King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

We’ve mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity. We’ve forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they’d hoarded.

This book is based on thousands of recently released FBI documents and tens of thousands of other new items—including personal letters, business records, White House telephone recordings, oral histories, unaired television footage, and unpublished biographies and autobiographies of people close to King. This is the first biography to make use of thousands of pages of materials that belonged to the man who served as the SCLC’s official historian, L. D. Reddick, as well as the first to benefit from the discovery of audiotapes recorded by Coretta King in the months after her husband’s death, and an unpublished memoir written by King’s father. This book is also built on hundreds of interviews with people who knew King, including family members and close friends, many of them willing to speak more openly than ever thanks to the passage of time.

The book represents an attempt to observe King’s life as it was lived—and through that life to better understand his times and our own.

Martin Luther King Jr. grew up believing in a God of redemption, a God of judgment, a God of grace and miracles, a personal God who believed that Black people mattered no matter what racist white people and government regulations said.

As the young King put it years later: “I came to see that God had placed a responsibility on my shoulders, and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.” Benjamin Mays explained it another way: “King became a minister because he had to be one.”

Daddy King was a powerful figure who had escaped poverty, overcome his own father’s violence, and emerged as a man of God and a leader in the battle for the rights of Black people.

King’s genius in later years would be his ability to deliver messages that inspired Black and white listeners alike, messages that made racial justice sound like an imperative for all, messages that crossed lines of theology and geography, that suggested both sides needed to act if the racial divide were ever to be erased without violence.

Gandhi showed King that “the love ethic of Jesus … was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months.”

Coretta was a farmer’s daughter, a self-described tomboy. She owned a nice coat and a few good dresses, but she cared little about impressing people with her clothes. She combed her hair and put on makeup in the morning, and then she was done for the day. She was not the type to freshen up and retrace her lipstick—until Martin suggested that she pay more attention to her appearance. “Perhaps you’d like to go to the ladies’ room and comb your hair,” he would say. “You look so pretty with lipstick on.” Later, Coretta said, she realized that this was Martin’s way of grooming her for the role of the minister’s wife.