King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

King learned to put the emotionalism of the church in context. “All week long,” he said, “at his job, traveling, shopping, eating, in almost everything he does, the Negro represses his emotions; puts up with discrimination; sees himself segregated and shunted into inferior housing, schools, jobs; closes his ears to the names he is called. On Sunday, when he goes to church, all these emotions burst forth. He shouts ‘Amen.’ He sings and stamps his feet, partly from joy at his freedom in his own church, partly from the sorrow of his experiences. For many Negroes, religion has probably provided a safety valve against insanity or rebellion. But there’s a danger in this emotionalism, too. It can become as empty a form as any other. I often say to my people that if we … had as much religion in our hearts and souls as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.”

They clashed yet again when M.L. announced that he had decided that after completing his bachelor’s degree at Morehouse he would continue his education in the North, at Crozer Theological Seminary, a predominantly white, nondenominational school in Chester, Pennsylvania. It was small, with only about forty students. Crozer was often called “the little University of Chicago Divinity School,” as the scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp Jr. have noted, because it taught the kind of American religious liberalism that had emerged in reaction to the rigid orthodoxy of much of the nineteenth-century Protestant establishment. The faculty at Crozer embraced biblical criticism and reckoned with Darwin’s theory of evolution, preparing students, as Smith and Zepp wrote, to engage with the “modern mind” and “the spirit of the age.”

M.L. told her that Daddy King was a frequent womanizer. Dobbs had already heard the rumors. M.L. said he was worried that he would someday wind up like his father, unable to resist the temptation of adultery. The subject arose every day M.L. and Dobbs were together that summer. “It obsessed him,” she said. The subject arose as often as it did in part because young King and Dobbs were talking to ministers who were Daddy King’s peers, men who whispered about Daddy King’s reputation as an adulterer. “There was a great deal of gossip about Reverend King,” Dobbs recalled.

King’s beliefs became more nuanced as he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, in classes taught by Smith. Niebuhr argued that man’s sinfulness would inevitably interfere with attempts to form a more just society. Christian love alone would not change the world, not so long as political and economic systems created vast inequalities among God’s children. Nations and privileged groups within those nations would preserve the status quo, by force if necessary. In his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr wrote that an oppressed minority group with no chance of amassing the power to challenge its oppressors might do well to adopt a strategy of nonviolence, as Gandhi did in India. “The emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy,” Niebuhr wrote. “It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him … It is equally hopeless to attempt emancipation through violent rebellion.”

King’s dissertation attracted little attention until 1990, when scholars at Stanford University announced that substantial portions had been plagiarized.

King would have to be bold enough to encourage the people to suffer for their freedom, moderate enough to keep their fervor under control, and optimistic enough to make everyone believe they could succeed. He needed to embolden without embittering. “Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?” he wondered. It was a question he would ask in various forms for the rest of his life.

On this night, King found a new voice. He discovered or sensed that his purpose was not to instruct or educate; his purpose was to prophesize.

can see no conflict between our devotion to Jesus Christ and our present action,” he responded. “In fact I see a necessary relationship. If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus he will seek to rid the Earth of social evils. The Gospel is social as well as personal.”

They liked the idea of a movement led by ministers, in part because it would help refute accusations of communist influence. Also, Black ministers didn’t depend on white people for their paychecks. They were less likely to be intimidated.

King told reporters the new organization would organize a massive pilgrimage of Black Americans to Washington if the president did not speak out forcefully against southern segregation. “This will not be a political march,” he said. “It will be rooted in deep spiritual faith.”

Years later, scholars would analyze the elements of King’s speeches and conclude that he employed many of the same skills as the finest professional singers. He controlled his tempo, picking up speed in a way that made his audience feel as if they were moving with him, as if they wanted to sing along. He used harmonics, varying his pitch, to make his speech melodic and never monotonous. And he controlled his rhythm masterfully, pausing when he wanted his audience to contemplate his words and repeating phrases without pause when he wanted listeners to feel those same words.

The white enemies of integration claimed they were the ones being oppressed. Negroes had a right to seek better lives, they said, but not if it disturbed white tranquility. Not if it shifted the balance of power. Not if it affected property values. Not if it forced change so quickly as to make people uncomfortable. Change would come slowly, they claimed, if everyone remained patient and calm.

Later, King would joke privately that he had been fortunate: “That was probably the fifth stabbing they had that night at that hospital,” he said. “If you’re gonna get stabbed, get stabbed in Harlem.”

“Our ultimate aim is not to humiliate the white man but to win his understanding.”

he explained the evolution of his thoughts on militarism. Once, he had thought that war, horrible as it is, might be a necessary alternative to a surrender to totalitarianism. But he had gradually concluded that war, given the power of modern weapons, could never be justified.

It was no wonder that reporters said King looked like a much older man. Coretta, too, grew weary. “The pressure of all this dulls you,” she said. “Or perhaps you grow better prepared for anything.

