King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

The place was Montgomery, Alabama, former capital of Alabama’s slave trade.

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.

“Great men … have not been boasters and buffoons,” wrote Emerson, “but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

He warned that materialism undermined our moral values, that nationalism threatened to crush all hope of universal brotherhood, that militarism bred cynicism and distrust. He saw a moral rot at the core of American life and worried that racism had blinded many of us to it.

Between 1885 and 1930, more than four thousand Black people were lynched as part of the enforcement of racial segregation and subordination.

In the 1930s, three out of every four Black workers in the South toiled as domestics or farmhands.

In 1944, the same year King went to Connecticut, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. The book was the most detailed examination of American racism ever compiled by a white man, based on research performed before the United States entered World War II. Nearly 1,500 pages long, the book described what Black Americans knew but couldn’t quantify: the disparities between the races in infant mortality, employment, education, and political representation.

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

“Fill up the jailhouses” would become a call to action, one that would inspire a new wave of activists, most of them younger than King. They included John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, C. T. Vivian, and Bernard Lafayette Jr.

IN 1964, IN a Gallup public opinion survey, Americans had named King the fourth most admired man in the world, behind Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill, and Dwight Eisenhower, and ahead of Robert Kennedy, Billy Graham, and Pope Paul VI. In 1965, he had slipped to sixth place out of ten, and in 1966 he fell off the list entirely. Among the respondents, 63 percent said they viewed King negatively.

The Yale historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in Harper’s Magazine that the civil rights movement seemed to be following the same course as Reconstruction: “a rising tide of indignation against an ancient wrong, the slow crumbling of stubborn resistance, the sudden rush and elation of victory—and then … the onset of reaction and the fading of high hopes.”

“I am now convinced,” he said, “that the simplest approach will prove to be the most revolutionary—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a … guaranteed annual income.” The idea was not so radical. In fact, three years later, President Richard Nixon would come close to enacting a plan to give every family of four a guaranteed annual income of $1,600, a move that had the support of more than a thousand American economists.

Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

King also said his view of white Americans had changed. After his experience in Chicago, after seeing how white people in the North resisted appeals to integrate their schools and neighborhoods, he had concluded that only a small part of white America supported racial justice. “Most Americans,” he said, “are unconscious racists.”

On May 2, 1967, about thirty young Black men and women carried rifles into the California state capitol building in Sacramento to protest a proposed bill to ban carrying loaded weapons in public. The protesters were members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a group founded to patrol the streets of Oakland. Its founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, said white police departments were not protecting Black people so much as containing, oppressing, and brutalizing them, which is why Black people needed the right to carry weapons.