic necessities of life that one of the richest nations in the world should be able to offer. He called for reparations and an Economic Bill of Rights leveraged by voting and demonstrations and a mass “live-in” civil disobedience action at the nation’s capital.

King demanded the country take a drastic turn in a social democratic direction, such as he saw in Norway when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He repeatedly warned that a country that continues to spend more on the military than human needs is “approaching spiritual death” and called on the nation to radically alter its priorities.

Rather than leading us to the Promised Land, King was murdered in Memphis, followed by the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who might have turned the country away from the path of criminal wars subsequently waged by President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger. What Rev. James Lawson calls “the politics of assassination” turned King’s dream into a nightmare.

King and Labor

Everyone needs to know the story of the only individual African American for which we have a national holiday, and this book is essential. The book does have a blind spot, however, largely ignoring an element in King’s evolution that remains especially important today: his connection to workers and unions and their significance in bringing about social justice.

Eig does describe how King learned about working-class issues from his father’s church, from growing up during the Great Depression, and from college experiences working on a tobacco farm. He also notes that Hoover started tracking King when he discovered that his advisor Stanley Levison wrote speeches that King delivered to unions, both to raise funds for the civil rights movement and as part of a strategy to build a broad coalition of interests to change American society.

As Hoover knew, the Communist Party and the nearly half a dozen leftist civil rights unions that had been expelled in 1949 from the mainstream labor movement followed that united front strategy. So did A. Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin , and just about every social democratic activist, all of whom understood that formula of a labor–civil rights coalition that naturally emerged from social movements of workers and people of color from the New Deal of the 1930s to the freedom movements of the 1960s.

The Packinghouse and Pullman Porters unions, with large black memberships, supported King’s campaign in Montgomery, and 1199: The National Health Care Workers’ Union and others joined in throughout King’s time of leadership. Walter Reuther, who is mentioned but not identified as president of the powerful United Auto Workers union, provided much of the bail funds in Birmingham, and joined King to lead a mass march in Detroit as well as in the March on Washington, to which his and other unions sent thousands of people on buses, trains, and planes. That “March for Jobs and Freedom” began as a labor event and ended as one of the most important mass marches of the twentieth century.

King addressed many if not most of the major unions and became an honorary member of some of them. In 1961, he spoke to the AFL-CIO federation criticizing union racism and warning that a “crisis confronts us both” in the form of a menacing military, segregationist, and right-wing coalition that threatens “everything that is decent and fair in American life” and could “drive labor into impotency.” Stanley Levison wrote most of this and King’s other labor speeches, but King gave those speeches life. He did not just follow a script written by someone else. He felt labor struggles.

A few days after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Olso, Norway, where he called for a universal campaign for peace and economic justice, he came back to Atlanta to go on the picket line. On behalf of eight hundred black women who worked in his church’s neighborhood, he joined their effort and stayed with it until they won their strike against the Scripto manufacturing company. Working with labor advisors and union allies, King thoroughly imbibed the idea of labor solidarity. What civil rights leader besides King would have stepped into the Memphis sanitation strike, as part of his Poor People’s Campaign, unprepared but quickly assessing the crisis at hand, to call for a general strike of black teachers, students, and working people?

Had things turned out differently, such an event in Memphis would have signaled a major turning point for the movements of the 1960s. His “All Labor has Dignity” stump speech to Memphis workers on March 18 speaks to both his familiarity with unions and his passion for the black working poor.

“You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” he said. “We can all get more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power.” King understood solidarity.

Like other biographers of King, Eig’s account of King’s last campaign in Memphis remains spare, telling us not enough about the movement and its consequences for how we remember King. As in Montgomery in 1955, in 1968 King infused a local struggle with larger, universal demands for solidarity.

“He gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis, and the peasants of Vietnam,” said Coretta Scott King.

On April 8, while white supremacists reveled in his death and continued to call King a communist and authorities feared another riot, she and three of her children led tens of thousands of Memphians along with strikers, Reuther, and other unionists in a disciplined, silent march in Memphis. She called on them to renew their dedication to King’s nonviolent vision to “make all people truly free and to make every person feel that he is a human being.” Weeks later, the sanitation workers won their strike and gained recognition for Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Labor and civil rights alliances helped to make public employees the fastest-growing segment of unions in the country.

On April 4, 2018, fifty years after King’s death, tens of thousands of us gathered in Memphis to rededicate ourselves to King’s labor, civil rights, and human rights coalition and to defy the corrupt, racist, and anti-union agenda of the Trump regime. Unions honor King today as a labor as well as freedom movement leader. Workers in Memphis and other places still use the “I Am a Man” slogan as part of their protests today.

Although Eig does not fully bring to the fore King’s vision of union and worker solidarity, he excels in highlighting King as a person and dramatizing his many struggles. In reading this book, I felt an upsurge of hope that we may be able to alter what looks like an increasingly dismal future. It’s a beautiful book that requires every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom, economic justice, and equality.

