Before the irrepressible activism and leadership of Martin Luther King Jr, the promises within the US Declaration of Independence and its constitution were hollow.
In his 13 years of political and social activism, starting in 1955 with a sermon at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, until his murder in 1968, King led the charge to demand that the country live up to its ideals.
King: The Life of Martin Luther King, a new, comprehensive biography by Jonathan Eig, is the first in decades. The author’s vast research included thousands of pages of new source materials and hundreds of fresh interviews.
But in the prologue Eig admits his intention wasn’t to reveal anything new; instead, it was to retrieve the real King, lost in hagiographies and “defanged” through the distortion of his work and legacy.
Eig means that mainly white, middle America has chosen selectively from King’s sermons, speeches and actions to harmonise with its version of US egalitarianism and opportunity, thereby assuaging its collective conscience. King the radical — supporter of strikes, instigator of mass protests, incendiary speaker — has been all but forgotten. The sanitisation has diminished how fraught, how onerous the struggle was.
Eig doesn’t camouflage the ignoble aspects of King’s character. Contrary to Baptist morals, King smoked heavily and also drank. He was what southern Baptists would call a fornicator, cheating openly on his wife, Coretta, for most of their marriage. He plagiarised parts of his theology doctoral thesis. The most egregious, as yet unproven, allegation was that he watched a fellow pastor perpetrate rape. Summaries of this claim, based on FBI surveillance, were published in 2019 by another of King’s biographers, but the veracity of the accusation can only be assessed in January 2027 when the original recordings will be declassified.
Correctly, Eig avoids pinpointing a single episode that triggered King into activism and leadership. Referencing the pioneering black psychologist Kenneth Clark, he notes that children’s most powerful learning and conditioning stem from lived experiences. So it’s clear that the full context of his upbringing shaped him: the dangerously racist US south; the deeply religious foundation of a strict disciplinarian father and a gentle, calming mother; and his family’s relatively privileged standing, which allowed King an education and wider perspectives.
Still, Eig highlights standout incidents. The young King was once slapped in the face by a white woman. “That nigger stepped on my foot,” she said. And “I’m not a nigger,” he told a white newspaper subscriber who disputed payment for his copy; the nine-year-old King then refused to deliver to that house and lost his paper delivery job. That may have been his first overt antiracist protest, Eig writes.
The arc of the moral universe, though long, is bending toward justice
— Martin Luther King Jr
Exposing the fissures in society
King was a brilliant student, but from a young age he decided to follow his pastor father into the Baptist church. Appointed pastor of his own congregation at just 25 and determined to serve in the crucible of the civil rights movement, he moved to Montgomery in 1954.
King was soon in the thick of the struggle. He played no direct role in starting the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott — that was sparked by Rosa Parks, who was arrested after refusing to relinquish her seat to a white person on a public bus — but subsequently directed the year-long campaign. He was elevated to national prominence when the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation violated the constitution. The victory spurred him towards full-time, de facto leadership of the civil rights movement. For the remaining years of his life he traversed the US to negotiate with presidents and politicians, to take up the banner of localised protest initiatives, to publicise the movement and to be its media face.
He had opponents on all sides. Conservative US politicians — many representing white-dominated, segregationist constituencies — viewed him as an archenemy. Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, always with voting majorities and re-election in mind, swayed between moderate support and pragmatic dislike. The other main black civil rights leader at the time, Malcolm X, was generally scornful of King’s nonviolent approach, believing that the fight for equality should be by any means necessary.
By exposing the deep fissures in US society to white Americans, King increasingly became subject to animosity. “I’m not talking about weak love. I’m talking about love with justice,” he responded to a white traveller sitting next to him on a flight. The man had challenged King about what he perceived as his rebellious attitude to Christian love. More remarkable — a sign of King’s drawcard power — is that other travellers leant forward to listen in, and the conversation was captured by a lucky New Yorker magazine writer, frantically taking notes.
Then there was the FBI, directed by J Edgar Hoover, who associated the fight for civil rights with communism. The Cold War backdrop was adequate rationale for the two respective presidents to authorise constant FBI surveillance of King. Hoover went further, veering into harassment and outright dirty tricks, intent on discrediting him using any means. The FBI’s head of domestic intelligence, William C Sullivan, mailed recordings of the conduct of many of King’s extramarital affairs to his home. One was accompanied by a note: “There is but one way out for you.”
Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right
— Martin Luther King Jr
Sad inevitability
King was undeterred, driven by his religious belief and sense of moral justice. In Montgomery in March 1965 — after three waves of citizens, protected by National Guard troops, had completed their five-day, 90km marches from Selma to Alabama’s state capital to protest that state’s refusal to allow blacks to register to vote — he gave his famous “Our God is Marching On” speech. “The arc of the moral universe, though long, is bending toward justice,” he declaimed.
We forget about the long, slow bend of that arc. “How long? Not long,” he repeated towards the end of that incredible speech. Killed more than 50 years later, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery would have said it’s too long and that, for all King’s achievements, the struggle for full social justice and civil liberties has not yet been won.
Paradoxically, given that Eig wants to show the “defanged” King, if there is a flaw in the book it is that he rarely captures the fiery build-up of his oratory; its power, passion and moving eloquence. To truly understand that King was not a feel-good character who met with presidents and negotiated to make the US — and by extension many other unequal societies — better, we need to feel that righteous anger. The book, as such, is best read with a laptop at hand to find and view clips of his speeches to see the man in action.
The final chapter of the book, a crescendo of events covering March and April 1968, is written in a tone of sad inevitability. King scathingly criticised Johnson’s refusal to end the Vietnam War, ending any possibility of further discussions with him. He acknowledged his nonviolent protest strategy was no longer enough, and publicly vowed to change tactics and step up demonstrations. The FBI released a special “negro messiah” alert and stepped up surveillance of King, determined not to allow him to become more heroic. He was suffering regular bouts of depression.
In early April King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support a sanitation workers’ strike. From Memphis he had called his church’s office to convey the title of that Sunday’s sermon, “Why America May Go To Hell”. Later, he gave a speech to the striking workers. “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right,” he insisted. More mutedly, towards the end of the speech, he reflected that “like anybody, I would like to live a long life ... but I’m not concerned about that now”.
These words have been interpreted as one of many premonitions of his death. The next day, on April 4 1968, aged just 39, he was shot when standing on his hotel room balcony.
What did Hoover make of the news? “I hope the son of a bitch doesn’t die. If he does, they’ll make a martyr out of him,” he said.
The polarised nature of US society, then and now, resonates from the words of a King colleague and fellow civil rights activist: “Every racist in the country has killed Dr King. Evil societies always destroy their consciences.”
In rounding out the reality of King as a very human, flawed man, Eig confirms that it’s possible to both question his moral greatness and salute his moral authority in the civil rights movement and his epoch-defining achievements.
* King: The Life of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
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