King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In the 1930s, three out of every four Black workers in the South toiled as domestics or farmhands. But young M. L. King saw Black people everywhere asserting themselves in bold new ways. In Atlanta, the owner of an Auburn Avenue gas station, John Harden, took over the city’s leading Black baseball team, the Atlanta Black Crackers, and briefly made it a winner in the late 1930s. In Germany, Jesse Owens won gold and glory for the United States in the 1936 Olympics. Joe Louis captured boxing’s heavyweight crown the following year. In 1939, Marian Anderson sang before a crowd of seventy-five thousand at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Never mind that the Black Crackers could not test their skills against white professional baseball teams. Never mind that Jesse Owens returned to the United States as a second-class citizen with few opportunities to reap the rewards for his fame. Never mind that Joe Louis was ordered by his white managers never to boast about defeating white opponents and never to be seen in the company of white women. Never mind that Marian Anderson couldn’t spend the night in many of the capital’s best hotels or dine in its finest restaurants after her groundbreaking performance. M. L. King Jr. would find opportunities that Owens, Louis, and Anderson hadn’t had, in part because those people and countless others, including his parents, had cut a path for him.