What more can readers read to understand King’s prophetic voice and vision? Turn additionally to stories written by labor and civil rights historians on King’s project to abolish poverty and demand that “all labor has dignity,” as he said in Memphis. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” We still need to fully embrace King’s framework of global solidarity in the struggle to end racism, poverty, and war. This new biography tells a story that helps to keep hope alive that we may someday attain King’s beloved community of social and economic justice.

Entertainment | Jonathan Eig wrote ‘King: A Life’ about Martin…

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Entertainment, entertainment | jonathan eig wrote ‘king: a life’ about martin luther king jr. — the man this time, instead of the myth.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig (May 16, 2023).

Steve Marino / Chicago Tribune

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left, inspects an apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. with his wife, Coretta, right, on Feb. 10, 1966, in Chicago.

Al Phillips / Chicago Tribune

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd gathered at 63rd and Halsted streets as he headed a non-partisan get out the vote caravan which toured Chicago from the south side to the north side on Oct. 29, 1964, in Chicago.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Al Raby, right, clean the ashes from the apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1966.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left, and Al Raby clean up garbage from an apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1966. King and Raby shed light on the poor living conditions of black people in the Lawndale neighborhood in 1966.

Al Raby, second from left, and Dr. Martin Luther King, seated on right, meet with a group of residents of an apartment building, including Ruby Keys, Louis Mitchell and Rosie Townes, at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 10, 1966. The group had gathered in Mrs. Townes apartment to talk about living conditions for black people in poor neighborhoods of Chicago. Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy is in the background.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walks outside after a morning summit meeting at the St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush Street in Chicago on Aug. 17, 1966. "Chicago business, political, and religious leaders met for nearly eight hours yesterday with leaders of the housing demonstrations that have caused turmoil in Chicago in recent weeks. They failed to reach any agreement and after the meeting, the Rev. Martin Luther King, leader of the Freedom movement in Chicago, said demonstrations will continue," the Tribune reported on Aug. 18, 1966. Jesse Jackson is walking next to King.

Rosie Townes, of 1321 S. Homan Ave., greets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy and Al Raby at her apartment where the group gathered to talk about grievances against building owners on Feb. 10, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talks with reporters outside St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush St. in Chicago after a morning summit meeting on Aug. 17, 1966. The meeting was to discuss the city's racial problems.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. walks outside after a morning summit meeting at the St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush St. in Chicago on Aug. 17, 1966. The meeting was to discuss open housing laws in Chicago. Jesse Jackson is at his side.

Ed Wagner Sr. / Chicago Tribune

Civil Rights Leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plays pool with his "best stick" in a match with Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby while on an anti-slum campaign on Feb. 17, 1966. The pool hall was located at 3251 W. Madison street in Chicago, but was destroyed in the rioting after MLK's death in 1968.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who met with a group of tenants at 1321 S. Homan Ave., leaves the apartment and is greeted by children as school was let out nearby on Feb. 10, 1966, in Chicago. He was hailed and cheered by the crowd. King is in front of his wife, Coretta, who is wearing a hat, on the center left.

Tom Kinahan / Chicago Tribune

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, in their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966. King and his family moved into the poor neighborhood to shed light on the living conditions of black people in Chicago in 1966.

A crowd gathers outside the new Chicago apartment rented by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, talk to the press outside their apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, look out the window of their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

A crowd gathers at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

Civil Rights Leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plays pool with his "best stick" in a match with Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby, standing next to him with pool cue, while on an anti-slum campaign on Feb. 17, 1966. The pool hall was located at 3251 W. Madison street in Chicago, but was destroyed in the rioting after MLK's death in 1968.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 48th and South State streets near the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project in Chicago on July 24, 1965.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 46th Street and South Ellis Avenue in Chicago on July 24, 1965.

A crowd swarms around a truck carrying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at 61st Street and South Park Avenue (now Martin Luther King Drive) as he heads a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote caravan that toured Chicago from the South Side to the North Side on Oct. 29, 1964.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 48th and South State streets near the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project in Chicago on July 24, 1965. Beethoven Elementary School can be seen in the background.

Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune

Jonathan Eig, a writer who has become one of the most accomplished biographers in the country, in his Chicago home office on May 16, 2023.

In the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spent much time visiting — and at one point renting a home in — Chicago to help with open housing initiatives and the civil rights movement in the city. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta pose with neighborhood children in their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

The air-conditioned tour bus with tinted windows stopped outside Bright Star Baptist Church in Bronzeville and out came several dozen congregants from the Anshe Emet Synagogue of Lakeview. They moved slowly up the sidewalk and concrete steps of the church. Before anyone reached the doors, welcomes erupted, like the clamor from a surprise party. “I assume you’re here for Jonathan Eig?” a Bright Star parishioner asked.

