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In King: A Life—the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published in decades—Jonathan Eig describes King as “a gravitational force” in the Freedom Movement. From the earliest days of his involvement, Eig writes, King proved capable of “pulling in reporters, financial donors, and young volunteers,” and transforming a social and political struggle into a moral crusade.
Eig’s King: A Life emerges at a critical juncture for the King legacy. Today we find it beset on one side by a 40-year campaign to erase the truth-speaking radical King of whom most white Americans disapproved in his final years, and on the other by new documents that threaten to destroy it entirely.
In addition to doing an extensive historical review of FBI documents, Eig also draws on hundreds of interviews, unpublished memoirs, and newly available archives of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
His interview subjects include such luminaries as the just-departed King contemporary, champion, and confidante Harry Belafonte. Belafonte recently told Eig, “In none of the history books of this country do you read about radical heroes.” To Jonathan Eig’s great credit, in King: A Life, we do.
I spoke with Eig on Zoom about the challenges of capturing the essence of the Freedom Movement icon, how his approach to King differs from previous biographers, and what he makes of the massive repository of FBI documents available now.
This interview was edited for space and clarity.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
When I started your book, I was captivated by King’s parents, and particularly his mother, Alberta King, and her amazing sense of humor—something her son clearly shared—and it seemed that your book was pointing in a different direction from the outset.
Jonathan Eig
I talked to David Garrow and Taylor Branch about this. In some ways, my book is the inverse of theirs. They’re telling a giant story with King at the center of it. I’m telling King’s story with the giant story on the periphery of it. And I think that that was key, because if one of them had done the straightforward biography, then maybe there wouldn’t have been as much room for mine. But I hope this really supplements their work nicely because it’s a much more intimate portrait.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
It definitely does. And it’s been so long since David J. Garrow’s book, Bearing the Cross, came out in 1986. The MLK holiday existed then, but it hadn’t yet changed perceptions of King and codified and sanitized our image of him. So Garrow’s book didn’t have to deal with that in the way that yours does.
Jonathan Eig
I think it was underway before the holiday became official, but the holiday definitely cemented that. And in many negative ways, it turned King literally into a monument and into a holiday and into a greeting card, and robbed us of his humanity in many ways. And as you said, Garrow’s book and Taylor Branch’s book are now decades old. And the times are different too. So King stands very differently in our society today, with the messages that he was preaching—most loudly at the end of his life—about reparations, about income inequality, about police brutality, about racism in the North. These problems are not just still with us, but haunting us as much as ever. And King tried to call them out. He tried to warn us, and we weren’t prepared to listen. So I think that’s another good reason to hear his voice again.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
I’m interested to see how people who say they love King, but don’t really know him will react to the King they meet in your book.
Jonathan Eig
I hope that they’ll think about it, because that was the beauty of King. He took people who disagreed with him and he engaged with them. He wasn’t afraid of arguing. He wasn’t afraid of debating. And he lived to challenge false ideas. He felt like that was a direct message from Christ, and he wanted to confront people to think about their prejudices and their biases. And he did that actively. So I don’t know what kind of reception he’d get today, because we’re even more closed-minded than we were then. But I know he’d still certainly want to try.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
It’s always fascinating to look at his relationship with other people in the movement that the media wanted to portray as opposed to him, like Stokely Carmichael. Because these two men tremendously enjoyed one another’s company.
Jonathan Eig
I think he would’ve enjoyed Malcolm’s company if he got to spend some more time with him too. But King liked everybody. He was really open-minded. He enjoyed debating, and he hated confrontation. So he was always looking for some kind of common ground. It’s amazing and fun to think about the fact that our greatest rebel, our greatest activist, is somebody who did not like personal conflict. He was okay with it on the public stage, but personally, he avoided it like the plague. And I think that’s why when you see him with Stokely Carmichael, he’s enjoying these debates. He’s enjoying these long walks through Mississippi, where they’re giving each other a hard time and debating these issues. And King is trying to hold his ground. He says, “I’m not gonna call it Black Power,” but it starts to creep into his speech anyway. He starts talking about the power that Black people have. He’s really thinking about these ideas that people are bringing forward. And I just love that about the guy.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
In 2019, when the new batch of FBI transcripts and summaries became available, David Garrow started sounding all kinds of alarm bells about the damning things they would reveal about King. But your book doesn’t really do that. The overwhelming impression I get from your book is not of a clay-footed civil rights hero having affairs, but of an FBI Director’s dereliction of duty. What comes across is what the wiretaps reveal about J. Edgar Hoover, his all-consuming obsession with King, and what he and his agents did to satisfy it. Can you talk a bit about dealing with that volatile material?
