King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Martin and Coretta were greeted with garlands at the airport, shuttled to their hotel, and questioned by about two dozen reporters. Did King believe that nonviolent protest might be effective in Africa? King said yes. Was it true that southern states in the United States outlawed interracial marriage? He confirmed it. Did his concept of nonviolence include vegetarianism? No, it did not.

King insisted that Yoki and Marty would attend public school, even though Atlanta’s schools remained segregated and even though Coretta worried their children would receive an inferior education. Private schools, King told his wife, “caused the children in the schools to feel they were better than the other children, that it set up a kind of class consciousness and also sometimes it kept the children from really feeling an identification with all people.”

Ella Baker advised the young activists and helped connect them to older activists, but she also warned the students not to be manipulated or dominated by the movement’s established leaders. “This inclination toward group-centered leadership,” she said, “rather than toward a leader-centered group pattern of organization, was refreshing indeed to those of the older group who bear the scars of the battle, the frustrations and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.”

Soon after, Roy Wilkins pushed back against King. The NAACP leader complained in an April 27 letter that King and his allies had been bashing the nation’s oldest civil rights organization for its conservative tactics. “We seek the same goals and we have the same enemies … At the same time we feel aggrieved over this unwarranted attack.”

Another legal problem arose at the same time when Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan filed a libel suit in county court against Ralph Abernathy, three other ministers, and The New York Times. The suit came in response to a full-page ad printed in the Times to solicit funds for King’s legal defense in the tax case. The ad had accused Alabama officials of terrorizing peaceful protesters, but it had included false and exaggerated statements about the actions of police and government officials, which the plaintiffs said had damaged their reputations. The case would go on to become a landmark of First Amendment law, but for now, as King’s associates faced the possibility of years in court and crippling fines, it was just another source of stress.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the powerful Black congressman from New York, created yet another challenge when he attacked King in the press, calling him a “captive of socialist interests,” as The Pittsburgh Courier put it, for his close ties to advisers Levison and Rustin. King, Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were planning to picket the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions. Powell opposed the protests, and he leveled a private threat: call off the pickets, or he would publicly allege that King and Rustin were lovers.

Advisers to Nixon, including Jackie Robinson, urged the Republican candidate to phone the jailed civil rights leader or to say something to the news media in his defense. Robinson had tears in his eyes after he met with Nixon and failed to persuade him to act. “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win,” the retired baseball legend said.

In one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy won by about 100,000 votes. Many political observers said Kennedy owed his election to the Black electorate, as about 70 percent of the Black vote went his way. Nixon blamed voter fraud. He blamed the press. He blamed the Eisenhower administration for failing to help King. And he blamed Black voters whose minds had been changed, as he put it, by “a couple of phone calls.”

King appreciated Kennedy’s willingness to take a risk and act on principle, knowing he might lose more votes in the South than he would gain in the North. Nixon, King said years later, missed an opportunity to take an early stand on civil rights. “So this is why I really considered him a moral coward and one who was really unwilling to take a courageous step and take a risk,” he said. “And I am convinced that because of that he lost the election.”

Not every activist welcomed King’s involvement. James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, argued against the invitation, saying the protest was already getting plenty of media attention. He feared the people of Albany might back off and let King do the fighting for them. In the long term, Forman felt that too much reliance on King’s electrifying leadership might undercut the establishment of a grassroots movement, both in Albany and across the country. But Anderson and other local leaders wanted King, and Forman dropped the argument when it was clear he would not prevail.

On March 6, 1962, the FBI’s domestic intelligence division formally proposed a telephone wiretap and microphone surveillance device for Levison’s office. Robert Kennedy authorized the move. With no court approval needed, the office microphone was installed in mid-March. A wiretap on Levison’s phone began four days later. Agents began filing memos to headquarters on Levison’s conversations with King, and J. Edgar Hoover began passing along reports to Kennedy. The phone calls proved that Levison was a key adviser to King, but they failed to prove that Levison had any ongoing involvement in communist matters. Even so, when Levison was heard recommending O’Dell for a promotion, the move made the FBI more suspicious than ever.

