King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

“The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American,” he wrote. “It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.”

The newspaper story said the proposed boycott was similar to a strategy employed by the White Citizens’ Council, which refused to patronize businesses that served Black customers or failed to strictly enforce Jim Crow laws. The comparison troubled King at first. Was it wrong to cause problems for the bus company to solve problems for Black riders? Was it the Christian thing to do? He reflected on Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and decided that the practical effect of the boycott was to stop participating in an “evil system.” To accept evil without challenging it, King concluded, would be to condone it.

People took taxis. They shared cars. Most of all, they walked. Police cars followed the buses, checking to see if Black “goon squads” were intimidating would-be passengers. But no goon squads were needed. Black people waved and cheered and stuck out their tongues at the empty buses. A daylong celebration commenced. When a minister stopped to give a ride to a woman who had walked a long way, he asked if she felt tired. “Well, my body may be a bit tired,” she said, “but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting. So I don’t mind if my body is tired, because my soul is free.” “And as I watched them,” King later wrote, “I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.”

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. With a booming voice and strident words, he marked the path for himself and for a movement. He reminded the people that their advantage was in their moral superiority. They would not burn crosses or pull white people from their homes. They would protest peacefully, as their Christian faith instructed. They meant to reform American democracy, not overthrow it. He called out in his deep, throbbing voice, and the people responded, the noise of the crowd rolling and pounding in waves that shook the building as he built to a climax: And we are not wrong… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. They would show their opponents love, yet love alone would not free his people, he said. The people would have to demand freedom: Follow me, King said, and we will use the power of love to make America our Promised Land, and when history books tell the story they will tell of people with “fleecy locks and black complexion” who rose to fight oppre...

The city still wouldn’t budge. “What they are after is the destruction of our social fabric,” said the mayor, Tacky Gayle. When Gayle called on a white pastor to speak, the pastor lectured King, saying ministers should abstain from political acts. King became angry. “I 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.”

King reminded his followers of the moral beauty of their protest. Their fight, he said, was not only for fairness. It was for the future. It was for redemption. It was to make America a better and more loving country for all people. It was for God.

Rufus Lewis later said that every Black person in Montgomery reacted as if his own home had been bombed, and, like King, they were not going to be intimidated. If anyone in Montgomery wanted to kill Reverend King, one man said, “they waited too late, because Martin Luther King is in all of us now, and in order to kill Martin Luther King, you’ll have to kill every Black in the city of Montgomery.”

James Baldwin, who traveled through the American South for the first time in 1957 and interviewed King, wrote: “What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person.” Those who love America and claim to love freedom, Baldwin wrote, need to take a “hard look” at themselves. “If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”

He and Coretta were preparing for a trip to India, a six-week journey that would include stops in London, Paris, and Zurich before India, and Beirut, Jerusalem, and Cairo on the way home. A Quaker pacifist group called the American Friends Service Committee sponsored the excursion, hoping King might learn more about Gandhi and gain a perspective on how nonviolent tactics could help America avoid the monumental failure Baldwin described. King had considered a tour of Russia, too, but he feared that segregationists would use his visit to smear him as a communist.

He echoed the words of Jesus in Matthew 11:28–30: I have learned now that the Master’s burden is light precisely when we take his yoke upon us. My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my suffering mounted I soon realized that there were two ways I can respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course … I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive … The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God.

Put us in jail, and we will go in with humble smiles on our faces, still loving you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you … But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom, but not only will we win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory. This seems to me the only answer and the only way to make our nation a new nation and our world a new world. Love is the absolute power.

“Every man should have something he’d die for. A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

His letter, written at a decisive moment in his leadership, written without access to his bookshelf and without the help of his frequent collaborators, would become his most passionate and lasting prose.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote.

“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.”

I would agree with St. Augustine,” he wrote, “that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

“You know, we’ve got to get something going,” he said privately. “The press is leaving.”

“I’m Sammy Davis.” Embarrassed that he had not recognized one of America’s best-known entertainers, whom he’d seen many times on television, Gunny escorted him to the stage, where Davis took his seat with the other celebrities who had made the trip, including Josephine Baker, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Rita Moreno, Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Ruby Dee, Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, and Steve McQueen.

“I have a dream today!” He hurried that last sentence, tying it to the previous one like a kite tail, making the words soar higher and faster on a wind that carried everyone along.