Jonathan Eig
My attitude was that we already knew King was unfaithful to Coretta. We already knew that the FBI was tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. But what was most important to me in writing this book was putting them in context of King’s life and his relationship with his wife, and why he felt the need or urge to be with other women. It also means putting it in the context of the FBI. Why was it so important for the FBI to wiretap this guy when it’s clear that he’s not a threat to democracy? At least to most people, it’s clear. And it’s clear that his connections to communism are nothing dramatic or extreme, or affecting the safety of American citizens. So I wanted to make sure that I put these things in the proper context and perspective. What’s most important about the FBI wiretaps? Is it the number of women that King is sleeping with? Or that this is driving public policy, that these wiretaps are affecting our leading activist’s relationship with the President of the United States, and consequently the chances of passing a Fair Housing bill? Or what effect is this FBI scrutiny having on the antiwar movement? That, to me, is much more important than who he’s getting in bed with.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One thing that the telephone transcripts quoted in the book conveys is a clearer impression of King’s closest white advisor, Stanley Levison, who had ties to the Communist party [and whose association with King was the justification the Kennedys used to authorize the wiretaps]. Instead of leading King down the garden path to communism, Levison comes across as a moderating influence. When King wants to speak out against the Vietnam War or talk about poverty or segregation outside the South, Levison says, “Let’s consider the big picture. Let’s stick to what’s best for the movement.”
Jonathan Eig
One thing that really intrigued me was the way that by the end, guys like Levison or Bayard Rustin who tried to forge King as a radical and tried to lead him into this role as a national movement leader, were uncomfortable with just how radical King wanted to be, and they were trying to rein him in. They were saying, “No, stick to voting rights in the South. That’s what you’re good at. That’s where we can have the most impact. Don’t go to Chicago. Don’t talk about the war. This is costing us fundraising support.”
It’s actually painful to read the transcripts, and to see him saying to his strongest allies—the people who’ve been with him since the beginning, people who truly love him— “Don’t you understand me?… Don’t you get it?” He’s refusing to settle for the pragmatic choice, and these guys who thought they were bringing him along into the movement and teaching him how to be a radical—suddenly, he’s eclipsed them.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
There’s one point early on in the book, during the Montgomery period, where King wonders if the militant and the moderate could be combined in the same speech, and you say, “It was a question he would ask in various forms for the rest of his life.” There were always people around who seemed more moderate and more militant than King, and no matter where he stood ideologically, he always found himself at the center of the movement, with a degree of responsibility he could never escape. Stokely Carmichael never had to deal with that level of responsibility, and I don’t believe he ever envied King’s position. Do you think King’s ability to balance the militant and the moderate proved a blessing and a curse?
Jonathan Eig
Yes. And I would point out before I answer that, that the same is true for Malcolm X. Malcolm does not have half his power if he doesn’t have King to play off. Because by putting King in the position of being the conservative, Malcolm can stand out more dramatically as the radical. But King was almost born for this role, by coming from a fairly middle class family in Atlanta, by being of the South but also being urban, by having “The Reverend Doctor” attached to his name at a time when half of all Americans were in church every Sunday. You have to have a little bit of grudging respect for a minister, even if you’re a racist. And a lot of white ministers in the South were wrestling with this.
King forced people all over in all different demographics to reflect on their racism. Why do you hate this man? He’s clearly coming from a position of love and faith, extolling democracy and the Constitution. He’s making it hard for us not to listen. And in a way, that’s his superpower: He can seem radical in some ways, and conservative in others. And there were many, many reporters who called him a conservative because of the way he dressed and the way he spoke, and because he was working within the system, and he was seeking the cooperation of government officials and helping the president with his legislative ambitions.
It’s almost impossible to imagine another person filling that role. He was really the perfect man at the perfect time.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One aspect of King’s life that paints him in an unflattering light today is his sexism. One of the most crushing scenes in the book is just after the March on Washington, when King is going to the White House and he flat out tells Coretta, “You’re not invited.”
Jonathan Eig
I think that Coretta’s story has never really been told the way it ought to be told. And I hope that I moved the needle a little bit and gave her some of the credit she deserves. And I hope that somebody else is gonna come along and write a great Coretta biography soon. Some of it is baked into the way King was raised, and certainly the times in which he was living. But there’s this moment where you think, “I think the reason he fell in love with Coretta truly is because she was an activist.” She had more experience with organized protests than he did [at the time they met], and I think that really turned him on in all the best ways. He dated lots of smart, beautiful women. So why Coretta? I think that’s the number one reason that she stood out. And he never really took advantage of that. He was set in his ways and so stubborn about the role of the woman in the household. He appreciated her counsel, and he appreciated her ability to step in for him sometimes when he couldn’t speak. And I think she plays a large role in guiding him. But he never gave her her wings, never let her fly the way she deserved to.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
There’s a chapter that you center on King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail. You describe it as this beautiful, blistering treatise, which obviously is highly regarded today, and is one of the most powerful testaments to King’s thinking, and his uncanny ability to write something that magnificent from a jail cell on little scraps of newspaper. But you also point out that it had little impact in Birmingham at the time.