“That’s right, and all this,” a grinning elderly woman said, waving at the growing line queuing up behind her to get in, “is what you would call the Jonathan Eig Fan Club.”

They laughed.

You would also call this a decent part of the congregation at Eig’s synagogue. They came here the other day because the North Side resident and acclaimed biographer was about to publish “King: A Life,” the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in 40 years. Bright Star and Anshe Emet have had a kind of sister-congregation relationship for a decade. It also makes sense to honor a Baptist minister in a Baptist church. Plus, congregations coming together, one Black, one white, to discuss King is like a manifestation of King — America in harmony. The point is lost on nobody. But it’s another King, one with claws who posed a serious threat to white supremacy, that’s here.

The King who was a person, not a stamp, or statue, or national holiday.

That King is present.

The ceiling of the church was low, and rows of long banquet tables covered in blue tablecloths filled the room. Soon every chair was taken. Two members of the new cross-congregation book club offered thoughts on “King.” A Bright Star congregant noted King was depressed: “That stood out. I experienced depression.” An Anshe Emet congregant said one of Eig’s sentences resonated: King has become “so hallowed he’s hollow.” Then Rabbi Michael Siegel, soberly, pointed out that though Mayor Brandon Johnson was inaugurated that day, “Chicago is at a low ebb … Yet in this church, I feel a lot of hope.” Then Pastor Chris Harris, jocular and warm, looked out on the crowd and said: “This is the brightest, and the lightest, my church has ever looked.” More laughter, and then attention swung to Eig, the trim, serious, Paul Shaffer-looking guy waiting between them.

Harris: “It took a lot of courage for you, as a white man, to write anything about a Black man that is less than positive.” The Black community, he said, has long grown used to white writers tearing down the image of King or “discrediting his greatness.” But that’s not this, Harris said. This is six years of reporting, interviewing and reframing greatness.

Eig nodded, staring downward.

“King” does not take that subtitle, “A Life,” lightly. It offers what many of Eig’s biographies have offered: An American mythology — Muhammad Ali , Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Al Capone — stripped of its bloodless granite image, though not importance.

Yet history is often a mountain range, scalable yet unmovable.

Several years ago, Eig watched the 2013 Jackie Robinson docudrama “42? and groaned as it repeated a folk tale: During a Robinson road trip to Cincinnati, Red fans booed until a white Brooklyn Dodger, Pee Wee Reese, left his position at shortstop and put an arm around Robinson, silencing the stadium. It’s an image chiseled into monuments, repeated in books and even a documentary from Ken Burns, Eig’s friend. “But I proved pretty conclusively it didn’t happen,” Eig said earlier that day, before the Bronzeville event. “In this job, some stories are embellished so long, they’re cemented.”

King required another level of rethinking. To publish a new biography in 2023 — a book being hailed as the best, most complete biography of the civil rights leader, and one already dug into The New York Times Bestseller list — meant “scraping decades of barnacles off the hull of King until you can say, ‘Let’s look at this again,'” Eig said. “The truth is, we haven’t seen him in a while. Not since we put up a 30-foot-tall monument in D.C. Not since we created a national holiday. It’s gotten hard to see him as a person. Some of the people I talked with felt this was intentional. The government needed to strip away what made King so radical until he became a safe figure, the kind we can all hold hands and sing about. People I interviewed who knew him were mad about this.

“And with a lot of good reason. You know, when J. Edgar Hoover got the phone call about King being shot, before King was even dead, Hoover said: ‘I hope the bastard doesn’t die, because then they’ll turn him into a martyr.’ In a way, a national holiday allows the government to control the image of what King actually stood for, softening it.”

After six years of digging and documenting, the result is a biography of King that removed the godliness for something more profound and meaningful. The significance of the book is that it “takes us beyond hagiographical treatments of King to a serious consideration of the man’s frailties, doubts and vulnerabilities,” said Lewis V. Baldwin, a King biographer and professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. “Eig accomplishes this without calling into question Dr. King’s important contributions and place in history.” It is a portrait of an activist who did not like confrontation, a guy who bit his nails, tried to kill himself (twice) as an adolescent and gave up a white girlfriend as a pragmatic necessity for a career in the Baptist church. It’s also a profile of a man whose righteousness, calm and conservative style, as Hoover understood, made him palpable, and therefore a true threat to American leaders not eager to live up to American ideals.

“I feel like Jonathan was able to show this person was even more special than we know because he was not a god,” said Shannon Luder-Manuel, a sensitivity reader hired by Eig’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to study the manuscript and its treatment of Black history. “I’m mixed race, which factors into my viewpoint, but you walk away from the book understanding King had his faults and that didn’t negate everything he did.”

Indeed, last month, when Eig spoke to a history class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in Kenwood, the students asked what others have: Why was the FBI so obsessed with King? Was it hard as a white guy to research this?

