King: A Life

By Jonathan Eig

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux/May 2023

Reviewed by Graham Fraser

October 13, 2023

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a Black seamstress in Montgomery Alabama, got on the Cleveland Ave. bus to head home. It was almost empty when she got on, but when some white people got on a few stops later, it filled up. The driver ordered her to give up her seat, and she refused. “I made up my mind that I was not going to move even if there were seats in the back,” she said in an interview two months later. “I was tired of being humiliated.”

She was arrested, photographed and fingerprinted, horrifying her husband and her mother. The incident triggered discussion of a boycott of the Montgomery bus service, but the leadership of the Black community was divided. “They needed someone who could get (two rival leaders) to work together, appeal to Black people from all parts of the city, present a respectable image to the press, and handle negotiations well,” writes Jonathan Eig in King: A Life the latest addition to the long shelf of Martin Luther King Jr. biographies. The suggestion was a young pastor who hadn’t been in the city long. He was new, one activist observed, adding, “But one thing he can do, he can move people with his words.”

The new pastor was King. He hesitated before agreeing to play a leadership role, but concluded that to accept evil without challenging it would be to condone it. That decision and the 13-month bus boycott vaulted him into the public eye and began his career as a civil rights leader.

The story of the Montgomery bus boycott, like the story of the Freedom Riders a few years later, is well-known. It has been told by the participants, by journalists covering the civil rights struggle at the time and by authors like David Halberstam. There have been books on the coverage of King by Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. There have been books that have revealed King’s plagiarism in his academic work, and books that have uncovered his extramarital affairs. But what is remarkable about Eig’s biography is not just the way he smoothly integrates all of these elements, and how he clarifies the important role played by his wife, Coretta Scott King, but how he uses new revelations from the documents now available in the archives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The result is a book full of the complexity and nuance of King’s relationships.

The first important relationship is that with his father, also a preacher, Martin Luther King Sr. The son of slaves, he was, as Eig puts it, “a powerful, feared presence, (with) a muscular frame, a booming bass voice and, as he admitted, a red-hot temper.” He beat his children fiercely, and his colleagues would speculate on the impact this brutality had on his son, observing that while he had no trouble confronting racist white sheriffs, he could not bear conflict with older civil rights leaders.

Then there was his relationship with his wife, Coretta Scott King, who gave up the prospects of a musical career to marry him. An activist before he was, she provided crucial support. Harry Belafonte, a family friend, observed that Martin “stepped into her space.” Despite her husband’s infidelities, she did not waver.

Hoover hated King, and used his claim that King was an active communist as a rationale for acting on that hatred in an era when the longstanding FBI director amassed power by using surveillance to gather evidence against critics, political targets and cultural icons.

In June, 1963, after a meeting with Black leaders, President John F. Kennedy pulled King aside for a private conversation in the Rose Garden. The president, in an extraordinary gesture, warned King that he was under surveillance by the FBI and urged him to get rid of two of his advisers, one of whom was a former communist. King fired one of them, but remained loyal to Stanley Levison. “Later, King joked that Kennedy had probably invited him to walk in the Rose Garden because (FBI director) J. Edgar Hoover had bugged the Oval Office,” Eig writes.

When Kennedy was shot, and King learned of his death, he was silent for a long time.

“This is what is going to happen to me also,” he finally said.

“Coretta held her husband’s hand. She wanted to say something that would comfort him but couldn’t find the words.

“‘I could not say ‘It won’t happen to you,’ she recalled. ‘I felt he was right.’”

Another complicated relationship was that which he developed with Lyndon Johnson, who phoned King three days after the Kennedy assassination. “I think one of the great tributes we can pay in memory of President Kennedy is to try to enact some of the great progressive policies he sought to initiate,” King said. “Well, I’m gonna support ‘em all and you can count on that,” Johnson replied. “And I’ll have to have y’all’s help, and I never needed it more than I do today.” King assured Johnson he would have it.

On March 15, 1965, only a few days after demonstrators were clubbed by Alabama State Troopers in Selma, Johnson spoke about voting rights to a joint session of Congress. He said that what happened in Selma was part of a larger movement: “The effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

He continued, saying that their cause must be everyone’s.

“Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

Johnson paused and “delivered each of his next four words deliberately” added Eig, describing one of the most famous instances of rhetorical appropriation of the era: “And…we..shall… overcome.”

Members of the audience jumped to their feet, applauding, and in Selma, the activist Richie Jean Jackson looked over at King. “He was crying.”

But the relationship with Johnson soured. This was due in part to King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam at a time when it had overwhelming support in the US. Some saw this as a radical change, and Jonson saw it as a betrayal. King insisted that he had always been a pacifist, opposed to violence.

But the change in Johnson’s attitude was also because of another critical relationship: with J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover hated King, and used his claim that King was an active communist as a rationale for acting on that hatred in an era when the longstanding FBI director amassed power by using surveillance to gather evidence against critics, political targets and cultural icons. His evidence for the assertion was the fact that Levison, one of King’s closest advisers and a good friend, had raised money for the party in the early 1950s. But despite hours of bugging their phone calls and taping their conversations, Eig writes, “no evidence emerged to suggest that communist operatives controlled or manipulated King.” Nevertheless, Hoover’s allegations of communist influence on King persisted as a justification for targeting King, and he forced subordinates to re-write reports so they would reflect that conviction. The FBI documents revealed King’s affairs and the emotional strain he was under, and, as Eig put it, “the extent and determination of the bureau’s campaign to thwart King.”

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated. He was 39. In the 55 years since, he has become an icon, but in the process, sanitized. “Young people hear of his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his call for fundamental change in the nation’s character, not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism and racism,” Eig writes.

Eig’s monumental book presents King in all of his complexity, and reminds us of that cry.

Graham Fraser served as Washington Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail from 1993-97 and wrote about race relations in the United Stares.