Why we must continually demythologize Martin Luther King Jr.

It is almost inconceivable to us today — more than six decades after he hesitatingly accepted the leadership of the group organizing the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott — that Martin Luther King, Jr., could ever have been an “ordinary and average man.”

And yet, as David J. Garrow’s landmark 1986 book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reminds us, the future icon of the civil rights movement was just one of thousands of everyday black...