“But then one student,” Eig recalled, “she asked point-blank: ‘How do we know you haven’t made all this stuff up?’ Which, fundamentally, may be the smartest question.”

Jonathan Eig works from a small thin office in the back of his apartment in Lakeview, which he shares with his wife, Jennifer Tescher, founder of the nonprofit Financial Health Network, and their three children (one of whom had been mentored by Eig in the Big Brother program and later became part of the family when his mother died). It was a laundry room until recently. There are framed black-and-white portraits of some of his subjects, but also Miles Davis, Bob Dylan. There are Mold-a-Rama busts of King on his desk and a stack of new thank-you cards and a pile of King stamps and a flood of paperwork. At one end of the room is a wall of books on whatever he happens to be writing about; when he moves on to the next subject, a new library of books is shuffled in. During the years of writing and researching “King,” books and papers spilled out of the shelves and were stacked in tall traffic cones around his chair, requiring navigation.

His papers, he said, caught the eye of the archivists at Northwestern University (he’s a graduate of its Medill journalism school), and since he’s always concerned about the chance of a burst pipe or something destroying research, he’s been eager to see it go.

For the first year he worked on “King,” he did nothing but travel the country and interview sources — King’s family, friends and colleagues who were alive, and getting old. He needed them now. This was pre-pandemic. He met with a who’s who of the civil rights ’60s and beyond: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Juanita Abernathy, John Lewis, Louis Farrakhan, Mavis Staples. He tracked down King’s childhood friends and King’s barber. Among the first interviews was comedian Dick Gregory, who looked square at Eig and wondered, rhetorically: Did Eig even know King was real? That someone so pure of heart and dedicated passed through this world? “What makes King different from Jesus?” Gregory asked. “Jesus is hearsay. Don’t mean it didn’t happen, but there’s film of King. Can’t nobody change nothing.”

In time, Eig built what he calls “a community” of academics and firsthand witnesses to King; from many, he sought a kind of blessing and goodwill to even work on the book.

“I thought the idea for the book was solid, if only because there hadn’t been a major one in decades,” said Peniel Joseph, author of several books on King, Malcolm X and the history of the Black Power movement, as well as the founder of Centers for the Study of Race and Democracy at both University of Texas and Tufts University. “There had been so much fresh information on King since then — good and bad. Something more complex felt overdue because the King we knew was starting to feel a little dated.” But many of those Eig approached initially assumed he was there for the scandals and questionable characteristics — the King of plagiarism charges and womanizing, the King who spoke about “power” but, afraid of scaring off allies, avoiding saying “Black Power.”

“I would say to them, ‘You knew King, but we don’t know him anymore because we have turned into this saintly, passive figure,'” Eig recalled. “I would say that I wanted to write something that both restored his humanity and reminded people of how radical he really was. And everyone I said that to would reply, ‘If that’s what you’re doing, then I’ll help.'”

When Eig notes the strange absence of a new MLK biography in 40 years, he means a single, self-contained focus on a full life, from birth to death. David Garrow’s “Bearing the Cross,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography is centered on his civil rights years; Taylor Branch’s 2,900-page trilogy, “America in the King Years,” which won the 1989 Pulitzer for history, was the far more expansive story of the period itself.

“Biography,” Eig said, “is a weird medium. Lots of academics don’t really like it — they see it as artsy, ephemeral. And for a generalist like me, a book on someone like King sounds daunting. You’re interpreting a life. That needs analysis and psychology, so by definition, a biography is a failure. I can’t tell you what was going on in his head. I don’t know what his life really was. I have breadcrumbs left behind to assemble his portrait.”

Eig, 59, talks like he writes, in tidy, direct paragraphs that don’t veer much from his point. He grew up in the Hudson River Valley, outside New York City. On a wall in his office is a picture of his grandfather at work as the foreman of a New York City bra company. His father was a bookkeeper who worked at the kitchen table; his mother ran a parenting program in schools. Eig went to work initially for newspapers and magazines, angling upward: the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal. He came to Chicago when his wife took a job here. He began his first book, on Lou Gehrig, with the assumption that “if I wanted to stay in newspapers, which I did, there’d always be those jobs to go back to.”

He stayed in the land of biography.

The Gehrig book (now being developed by Lorne Michaels’ production company as an Apple+ series) led to Jackie Robinson; his book on Capone (shaped out of thousands of pages of investigative material found in Nebraska) led to Eig’s wife suggesting he try something less masculine, which became “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex.” For the most part, if there is a uniting theme here, he said, it’s that each is about rebels. “Even Gehrig, timid and insecure, when he got sick (with ALS, ending his life at 37), he had to step up at a time when people didn’t speak publicly of illness. The pill was created by a scientist at Harvard denied tenure, who worked out of his garage. I don’t know why I am drawn to this type of person. I’m the oldest child in my family, the most conformist guy, a rule follower attracted to people who shake things up.”

