“I don’t want to look like an undertaker,” he once said, describing his undertakerlike wardrobe, “but I do believe in conservative dress.” As the bus boycott began, he would get up at 5:30 A.M. to work for three hours on his doctoral thesis and then join Coretta for breakfast before going off to his pastoral duties. (Critical parts of his thesis, it would turn out, were plagiarized, a reminder, like his womanizing, of the flaws in even the most exceptional of men.)