As a preacher, King understood the importance of living up to the moral standards he preached to his followers. But, as Ralph Abernathy wrote, he “had a particularly difficult time” with sexual temptation. He was a relatively privileged man who had grown up in a time and in a culture in which adulterous activity was commonplace. He knew his father’s reputation. He also knew, Abernathy wrote, that with his good looks and charm, he “attracted women, even when he didn’t intend to, and attracted them in droves.” Abernathy continued: Part of his appeal was his predominant role in the black community and part of it was personal … Martin Luther King was the most important black man in America … That fact alone endowed him with an aura of power and greatness that women found very appealing … But he also had a personal charm … He was always gracious and courteous to women, whether they were attractive to him or not … He was warm and friendly. He could make them laugh. He was good company … These qualities made him even more attractive in close proximity than he was at a distance. Then, too, Martin’s own love of women was apparent in ways that could not be easily pinpointed—but which women clearly sensed even from afar. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on a stage and having Martin turn to me to say, “Do you see that woman giving me the eye, the one in the red dress?” I wouldn’t be able to pick her out at such a distance, but already she had somehow conveyed to him her at...

“Martin really believed in love,” Clark said, perhaps jokingly. Clark observed that women propositioned King frequently, and King couldn’t bear to turn them down. “Baptist ministers,” Clark added, “had to service their congregations.”

J. Edgar Hoover was always sensitive to criticism. When the FBI director heard about King’s comments, he asked Berl I. Bernhard, staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to talk to King and explain that not all the agents in the South were southerners. King didn’t buy it. “I still think the Bureau’s in bed with all of the southern police chiefs, and we’re not getting adequate investigations,” King told Bernhard. High-ranking FBI officials decided that the bureau’s assistant director, Cartha Dekle “Deke” DeLoach, should contact King and arrange a meeting to discuss the minister’s complaints. DeLoach phoned King twice on November 30. He left two messages, but he said that King didn’t return his calls. “It would appear obvious,” DeLoach wrote in a memo, “that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts. He obviously used deceit, lies and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes.” In another memo, Hoover called King’s failure to return the calls “an instance of his insincerity,” and added that “no further attempts are being undertaken by this Bureau to contact him.”

Two days after King’s critical remarks about the FBI, Robert Kennedy authorized the bureau to expand its surveillance of Levison, putting a tap on Levison’s home phone to go with the one already installed at his office. More wiretaps were soon to follow, as the FBI began to treat King himself as a threat.

Malcolm X had called the Albany Movement a low point in the civil rights struggle, more proof of nonviolent protest’s pointlessness. “You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist,” he said, “and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”

King knew, as he made clear in The Nation, that racism was not merely a southern problem, and he didn’t want to make it easy for people to blame discrimination on a few outspoken segregationists. He understood that some northern white people justified their own racist practices by telling themselves they weren’t as bad as Bull Connor and his ilk. Southern bigots described Black people as genetically inferior, he wrote, while northern segregationists argued that Black people were victims of the culture of poverty who needed better work habits and stronger family values. The results were no less harmful in the North, but they were more visible in places such as Birmingham. A year earlier, when Black students had organized a series of selective-buying campaigns against white merchants, the city of Birmingham had responded by withdrawing support for a surplus-food program that benefited many in the Black community. When a group of merchants agreed to desegregate, Bull Connor and other city officials harassed them, sending city inspectors who cited the businesses for things such as unsafe stairs and inadequate fireproofing.

Later, back at the Gaston Motel, Forman found Wyatt Tee Walker and Dorothy Cotton in high spirits, “jumping up and down, elated.” Forman later wrote: “They said over and over again, ‘We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some police brutality. They brought out the dogs. We’ve got a movement.’” Forman was disgusted, seeing no reason to celebrate police brutality, even if it did generate valuable news coverage.

King’s letter from jail was a love letter in the broadest sense: it spoke of the need to be “extremists for love.” It was a letter of thanks to God and the Black church: “I am grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.” It offered a metaphor: It said America was a prison for Black people. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote. It proffered patriotism: Those protesters who “sat down at lunch counters … were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream” and “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” It called to the consciences of moderates and liberals: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” It held a warning: The question, he said, “is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be,” while reminding these ministers of the extremism of people like the prophet Amos, Jesus, Jefferson, and Lincoln. “I would agree with St. Augustine,” he wrote, “that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

In the midst of the chaos, a fifteen-year-old boy named Walter Gadsden stepped across the street at the corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue North, in front of the Jockey Boy Restaurant. He was a high school student who had come to watch the demonstration, not to participate. But as he crossed the street, a police dog lunged at him. Gadsden was not afraid of big dogs—his family owned one, in fact. Instinctively, he raised his left knee in self-defense, connecting with the dog’s chest, but he appeared to remain calm, hands at his side. At the same moment, three more things happened: the white police officer who held the dog’s leash grabbed the front of Gadsden’s cardigan sweater with his right hand; Gadsden’s left hand clasped the police officer’s right wrist; and, perhaps most important, an Associated Press photographer named Bill Hudson snapped a picture. Bull Connor had used the dogs for about thirty minutes, and they had inflicted little damage. Even the fire hoses had caused more havoc than injury. In the century since slavery’s end, Black people in America had endured far worse, but most of it had happened without white witnesses in the news media, without widespread photographic evidence. It was the image of this single encounter—a young Black man under attack by a police dog—that appeared the next day on the front page of The New York Times and in other newspapers across the country. The photo shook the world and crystallized the message King and others had b...