Until “King,” Eig’s best-known work was 2017’s sprawling “Ali: A Life,” the research for which inspired Ken Burns to make his own documentary on Ali, and established Eig as a confident, thorough master of the thoughtful, sensitive historical reevaluation. He says Ali’s family was hard to deal with, and navigating through the politics of the family and three of Ali’s wives (a fourth had already died), “became messy but also the most fun I have had working on a book.” With “Ali,” he learned to love interviews. The Gehrig book was written using around 30 interviews. “Ali” came partly out of 500 conversations.

“King,” which Eig gravitated to while researching Ali’s meetings with the civil rights leader, required around 200 interviews. Rabbi Siegel describes Eig as “classic mensch,” the sort who is “intensely conscious of how important another person’s ideas might be.” So as he wrote “King,” Eig turned to “War and Peace” for insight on power. He modeled his “I Have a Dream” chapter on the work of novelist Don DeLillo (who gave his blessing to Eig); he studied thrillers to quicken the pace during King’s murder. To capture King’s tone of spiritual reckoning, he adopted the cadence, repetition and drama of preachers.

But where “King” veers from mere biography to literary landmark is in the use of fresh materials, papers, letters, most seen here for the first time. Eig draws from an unpublished memoir by King’s father; tapes made by Coretta Scott King for a biography; unreleased FBI files; notes from collaborators who worked with King on his books; new telephone transcripts. He gained access to archives gathered by an official Southern Christian Leadership Conference historian who traveled with King; it had never been opened. Biographer David Garrow — who shared his own archive with Eig — said the big leap forward here is in the richness of Eig’s depiction of King’s early years. Some of the arguments about King that Eig’s book tackles — how much of a democratic socialist he actually was, how critical of Malcolm X he could be — have been debated for decades.

“By the early 1990s, partly because of (the landmark PBS series) ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ so many historians and journalists turned to civil rights history that people like John Lewis would have more people angling to interview them than they could count,” Garrow recalled.

But at least on the question of Malcolm X, Eig has broken ground.

For generations, there’s been a broad teaching among historians and students that King and Malcolm X stood at polar ends of the civil rights movement — King the nonviolent mollifier, Malcolm the provocateur who demanded equality by “any means necessary.”

Much of the evidence for this came from a 1965 interview King gave Alex Haley for Playboy: King accuses Malcolm of “fiery, demagogic oratory.” (Malcolm X, for his part, portrayed King as “a modern Uncle Tom.”) Going through transcripts of the interview in Haley’s papers at Duke University, Eig figured out that Haley — who was working then on Malcolm X’s autobiography, and has since been accused often of fudging facts — shifted around quotations. King’s use of “fiery, demagogic oratory” was a more general response to extremists. Haley assigned this phrase (and others) to King’s quotation about Malcolm X, significantly downplaying just how open King actually was about Malcolm X, admitting that he didn’t want to come off as if “I think I have the only truth, the only way.”

Eig, uncertain what he had, called scholars.

“I had been pushing — as had others — against that conventional narrative of the King-Malcolm relationship for a long time,” Peniel Joseph said. “But here’s concrete evidence that led to a constrained vision of history. I think it’ll open the way they are taught. King and Malcolm were dual sides of the same coin, not diametrically opposed. It may take time for the public to understand, but because of Jonathan, that process is underway.”

That night in Bronzeville, Eig smiled and cringed and burst a few bubbles. Heads shook, sometimes out of frustration at what had long been assumed, sometimes out of simple amazement. Pastor Chris Harris leaned over to Eig: Is it true, he asked, that during the “I Have a Dream” speech, Mahalia Jackson felt King losing the crowd and urged King to “Tell them about the dream!” The story is a cornerstone in Black mythology.

“Sadly,” Eig said, “it’s not true.”

Groans throughout the church.

Eig, while researching the speech, got ahold of a recording that Motown was making from the stage; the order of her words and his words don’t jibe. But the speech itself, Eig pointed out, that hard to argue nugget of American history, rewind it back five minutes and King, in the same speech, urges reparations and calls out police brutality.

“The people who were running the cameras and editing that footage probably believed they were sending a message of harmony,” Eig said, “but as a result, they skewed our understanding.” And about King’s time in Chicago, when he marched against segregation in housing and education, and was met with some of the ugliest racist episodes of the decade, North or South: The understanding is King’s time in Chicago was a bust. “And it didn’t go well,” Eig told me earlier. “Advisors advised him against going. He was up against forces he hadn’t dealt with. Chicago was not open to change.

“But he didn’t come here and just get defeated. He offered Chicago concrete solutions that might have made a difference to how this city operates. They were rejected. He did not have a good relationship with Mayor Daley. You can hear recordings. Daley would call President Johnson: He wasn’t open to King, he viewed King as a threat to LBJ.”

