King: A Life
There is no dearth of writing on the life of MLK. Besides his own books and posthumous collections of speeches and sermons, for as long as any of us can remember we have had biographies, documentaries, and feature films that help us understand the man behind the myth, from a variety of vantage points.
So maybe, upon seeing Jonathan Eig’s hefty new King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) on the front table at the local indie bookstore, your reaction was a bit like mine: Do we really need a new MLK biography? I mean, what more needs to be said?
A lot more, it turns out. And much of it comes down to sources. In the prologue, Eig writes that in this book he drew upon “thousands of recently released FBI documents and tens of thousands of other new items,” including letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and previously unpublished materials from people close to the action. Eig also interviewed relatives and friends of King, “many of them willing to speak more openly than ever thanks to the passage of time.”
With this book, Eig tells us he has set out to “help readers better understand King’s struggle” by seeking “to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography.” So, yes, we get all the heroic stuff—the speeches, the marches, the beatings, the jailings, the breathtakingly disciplined practice of nonviolence. But we also get the infidelities. And the plagiarism. And a lot of insecurity behind the facade.
Somehow this accumulation of contradiction doesn’t diminish the man. It does the opposite, making him properly three-dimensional. It’s a more tragic reading of his story, certainly, but it’s more relatable too—even for those of us whose lives have not been impacted by the blunt force of police batons, or included speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or evenings spent in hotel rooms across town.
“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… That [King] failed to fully achieve his goal should not diminish his heroism any more than the failure of the original founding fathers diminishes theirs.”
What a life.