Jonathan Eig
One of King’s big complaints throughout his whole career is his disappointment with white preachers who don’t see the Bible as a call for integration. So the letter that appears in the newspaper on the day he’s arrested really provokes him in a way that he’s seldom provoked. I suspect that a lot of this was from stuff he’d written over the years and sermons he’d given over the years. King did so well patching things together, stealing things when necessary, and then editing it many, many times, so that it takes shape gradually. And this notion that he’s writing on scraps of newspaper and on hamburger wrappers is true. One of my favorite interviews was with Willie Pearl King, the secretary who typed the letter as these scraps were coming out of the jail. Of course I asked her, “What’d you do with the scraps of sandwich wrappers and toilet paper and newspaper?” And she said, “Well, I threw ’em away, of course. They were disgusting.”
Steve Nathans-Kelly
I want to talk about King’s attempt to take the movement up to Chicago to fight housing discrimination, which is generally regarded as a failure. So much of King’s success supposedly stemmed from his impact on Northern whites of good conscience, but we start to see the limitations of that when he tries to take the movement North, to a place where they don’t want to admit anything is wrong. Then he goes to Chicago and confronts hate worse than anything he’d seen in the South. How much of a sense do you think he had of the resistance that he was going to experience in the North, even from white people who had seemed sympathetic to his cause when he was working in the South?
Jonathan Eig
I don’t think he was prepared for the level of resistance he faced. He goes out to L.A. after the riots there, and I think he’s genuinely shocked, not just by the poverty and by the anger in the Black community, but by the recalcitrance of the white leadership there to engage in conversation. He really thought that they would be more receptive to discussion because they’re not Bull Connor. He thought that they might be willing to meet and talk and work with him. And Sam Yorty in L.A. is a huge disappointment to King. And that might have been a warning sign when he went to Chicago, but it wasn’t. He continued to believe that he was going to find more support and more goodwill in the north than he did in the South.
Maybe that was naive. But his friends tried to warn him that you don’t really understand how the cities are organized. You don’t understand the power structure there. You don’t understand the precinct system in Chicago and the loyalty that it generates. You don’t understand how many Black people are dependent on the mayor for their jobs in places like Chicago and Philadelphia. And King figured, “Well, that’ll all work itself out.” And he had this great ability to throw himself into situations and just say, “Well, that may all be true, but we’re gonna find out and, and we’ll see what happens.” And that’s exactly what he did in Birmingham and Selma and Albany. He said, “We’re just gonna light a spark and see what happens.”
Steve Nathans-Kelly
When you look at how badly things went for King in Chicago, and then you see him taking a very unpopular stance against the war in Vietnam, his influence and effectiveness were diminished. On the one hand he’s too moderate, too Sunday school for the Black Power movement, and on the other he’s become too radical to have the ear of the president.
Jonathan Eig
That’s why, with the benefit of hindsight, some people will say, “Well, he knew the end was coming. He was prepared to die because he was at loose ends and his power was waning. It was better to die than to drift off into ineffectiveness.” And I don’t believe that that’s just the story we tell because he did die. What’s more powerful to me is the fact that he kept trying. Clearly he was losing power. He was losing access to the president in part because of Hoover’s work, and in part because of King’s own refusal to remain silent on Vietnam. But the country was, in many ways, moving on. The Black community was becoming more radical, and King was struggling to find his place.
But as he became less effective, once again he refused to compromise. That would’ve been the perfect moment for him to say, “I need a break. I’ve just been hospitalized for exhaustion for the third time. I’m going to continue to support the movement and do everything I can, but I’m gonna step back from leadership and I’m going to teach the next generation of leaders.” It probably would’ve been the smarter, saner move—certainly better for his health and for his family. But he felt like he couldn’t, that he had too important a role to play. God had told him that he had a responsibility, and he was going to keep doing it even if he became less effective. And that was extraordinary. I think that emotionally, he suffered terribly for that. It’s a kind of courage that I can’t even imagine.
NONFICTION
King: A Life
By Jonathan Eig
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published May 16, 2023
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