At the end of the Bright Star evening, Pastor Harris urged togetherness, then added: It wasn’t enough. An event like this, about King: “Let me be honest. This is safe .” He said the assembled “continue to take credit for what folks did five decades ago.” He asked them, instead, to “keep the old frames and put new pictures of us marching in it.”

Then Harris turned in his seat:

How would Eig challenge them now?

The author looked uncomfortable. He noted that he wasn’t just inaugurated mayor of Chicago. Much laughter. Instead, he would tell a short story: King, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and other civil rights leaders were meeting at the White House, talking to John F. Kennedy, who thought the upcoming March on Washington was “a mistake.” The president asked them why “you people” can’t encourage Black parents to bring up their children better — why can’t “you people” be like other ethnic minorities? Finally, Wilkins turned to Kennedy and replied: “Mr. President, we are doing our part. You do yours.”

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King: The Life of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig review – a story that speaks to our times

The author of a monumental biography of Muhammad Ali uses new material to flesh out the civil rights giant

W ho was the Rev Martin Luther King Jr? In America, the civil rights activist and Baptist minister is now embraced across the political spectrum even as the teaching of the history of discrimination and segregation that shaped him is being actively suppressed in many parts of the country. Beyond the US, he is widely celebrated in nations confronting difficult questions about their own racial pasts .

At the time of his assassination in 1968, however, most Americans had a negative view of him, and the National Security Agency had tapped his overseas phone calls . As late as the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan could state that it was still an open question whether he had been a communist dupe , as King’s enemies at J Edgar Hoover’s FBI had long alleged. By the end of that decade, however, with a national holiday in his honour (reluctantly assented to by Reagan) and prize-winning biographies by Taylor Branch and David Garrow in print, King’s image had undergone a remarkable transformation. Scholars now argue about how much Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas influenced him, though the public often embraces a simpler image of King that renders his more radical racial and economic pronouncements in anodyne terms .

Jonathan Eig, author of a monumental biography of the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali, promises to give us a new King, fully rounded and appropriate for our own moment. His book aspires to “help us make our way through these troubled times” and arrives bearing copious endorsements from past biographers.

His subject was originally called Mike King Jr, named after his Baptist preacher father. King Sr, also known as Daddy King, later adopted the more auspicious name of the reforming German theologian for himself and his son. The family home was in Atlanta, and King’s independent-minded mother Alberta was the daughter of a minister who presided at Ebenezer Baptist church, where both father and son would preach.

Eig traces the nattily dressed and flirtatious King’s progress through his studies at Atlanta’s Morehouse College to Crozer Theological Seminary (where he committed one of his many acts of plagiarism ) to his doctoral studies at Boston University, during which he met his future wife, Coretta Scott. Scott’s passion for civil rights and social reform, we learn, probably exceeded King’s. Once her husband became famous, she became an activist in her own right , going on the road to put her vocal training and organising passion to use in the service of the movement – even while raising their four children.

The event that changed the 26-year-old King’s life was the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger in December 1955. King, a newcomer to the city as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist church, was selected to lead the boycott partly because of his willingness to fight, and partly because he didn’t yet have rivals or enemies among the local Black leadership. The boycotters succeeded, aided by a supreme court victory. That victory made King the national face of a newly ascendant Black freedom movement.

Eig does an excellent job of tracing King’s interior struggles and self-doubts amid the sudden onslaught of media attention, threats, the bombing of his home and his near-death after being stabbed by a Black woman in Harlem. He also devotes sustained attention to the FBI’s campaign of bugging and harassment (authorised by Attorney General Robert Kennedy), which included sending King audiotape evidence of his extramarital affairs, along with a letter suggesting that he step down from leadership or perhaps kill himself before being exposed.

Those efforts intensified amid the events for which King is now most known: the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, King’s famous speech at the March on Washington, the Selma-to-Montgomery march that pushed along the voting rights act of 1965, his effort to bring the movement north to the slums of Chicago, his receipt of the Nobel peace prize and his opposition to the Vietnam war. Eig also repeatedly defends King against the FBI’s charge that he was being manipulated by the small and ineffectual Communist Party USA. Although, in belabouring the point, he perhaps inadvertently lends credence to the Bureau’s framing of things – and lessens the reader’s appreciation of King’s own expansive vision of social justice for the poor and disenfranchised.

Eig takes the time to thoroughly document King’s many affairs – much of which we know about because of the FBI’s relentless surveillance. Along the way, he makes choices that will spark controversy for some, such as his inclusion (albeit sceptically) of David Garrow’s much-criticised claim that King may have “laughed and offered advice” while a fellow minister committed an act of rape – an accusation that originates with King’s enemies at the FBI and cannot be assessed until supporting documents are released in 2027 .