It was a sign of King’s greatest flaw as a leader, an ironic flaw for a protest leader, Rustin said: he hated conflict.

Bevel recalled, “it became obvious to me that he had never really studied strategy and tactics of nonviolence … His nonviolence was philosophical, but never practically applied.”

The NAACP attacked the legal underpinnings of segregation, and SNCC organized at the local level, while the SCLC and other groups educated and registered voters. But the movement’s progress from Montgomery to Albany and onward was not a coordinated plan or even a cresting wave.

Paranoia about communism ran so high that some people believed fluoridation of the water was a plot; in such an environment, it was easy to convince Americans, especially in the South, that the civil rights movement might also be a scheme to undermine democracy.

Ninety-one percent of Americans had television sets in their homes.

He had stuck to the script, almost word for word, to that point. He arrived at his hotel in Washington at ten o’clock the night before without having started work on his speech. It took him about two hours to make an outline and another ninety minutes to turn the outline into a finished draft. It was sometime between three and three-thirty when he finished.

Three months later, King told an interviewer he didn’t know why he “turned aside” from his prepared speech, quit it completely, looked up from his typewritten pages, and said: “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow…” And then he began one of the most famous orations in American history.

he asked King if he’d been aware of the tic. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, how did you get rid of it?” Belafonte asked. “I made peace.” “With what?” “With death.”

“I don’t think we’re inciting discord but exposing discord,” King said.

Hoover made himself indispensable to presidents by monitoring their critics and rivals.

Wachtel said he thought King should “bell the cat,” in other words, develop a plan to at least neutralize if not discredit Hoover. But King was ill-equipped for such a battle. “He just couldn’t face up to it,” Wachtel said years later. “One of the reasons that he couldn’t stand up and fight was that he had his own guilt.”

Rarely, in any time, does an issue lay bare the heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or security, but rather to the values and the purposes and meaning of our beloved Nation.

With no air conditioner, and not even a fan, the room was oppressively hot. King sat on the floor, “trying to convince these kids that rioting was destructive,” Wilkins recalled. “For hours this went on; and there were no photographers there, no newspaper men. There was no glory in it.”

This was a time for scorn, a time for distrust, a time when faith seemed old-fashioned, or even naïve. The shifting attitudes had enormous consequences for the civil rights movement, warned one of the SCLC’s biggest supporters, Leslie Dunbar, director of the nonprofit Field Foundation. Ongoing cynicism might lead many white people in the North to conclude that the problems of the American Negro were best handled by the police. “That way,” Dunbar said, “whites would be able to sleep peacefully in the suburbs and let Negroes riot among themselves.”

he accused the government of “squandering” money on war and manned space flight while spending minuscule amounts to fight poverty and racism. King read a forty-four-page statement in which he repeatedly linked Vietnam to civil rights. “The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures,” he said, “we will lose in our decaying cities.

For two years, he said, he had struggled to overcome the betrayal of his own silence on Vietnam. Many people asked him why he chose to speak out against the war. Wasn’t he damaging the civil rights campaign? He understood the question, he said, but he nevertheless felt dismayed that his friends and allies didn’t really know him, didn’t understand the depth of his dedication, the sincerity of his religious calling, didn’t truly understand the world in which they lived.

The civil rights movement was dead. Liberalism was dead, too. “There are few mourners,” Kopkind wrote. But King did not share the growing cynicism that captured many left-wing book critics, and he did mourn. He expressed his sadness in calls with his friends and supporters. He said he had seen up close the frustration among poor Black people, especially in the cities, and he was pained but not surprised by the explosion of their anger. “There were dark days before, but this is the darkest,”

King made it plain. There’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of greatness, he said, if you seek greatness in serving others: Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve … You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love, and you can be that servant.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life … But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. His eyes scanned down and then to the left and then back up at his audience. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! The audience roared, and King roared back. So I’m happy tonight! I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory— This time, as the audience roared, a tiny smile flashed across King’s face. It disappeared as fast as it came, and he took a breath. —of the coming of the Lord! He knifed the air with his left hand and turned away as the audience erupted in euphoric applause. Abernathy rose from his seat and threw both arms around King’s waist. Abernathy looked in his best friend’s eyes and saw tears.

“Every racist in the country has killed Dr. King,” the activist James Farmer told a reporter. “Evil societies always destroy their consciences.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING’S children received the news when a special bulletin interrupted one of their favorite television shows. The CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite told them and the nation: “Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.” Seven-year-old Dexter, ten-year-old Martin, and twelve-year-old Yolanda ran to their mother. Coretta Scott King was on the phone. She raised a finger, signaling for the children to be quiet. “I understand,” she said. The children waited. “I understand,” she said again. Finally, she hung up. “Your father,” she said calmly. “There’s been an accident.”

But in hallowing King we have hollowed him.

On my most recent visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2022, I found none of King’s books for sale in the gift shop. Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change.