Somehow I missed Jonathan Eig's King: a Life despite the biography having won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. If you too missed this book, Donald Trump's attack on knowledge of the mid-twentieth century Black struggle against white supremacy makes the volume even more desirable reading.
And Jonathan Eig has done what is hard: he's made King's story human, yet still dramatic; larger than life and still accessible. Here's how Eig summarizes the short life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he led:
Before King, the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had been hollow. King and the other leaders of the twentieth century civil rights movement, along with millions of ordinary protesters, demanded that America live up to its stated ideals. They fought without muskets, without money, and without political power. They built their revolution on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind.
This book tells the story of a man who, in a career that spanned a mere thirteen years, brought the nation closer than it had ever been to reckoning with the reality of having treated people as property and secondary citizens. That he failed to fully achieve his goal should not diminish his heroism any more than the failure of the original founding fathers diminishes theirs. To help readers better understand King's struggle, this book seeks to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography. ... He was deliberately mischaracterized in his lifetime and he remains so today.
... King was a man, not a saint, not a symbol. ... He was a man who announced at an early age that God had called him to act. He lived his life accordingly. And he was willing to die.
Can someone be both human and a hero? In every time, we doubt this is possible, until we recognize heroism embodied, even if fleetingly, by someone among us.
• • •
I belong to the last American age cohort for whom the public events of King's life are lived history. I remember, dimly, the Montgomery bus boycott demanding integrated service as background noise in the '50s; the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made the civil rights movement live indeed, as the rector of my Episcopal church attended fearfully; the Civil Rights Act of 1965 seemed to announce that the nation had turned a corner on racial discrimination. Oh well. Those heady days had to give way to realization that, especially for descendants of slaves, "freedom is a constant struggle."
Movement attention moved on. Before he was killed, King came to seem a relic of a more hopeful time as the young generation, my generation, turned to repudiating US imperialism's brutal Vietnam campaign of death. Even King turned this way, to his credit; this turn likely undermined his even more significant effort to mobilize beyond racial injustices against the crimes of American capitalism.
A hero's lot is not a happy one. Yet from heroes spring life.
• • •
Jonathan Eig's King corrects a deficiency in how we remember the man's life. He needed and depended on his long suffering wife.
During a 1965 television interview conducted at this house, King was asked if he had educated his wife on matters of activism. "Well, it may have been the other way around," he said. "I think at many points she educated me. When I met her, she was very concerned about all the things we are trying to do now. I will never forget the first discussion we had when we met was the whole question of racial inequality and economic inequality and the question of peace ... I wish I could say to satisfy my masculine ego that I led her down this path, but I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved when we met as she is now."
[Coretta Scott King agreed.] "I considered my own role very important from the beginning," she wrote.
The time for assertive women came a little later.
• • •
Eig, I am sure, believes King had a message for our time:
... Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King;...
"Our very survival," he wrote, "depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."
Let's try to stay woke.
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