At times, Eig’s book does give us hints of a King who might speak directly to our own times – for instance his advocacy of reparations for African Americans for centuries of bondage and oppression, although it is notable that his last effort, the poor people’s march on Washington, sought to recruit Chicanos, Native Americans, white coal miners and other groups to its cause. In general, however, the King we find here is one that previous biographers have charted. Eig’s thoroughly researched account updates their work, but aside from, for example, placing Coretta nearer the centre of the story and tracing the exact origins of the “I Have a Dream” section of the March on Washington speech, it mostly traces and deepens the tracks of a familiar story.

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Above all it reveals a flawed man, self-doubting, hunted and persecuted by his enemies in the American government while still retaining enough faith to reach for visions of the future that went beyond those of many of his closest allies. At the time of his assassination, he was planning to deliver a sermon entitled “Why America may go to hell”.

Each generation ought to grapple with his life and legacy. For those seeking a readable and comprehensive account of King’s life, buttressed by extensive and up-to-date archival and oral history research, Eig’s book will remain essential reading – but certainly not the last word on its subject.

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When Martin Luther King Jr. came to L.A., only one white politician was willing to greet him

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The Rev. Fred O. Doty had invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at his church in January 1961, and he was looking for an official to greet the civil rights leader at the airport.

But the L.A. mayor had an apparent scheduling conflict.

Council members wanted to spend time with their families.

Senators couldn’t be reached. And assembly members were too busy.

So Doty called L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

“I would be honored to greet Dr. King,” Hahn said.

Supervisor Janice Hahn recalled the story Wednesday during the unveiling of a bronze statue memorializing the moment her father shook King’s hand on the steps of a plane at Los Angeles International Airport.

The life-size statue stands near a church on West Alondra Boulevard in Compton, surrounded by plaques honoring other politicians Kenneth Hahn helped ascend to power.

The moment between King and Hahn remains important in the minds of many Black residents in the 2nd District, which Kenneth Hahn represented for 40 years. He was known as a champion of civil rights in the district, local leaders said.

L.J. Guillory, known as Bishop Guillory, commissioned and paid for the statue.

Guillory said that L.A. politicians declined to greet King because they wanted to keep up the facade that California was better than the places in the South where King was marching for justice.

“California did not want the world to know that they were as racist as the South,” Guillory said. “This was the Tinseltown. This was the land of milk and honey.”

Guillory declined to say who the artist was or how much the statue cost, joking that he’d be divorced if his wife heard the number. The couple, he said, donates a lot of money and time in Compton.

The photo was taken on Jan. 13, 1961, when King arrived for a busy weekend of events.

The Jackson Advocate, the oldest Black newspaper in Mississippi, documented King’s visit, noting that Hahn “extended official greetings” at the airport.

At the Ambassador Hotel, King gave “fiery remarks” to journalists about local leaders drawing district boundaries that barred Black voters from fair representation, according to the Advocate.

“Dr. King stated that the ugliness of segregation can be just as harmful in Los Angeles as in Georgia, and it does exist in the North and in the West though it may be a subtle, under-the-table type of segregation” most obvious in housing, government representation and economic situations, the newspaper said.

That weekend, King helped launch the Western Christian Leadership Conference , which aimed to uplift Black people in the West. He collected $1,400 — about $14,600 in today’s money — to aid in his fight in the South, according to the California Eagle, a Black-owned newspaper in L.A.

Doty invited King to speak after members of his church became “concerned about the repeated shameful incidents in the South” and “sought first-hand information about the developing struggle,” according to the Eagle.

King spoke at Doty’s packed church Sunday morning and then that evening at an event that Doty organized at Canoga Park High School on the “future of integration,” the Eagle said. About 100 people flocked to King with questions after his talk .

After King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., Hahn called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, and asked whether L.A. County could name a new hospital in his honor.

“He’s like, ‘Mrs. King, I don’t think you know who I am, but if it’s OK with you, I’d like to name this hospital in Watts after your husband,’” Janice Hahn, who joined the Board of Supervisors in 2016, said Wednesday. “She stopped him and she said, ‘Oh, no, I know who you are, because when my Martin came home, he couldn’t stop talking about the white official that was so kind to him.’”

That hospital, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, opened in 1972. The troubled facility closed in 2007 after efforts to reform it failed and was replaced in 2015 with Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Willowbrook.

In November, the Willowbrook hospital’s leaders sounded the alarm that it could run out of money because of a failed funding model. Unlike its predecessor, the hospital has received high ratings from regulators.

Hahn said the hospital was the first thing her father fought for as an elected official.

“It was a big fight because the rest of the county didn’t always believe that that part of L.A. County deserved the same things that everybody else had,” she said.

Kenneth Hahn died in 1997 at 77. During his 45 years of public service, he pushed L.A. County to install freeway emergency call boxes, led the development of the county’s paramedic program and helped bring the Dodgers to L.A.

As noted in his Times obituary , Hahn appointed the late Gilbert Lindsay, who later would join the City Council, as his deputy in 1952 — the first Black person to hold such a position in the county.