King’s letter from the Birmingham jail had included a searing attack on white moderates. He knew that many of the northern liberals who funded his work in the South resisted change in their own lives, businesses, and communities. He also knew that political leaders, including President Kennedy, found it expedient to treat racism as a purely southern phenomenon. When third-world nations and the Soviet Union criticized America for its treatment of Black citizens, Kennedy could blame the moral failure on racist diehards in the South while bragging about his admiration and support for Martin Luther King Jr.

“We the Negro people are now not afraid,” said Carrie Allen, a grocery store worker in Union Springs, Alabama. “We have woke up.” Protests erupted in hundreds of cities and towns. Protesters sat in at lunch counters and lined up at courthouses to register to vote, risking their lives and livelihoods every time. The white news organizations in the North not only covered the action but also reported on the conditions underlying the protests, helping many Americans to better comprehend the roots of racism, a lesson most had never received at home or in school. “The wellsprings of the river of Negro protest lie in a world as remote and as unfamiliar to most white Americans as the far side of the moon—the dark side,” reported Newsweek. “Who are these revolutionaries? What do they want?”

King possessed the ability to move through uncertainty, going in with a plan but also knowing that the plan would change in response to countless unknown twists of fate, guided by faith in God and confidence in himself. Now he believed a tipping point might be at hand. With groups like SNCC and CORE organizing in the South, with support from the Justice Department and new legislation from Congress, with the NAACP litigating, and with increased Black voter registration, the system of Jim Crow–style oppression might collapse. At the same time, King faced challenges beyond dealing with a cautious president. He faced a violent reaction from white segregationists who saw their own definition of patriotism and their vision of American society under attack. He faced pressure from a growing radical wing of the civil rights movement, personified by but not limited to Malcolm X, who didn’t trust the white people in power to ever share that power. He faced a suspicious FBI director and an increasingly anxious attorney general. The harder King pushed, the harder those opposing forces might push back. Nevertheless, he pushed.

Kennedy had not planned to make civil rights the focus of the second half of his first term, and he worried about the prospect. The president was concerned that the civil rights issue “was going to be his political swan song,” his brother Robert said. “We used to discuss whether what had been done was the right thing to do, just the fact that I’d gotten him into so much difficulty. We used to talk about it every three days, because there was so much attention focused on it at that time in an unpleasant way.” If the civil rights legislation failed, while other legislation was delayed, Kennedy might lose his bid for reelection in 1964 over an issue that he could have avoided.

King, in private, expressed concern about that powder keg: “The Negro is shedding himself of his fear,” he said, “and my real worry is how we will keep this fearlessness from rising to violent proportions.”

“We want success in Congress,” the president told the Black leaders, “not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us. I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say, ‘yes, I’m for the bill but I’m damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.” Kennedy called the proposed march on Washington “a great mistake.”

King soon suspended O’Dell, but he held his ground on Levison, telling Kennedy and others that he knew and trusted his longtime friend and adviser. Later, King joked that Kennedy had probably invited him to walk in the Rose Garden because J. Edgar Hoover had bugged the Oval Office.

“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy,” he said, making use of a phrase President Kennedy had used in his recent television address. It was an adaptation of a speech he’d given in North Carolina in 1962, one in which he had borrowed phrases and cadences from a Langston Hughes poem called “I Dream a World,” as the scholar W. Jason Miller has written. King mixed poetry, prayer, and patriotism. For another speaker, the result might have been ponderous, but King used these religious and poetic forces to inspire all America to seize this moment of opportunity; to bring peace, love, and equality to those who had so long been denied; and to fulfill, at last, the promise of the American dream.

On July 23, less than a month before King’s trip to New York, J. Edgar Hoover had sent a memo to Robert Kennedy, again making the case that communist forces were using Levison to influence and control King. Nothing in the hundreds of pages of memos produced by agents suggested that Levison was conducting business with communists or trying to manipulate King for the benefit of the Communist Party. Levison and King spent most of their time on the phone discussing how to make democracy work for all its citizens, talking about the courts, Congress, the media, and the powers of the presidency.

