King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In the process of canonizing King, we’ve defanged him, replacing his complicated politics and philosophy with catchphrases that suit one ideology or another. We’ve heard the recording of his “I Have a Dream” speech so many times we don’t really hear it anymore; we no longer register its cry for America to recognize the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality” or its petition for economic reparations. We don’t appreciate that King was making demands, not wishes. “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said that summer day in 1963 as he stood at the foot of Abraham Lincoln’s statue. 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. We’ve failed to recall that King was one of the most brutally divisive figures in American history—attacked not only by segregationists in the South but also by his own government, by more militant Black activists, and by white northern liberals. He was deliberately mischaracterized in his lifetime, and he remains so today.