Janice Hahn said she has thought back to the family story of her father greeting King many times, including when in 2020 she learned about Bruce’s Beach , an oceanfront property in her district that the city of Manhattan Beach had seized from a Black couple in the 1920s.

“I got a lot of criticism — I had friends who thought I’d lost my way,” Hahn said. “But every once in a while, that moment helps shape the decisions that I make too.”

Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

More to Read

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Nov. 21, 2023

Opinion: An L.A. Black civil rights pioneer finally gets the recognition he deserves

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Aug. 26, 2023

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Jaclyn Cosgrove is a reporter at the Los Angeles Times who writes about L.A. County government, with a focus on the county’s mental health treatment system. Previously, Cosgrove worked at the Oklahoman, where they wrote extensively about the state’s mental health and substance use treatment system. They are a graduate of Oklahoma State University and have a master of legal studies degree from UCLA School of Law.

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ASU’s National Center to Observe MLK Holiday with Virtual Event

By ASU News Services

The National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University will host a virtual observance of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday on Thursday, January 12, 2023, from 11 a.m. – noon. The program, titled “Martin Luther King Jr. - The Man and His Time” will be streamed on The National Center’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/civilrightscenter) and YouTube Premiere page ( @ASUCenterforCivilRights ) .

Dr. Richard Wills, Sr., former pastor of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church (Montgomery, Ala.) and Friendship Baptist Church (Atlanta, Georgia), will be the guest speaker and examine the life of King and his impact on the Civil Rights Movement.

In the mid-twentieth century King helped to lay the framework for a successful non-violent direct action campaign in the United States. Activists the world over, have employed strategies worked out by MLK Jr. to address the unresolved social justice challenges facing people in the twenty-first century.

For more information, contact Ms. Bradly Pettway at 334.229.6888 or email: [email protected].

Martin Luther King III Joins UVA Center for Politics

March 24, 2024 • By Bryan McKenzie, [email protected] Bryan McKenzie, [email protected]

• Bryan McKenzie , [email protected]

Martin Luther King III, who spoke at Old Cabell Hall for the 2018 Virginia Film Festival, has been named a professor of practice at the UVA Center for Politics. (Photo by Sanjay Suchak)

Martin Luther King III will join the University of Virginia Center for Politics as a professor of practice for a term beginning immediately and continuing through the fall semester, center officials announced today.

King is the second professor of practice in the Center for Politics and joins former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, who started in March 2023.

King’s appointment coincides with the anniversary of the March 25, 1963, address his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave at UVA.

“I am delighted to join the Center for Politics as a professor of practice at the University of Virginia, and to do so during the anniversary month when my father addressed UVA 61 years ago makes this appointment all the more meaningful,” King said.

Related Story

This is How the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Came to Speak at UVA in 1963

“Like my parents, I have devoted my career to social justice advocacy and combatting some of the most troubling issues of our time, including poverty, racism and violence,” he said. “I look forward to continuing that work with the Center for Politics.”

During his tenure, King will participate in University-wide lectures, serve as a guest lecturer in student seminars and participate in other University and community events to be announced at a future date.

Center officials said King advances the legacy of his parents as a peacemaker and a negotiator on some of today’s most critical national and international platforms for social change.

They said King has devoted his life to promoting global human rights and social justice, earning a reputation as a respected international statesman and a passionate advocate for the poor and oppressed.

The announcement of King’s appointment comes 61 years after his father, the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to 900 University students at Old Cabell Hall. (Contributed photo)

“Professor King brings a wealth of experience in social justice, politics, human rights and much more, and we’re thrilled that he has chosen the Center for Politics,” Larry J. Sabato, the center’s director, said. “I know the students will enjoy getting to know him and learning from his vast experience in the public arena.”

King’s appointment date coincides with the address his father gave to an audience of nearly 900 people in the Old Cabell Hall Auditorium at the invitation of a then-new student organization called the Thomas Jefferson Virginia Council on Human Relations.

Students in the council, mostly African American, were concerned about persecution and discrimination on Grounds in an era when segregation was written into Virginia law. Black students faced several educational hurdles, including exclusion from enrollment in the College of Arts & Sciences. Only one restaurant on the Corner, the University Cafeteria, served Black students.

The students invited the elder King to help their cause. After driving himself from Georgia, King spoke for about an hour against racial segregation at universities and called for increased enrollment of African American students.

The younger King’s first public event as professor of practice will take place April 5 in the same venue where his father spoke. A special concert of the University Chamber Singers, under the direction of professor Michael Slon, is planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UVA Center for Politics.

King will also be a featured speaker during the center’s anniversary weekend, April 6-8. Full details of the center’s 25th anniversary weekend will be released soon.

Media Contact

Bryan McKenzie

Assistant Editor, UVA Today Office of University Communications

[email protected] 434-924-3778

Article Information

April 1, 2024

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