One white lawyer, Charles Morgan, speaking to the Young Men’s Business Club, declared: “Who did it? The answer should be we all did it … Every person in this community who has, in any way, contributed to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.”

He sounded weary himself, at times, but never hopeless. He told a St. Augustine audience: You know, they threaten us occasionally with more than beatings … They threaten us with actual physical death. They think that this will stop the movement. I got word way out in California that a plan was underway to take my life in St. Augustine, Florida. Well, if physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brother and all of my brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

I cannot stand idly by when any community finds itself caught in the shackles of man’s inhumanity to man, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little towns and villages captured by “thus saith the Lord,” just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus, and decided to hotfoot it all around the Greco-Roman world and carry the gospel of Jesus Christ, I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom everywhere men are oppressed.

How long would it take? His voice thundered as he asked and answered the question and concluded his speech: It will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow … How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.

For now, he said, he subjected himself to “endless self-analysis … to be as certain as I can that I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work, that I am maintaining my sense of purpose, that I am holding fast to my ideals, that I am guiding my people in the right direction. But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in—for all men, Black and white alike.” He was still an optimist, he said—enough so to believe that America might yet find “the high road to the fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ dream, when they wrote, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’”

As a minister, I cannot advocate racial peace and non-violence for black men alone, nor white men alone, nor for yellow men alone … If a man of God fails to see this; if he fails to seek to help bring about peace on earth as well as good will among mankind, he isn’t much of a spokesman for the Christ who predicted, centuries ago, that he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.”

From South Vietnam, a Buddhist monk and antiwar activist named Thich Nhat Hanh published an open letter to King, one that applauded the American preacher’s ecumenical approach to social action. “I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully … the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. The monk went on to cite the writings of Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other favorites of King. “The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You can not remain silent … You can not be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, to you, God is in action, too.”

There’s no doubt about that. I will agree that there is a group in the Negro community advocating for violence now. I happen to feel that this group represents a numerical minority … I don’t think this vocal group will be able to make a real dent in the Negro community … I contend that the cry of “Black power” is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro has worsened over the last few years.

frustration that Black people, who comprised only 10 percent of the American population, comprised roughly 20 percent of the casualty lists in the Vietnam War.

The call for Black power did not have to mean separation or domination, the clergymen wrote; it meant Black people sought to end the imbalance of power that made white people feel they were justified in getting what they wanted through their accumulated power and while tying “a white noose of suburbia around the necks” of Black people, leaving them all too often poor and unprotected or even persecuted by the unequal application of the law.

Black liberation theology, a theology “inspired by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” as Cone put it, a theology that empowered people to “fight for justice as King said and love ourselves as Malcolm said … teaching us how to be both unapologetically Black and Christian at the same time.”

Legislative and judicial victories, he continued, “did very little” to help poor Black people in the North. New laws and court decisions failed to destroy the roots of American racism, he said, adding that “our society is still structured on the basis of racism.” Most Americans had not been asked to sacrifice for equality. They had not been asked to make reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. They had not addressed or attempted to cure the nation’s vast inequalities of wealth and opportunity. The new federal laws had cost most Americans nothing. That would have to change, King said, even if it meant pulling America toward a system of democratic socialism like those found in European countries.

But King said he was not quitting: I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up in life … I have a dream that one day men will rise up and come to see that they are made to live together as brothers. I still have a dream this morning that one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin … I still have a dream that one day the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized, and the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, and brotherhood will be more than a few words at the end of a prayer … I still have a dream today that one day justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream … I still have a dream today.

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.

was rapt. His father was silent. I’d like for someone to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody! I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question! I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry … I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity! Yes, if you want to say that day that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace, that I was a drum major for righteousness, and all of the other shallow things will not matter … I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Sweat covered his brow. His voice grew louder, echoing in the rafters: 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.”

“Starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence … Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

“Love is the only force that can destroy hate,”

In those schools named for King, and in almost every school in America, King’s life and lessons are often smoothed and polished beyond recognition. Young people hear his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his call for fundamental change in the nation’s character, not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism. As King’s friend Harry Belafonte told me, “In none of the history books of this country do you read about radical heroes.”

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. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix those problems.

“Our very survival,” he wrote, “depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.” Amen.