King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

King also took on a monthly column in Ebony magazine called “Advice for Living,” which ran from August 1957 to December 1958. The column offered him the chance to serve as minister to a large and diverse audience, answering readers’ letters and using Christian values and calm reassurance to guide the troubled through difficult times. He expressed opposition to the death penalty; he urged one angry reader to reconsider his notion of what it meant to be a strong Black man and to embrace nonviolence; he warned Black men and women not to give in to a sense of “inferiority and self-hatred” that white racism had imposed on American society; he defended interracial marriage; he called birth control “rationally and morally justifiable”; he urged a Black man who didn’t like Jews to get over his bigotry; he expressed moral opposition to gambling and premarital sex; and he advised a woman with an unfaithful husband to seek counseling but also to consider whether her nagging or inattentiveness had contributed to her husband’s desire to have an affair. In what appears to have been King’s only known writing on the subject of homosexuality, he told a boy that his feelings of attraction to other boys were “culturally acquired,” not innate. King did not condemn the young man’s homosexual feelings, but he did say they presented a “problem,” one that might be overcome with the help of a psychiatrist.