But if the march had been too tame for Malcolm X, it was still too militant for J. Edgar Hoover and others at the FBI. A week before the march, the bureau’s domestic intelligence division had produced a sixty-eight-page report stating that the Communist Party of America—a tiny organization with only about four thousand members by that time—exerted little or no influence on the civil rights movement. Hoover did not take it well. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” the director scrawled on the report’s cover letter. “You contended then that Castro & his cohorts were not Communists & not influenced by Communists … I for one can’t ignore the memos re King, O’Dell, Levison … et al as having only infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”

Sullivan’s memo may have been intended primarily to appease his angry boss, who hated to see King gain greater fame as a moral leader, but it also served as a reminder, as the historian David J. Garrow has written, that the FBI was guided by both paternalism and racism in its assumption that Black Americans were especially vulnerable to communist manipulation. Hoover and the FBI did not treat Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, or A. Philip Randolph the way they treated King. Among the leading civil rights activists, King, with his ties to Stanley Levison and his ability to move masses of people, was perceived as the biggest threat. Given the level of risk King posed, Sullivan wrote, the FBI might find it necessary to go beyond the kind of “conclusive evidence … that would stand up in testimony or court” in building its case against King. Never mind the law, in other words; King had to be stopped.

No matter how strongly King stressed the American values of his movement, no matter how often he quoted from the Constitution, the Bible, and patriotic songs, he was still perceived and treated as a threat. No one within the FBI or the Kennedy administration suggested that law enforcement ought to be protecting leaders of the civil rights movement rather than investigating and undermining them.

“More and more, I have come to feel that our next attack will have to be more than just getting a lunch counter integrated or a department store to take down discriminatory signs,” King said. “I feel we will have to assault the whole system of segregation in a community.” Yet again, however, the integration movement faced opposition, in part from radical Black activists, including Malcolm X, who said King had been co-opted and defanged by the Kennedys. Malcolm said he was impressed with the March on Washington “the same way I would be with the Rose Bowl Game.” King’s speech was moving, but “while King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare.” An even more virulent response, however, came from angry white people, mostly in the South, who heard King use words like “attack” and “assault” and made up their minds to fight back.

Johnson used his first major address as president to declare his commitment to Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Though his relationship with Robert Kennedy was a tense one, Johnson would attempt to work with the attorney general on the most urgent domestic issue of their time. In an interview years later, however, Johnson would criticize Robert Kennedy for the decision to spy on King. “I thought I was dealing with a child. I never did understand Bobby,” Johnson said. “I never did understand how the press built him into the great figure that he was. He came into public life as [Senator Joseph] McCarthy’s counsel and then he was [Senator John] McClellan’s counsel and then he tapped Martin Luther King’s telephone wire … Martin Luther King’s activity was financed by Kennedy.” Johnson may have been referring to Robert Kennedy’s work in helping to raise bond money for protesters in Birmingham. “He tapped the phone with his right hand and gave him one-hundred-dollar bills with the left,” Johnson said.

Over a span of seventeen months, according to Sullivan, the FBI made recordings of King in fifteen hotel rooms, “and Hoover listened to all of them.” Hoover also instructed agents to make the tapes available to “some members of the press, to some select congressmen, and to President Johnson.” When the recording devices picked up King making a highly distasteful joke about John F. Kennedy’s sex life, Hoover made certain Kennedy’s brother, the attorney general, heard about it. Jackie Kennedy, the president’s widow, heard about it from Robert Kennedy and said later, in an oral history, “I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible.”

King saw Black reparations as a form of social atonement, a way to heal, to restore bonds shattered by slavery and racism. That’s why he focused on “the forgotten white poor” as well as the mistreated Black. That’s why he refused to make a choice between ending poverty and compensating Black people for the injustices they suffered. America had a responsibility to do both, he insisted.

“Democracy, in its finest sense,” he wrote, “is payment.”

It had been nearly ten years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In those ten years, The New York Times observed, “the stereotype of the apathetic, satisfied Negro” had been obliterated; the federal government had joined the fight against racial segregation; and people of all races and political views had come to agree that race would be “the great domestic issue facing this country” for years to come. After a decade, however, only 1 percent of white children in the South went to school with Negro children. Negro men were still twice as likely as white men to be unemployed, and the median income for Negro families remained stuck at about half that of white families. Many schools in the North had grown more segregated as white families over the course of the decade migrated from cities to suburbs, in part to escape the growing urban Negro population. In New York City, a majority of white people surveyed by The New York Times said the civil rights movement had gone too far. The white people surveyed “spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimin...

In his nationally televised remarks, Johnson said: We believe that all men are created equal, yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights, yet many Americans do not enjoy these rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty, yet millions are being deprived of these blessings, not because of their own failures but because of the color of their skin … My fellow citizens, we have come to a time of testing. We must not fail.

When Johnson told Kennedy he should ask the FBI to protect King, the attorney general admitted that his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover was shattered beyond repair, and that he wasn’t comfortable asking Hoover for help. Johnson knew that already, but he seemed to enjoy making Kennedy squirm. Johnson, as vice president, had felt humiliated by John and Bobby Kennedy. Now Johnson had the upper hand. Both men knew it.

Civil rights activists called for Hoover’s resignation, but the FBI director, approaching his seventieth birthday, said he had no intention of stepping aside. In talks with William C. Sullivan, the FBI’s chief of domestic intelligence, Hoover expressed his frustration that the American news media would not report on King’s sexual activities. The bureau had been peddling the stories to news reporters, to no avail. But after the public clash between Hoover and King, Sullivan got more aggressive: he ordered the FBI’s laboratory to create a composite tape containing some of the most explicit moments recorded in King’s hotel rooms. On Saturday, November 21, Sullivan ordered an agent to fly to Miami and mail the tape in an unmarked package to King’s office in Atlanta. He enclosed an anonymous letter on unwatermarked paper, typewritten, tightly spaced, peppered with intentional typos and misspellings, composed to suggest that its author was a disaffected Black man. Its opening sentence echoed Hoover, who made a point of saying he would never put the word “reverend” or “doctor” before the man’s name. The letter read: KING, In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast. King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great...

Hoover tightened the screws. He sent a memo to Bill Moyers, then a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, saying he thought the president should know about new information showing that King “has the reputation among many Negro leaders of being a heavy consumer of alcoholic beverages and is known … to be extremely loose in his moral behavior.”

In Abernathy’s view, the arrival of the tape signaled the opening of a “second front” in the fight for civil rights: “For the FBI had become our enemy just as surely as the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations that were waiting for us in Selma.”

Her husband, meanwhile, offered a clear-eyed appraisal of the FBI’s tactics: “They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit,” he told a friend in a phone call recorded by the FBI. Years later, Coretta said she had “no question” the FBI was trying to push Martin to suicide.

In Mobile, Alabama, the local White Citizens’ Council set up a telephone line for people who wanted to dial in to hear a prerecorded attack on King: “If Martin Luther ‘Riot’ King and Dick Gregory want to do something for their people,” said the message, “they ought to go to the Congo and try to civilize them … Riot King has brought more violence to the South than anyone else in the past 110 years.” When King announced plans to lead a January voter registration drive in Selma, the local newspaper reminded readers that J. Edgar Hoover had branded King “the most notorious liar in the country” and urged local citizens to pay no attention to the “controversial darkie.”

The young radicals in SNCC complained that King and the SCLC were “hoggin’ all the publicity and all the money and doing very little to deserve it,” as Julian Bond, one of SNCC’s founders, put it. For certain members of SNCC, Hosea Williams said, the “number one goal in their life was to embarrass Martin Luther King Jr.”

Malcolm X, who also understood the importance of drama, left New York early on the morning of February 3, flew to Montgomery, and then drove to Tuskegee, where he spoke to a crowd of three thousand Tuskegee Institute students. The battle was wearing on Malcolm. Nation of Islam enforcers continued to track him. If the enforcers wanted to kill him, Malcolm said, he was confident they would succeed. “I taught them myself,” he said.

He told the students that 1965 would be “the longest and hottest and bloodiest year in the history of the race revolution.” He also read from a telegram that he said he had sent to George Lincoln Rockwell, saying that if Rockwell and his American Nazi Party continued their campaign of terror, they would be met with “maximum physical retaliation by those of us who are not handcuffed by a policy of nonviolence.” That was a change from 1961, when Malcolm and Rockwell had appeared together at a rally in Washington, united in their opposition to integration.

While King never said publicly that he was trying to avoid Malcolm, he did say that he found Malcolm’s call for people to arm themselves “very unfortunate.” If Black people take up arms, King said, it will only give certain white Americans “an excuse to kill up a lot of us.”

King and Malcolm X were often portrayed as antagonists, in part because of Malcolm’s vitriol and because of comments attributed to King in a 1965 Playboy magazine interview conducted by Alex Haley. But the recent discovery of Haley’s unedited interview transcript shows that King was not as critical as Playboy made him sound. The magazine quoted King saying of Malcolm: “He is very articulate, as you say, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views … I have often wished that he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery demagogic oratory in the black ghettoes, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”