martin luther king biography eig

Jonathan Eig

KING: A LIFE

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An Intimate Portrait

The first major biography of King in 40 years, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of newly discovered documents, this is King like you've never seen him before: flawed, brave, radical...and under heavy attack by the FBI.

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“A landmark biography … Monumental.”

New York Times

“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable... The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades...and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King... [Eig’s is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current...Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” 

   ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Based on New FBI Files

The first King biography written with access to thousands of recently released pages of FBI files as well as thousands of personal papers from King's associates and friends.

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King: A Life

Author: Jonathan Eig

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1 The Kings of Stockbridge TAKE THIS BUCKET of milk to the neighbors, Delia King told her son Michael one day. Delia and her husband, Jim King, lived with their growing brood of children in a tiny wooden sharecroppers’ shack in Stockbridge, Georgia, about twenty miles southeast of Atlanta. The shack and the land around it belonged to a white man. The white man kept most of the money from the crops, but it was the King family, one generation removed from slavery, that cleared the soil stone by stone, planted and picked the cotton, and went hungry when the scorching sun rendered the earth no more fertile than a rutted road. Yet when Delia heard that her neighbor had a sick cow that wouldn’t give milk, she acted without hesitation. “She was a very devout Christian,” recalled Michael, who would go on to change his name to Martin Luther King Sr. “I remember, as a small boy, my mother was a woman who shared what she had with others,” he said in a newly discovered set of audiotaped interviews he made for an unpublished autobiography. Michael was about twelve years old when his mother sent him on his mission that bright summer day around 1910. As he carried his bucket, he paused in front of a sawmill where he watched burly men and oxen at work, hauling timber. A voice snapped him to attention. It was the white mill owner: “Say, boy, run get a bucket of water for my men from down at the stream.” Apologizing, Michael told the mill owner he was on an errand. He needed to go. The mill owner grabbed Michael by his shirt and kicked over his bucket of milk. As Michael bent to pick up the bucket, the white man’s boot connected with the boy’s ear. He tumbled. He tried to rise, but a fist smashed his face. Blood poured from his mouth. Everything went hazy. Michael got up, ran home, and spotted his mother in the yard, washing clothes in an iron tub set over a fire. Delia scanned her son’s blood-crusted face and torn shirt. “Who did this to you, Michael?” she asked, voice low and tight. The boy didn’t answer. “ Michael! ” Delia screamed. “ Who did this? ” Delia marched to the mill, squeezing her son’s wrist as she tugged him along. She found the owner. “Did you do this to my child?” She locked eyes with the man. “Woman! You lost your mind? Get the hell outta here before I—” Delia screamed: “Did you do this to my child?” “Yeah…” She lowered her shoulder and rammed the mill owner in his chest, knocking him into the side of a shed. She forced him to the ground and hammered at his face with hands and arms hardened by a lifetime of manual labor. When one of the mill workers tried to pull her away, Delia punched him, too. The others backed off. “You can kill me! But if you put a hand on a child of mine, you’ll answer.” Delia balled her fists, ready for more, but the mill owner wanted none of it. Back home, Delia cleaned her son’s face. She warned him not to tell his father what had happened. A Black woman might get away with beating a white man, but a Black man would likely pay with his life. Soon, though, Jim King heard about the mill owner’s attack on his son. As Delia had feared, Jim grabbed a rifle and went to the mill bent on revenge. The owner wasn’t there. That night, a mob of white men on horseback rode to the Kings’ shack. Jim King knew the law offered no protection, so he did the only thing he could think of to save himself and his family: he ran. He took off into the woods and stayed away through the summer and into the fall. Delia became sick. The cotton crop suffered, and the vegetables got picked too late. The family struggled to survive the winter. Months later, Michael heard from a friend that the mill owner was no longer angry. Things could go back to normal, the friend said. Jim King came home, but normal was not an option. “I’m gonna blow one of these crackers’ heads off,” he told his son. Jim drank heavily and argued forcefully with Delia. When he left the house, he went alone, and took his rifle. He tried to shoot something his family could eat, but he was often too drunk to see a rabbit, much less hit one. “I just wondered what was normal for us,” Michael recalled, “and how long we could expect it to last.” * * * Michael King’s parents were born in the so-called Reconstruction years immediately following the Civil War. Men and women recently released from slavery purchased land, started churches, and built communities. They voted, too, electing more than two thousand Black public officials, including a governor in Louisiana, ten Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and two U.S. senators. The historian Eric Foner described Reconstruction as “a radical experiment in interracial democracy,” during which formerly enslaved laborers became free laborers. But the experiment failed. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The white backlash to Black people’s gains was immediate—and vicious. The U.S. government permitted white elected officials in the South to address the so-called Negro problem as they liked. Racial animosity metastasized. A system of land rental, known as sharecropping, forced Black farmers into a relationship with white landowners that was deeply exploitative. Factory owners and financiers in the North went along, for the most part, silenced by the profits generated by cheap labor. White officials in the South concluded that Black people were not only inferior, and therefore unfit to be treated as equal citizens, but also a threat to their physical safety. Southern lawmakers passed codes to establish systems of peonage not far removed from slavery. By the start of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws designed to divide the races and subordinate Black people. The segregation rules—commonly known as Jim Crow laws—mandated separation of the races: in schools, trains, theaters, churches, hotels, hospitals, barbershops, restrooms, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, cemeteries, and elsewhere. Jim Crow laws prohibited Black and white people from playing checkers, dominos, and card games together in their own homes. Marriage between races was forbidden, too. For many in the white community, the greatest fear of all was miscegenation, which would blur the line they had worked so hard to create and enforce. For others, the greatest fear was a reordering of power. Supporters viewed the Jim Crow laws as a system of controls, like dams and dikes, designed to preserve the natural order as they perceived it. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court gave legal sanction to segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson , creating a standard of “separate but equal” that was anything but equal. Atlanta became the unofficial capital of the booming, divided South. It was in Atlanta, in 1895, that the Black educator Booker T. Washington proposed his famous compromise, saying Black people would at least for the upcoming future accept separation of the races if the white community, in return, took responsibility for improving the skills and social conditions of Black people. But Washington’s critics feared that such a compromise would leave Black people permanently subservient. Georgia, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, became “the centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.” Jim King—born the year before the abolition of chattel slavery—personified the crushing frustrations of Black life in the South. He never learned to read or write. He never voted. He never owned property. Instead, he lived in a perpetual state of debt to the white men for whom he farmed. He grew lean, edgy, and angry. America hadn’t given Jim King much, and then, bit by bit, it took away what little he had managed to accumulate, leaving frustration, travail, and rage. That’s how his son Michael described it. The American dream, built on promises written into the nation’s founding documents, lost all meaning. Jim King drank until he had “a look of very quiet but very serious fire in his eyes,” wrote his son, until he no longer cared, “not about living, not about pain, not about his anger or anything else.” Delia, ten years younger than her husband, held the family together. Born Delia Linsey in Ellenwood, Georgia, she, too, had grown up on a white-owned farm. Her father, Jim Long, had been used in slavery to sire children, to build up the owner’s supply of enslaved laborers and boost the owner’s return on investment in human property. Enslaved women were the victims of these forced sexual encounters. Delia’s mother, Jane Linsey, born in 1853, gave birth to her first child at the age of sixteen and went on to have four more, without marrying. By 1880, the federal census reported that Jane was twenty-seven, the mother of five, single, not widowed or divorced, with no occupation other than “keeping home.” Jim Long appears on the next page of the census, living nearby at the age of thirty-six, married to a woman named Francis, with ten more children. Delia Linsey married Jim King in Henry County on August 20, 1895. On the marriage license, Delia’s maiden name was spelled Lindsey. Five years later, the Kings were living in Ellenwood, where Jim worked as a day laborer and Delia took care of their daughter Woodie and their son Michael. Another son, Lucius, died at some point during infancy. In addition to farming, Jim King worked part-time at a rock quarry until an accident in the quarry took one of his fingers and made further work there impossible. By 1910, the Kings were farming cotton in Stockbridge and raising seven children. Federal census reports show that Delia King didn’t know how to read or write in 1900 or 1910. But by 1920, at age forty-five, she had learned, most likely by reading the Bible. When she wasn’t giving birth, feeding children, cooking for her family, sewing, washing, planting vegetables, or picking cotton, Delia cleaned and ironed clothes for white families. When it rained, the roof leaked. When ice-cold wind blew through the cracks in the flimsy walls, the family crowded around the fireplace, Michael recalled, “while our backs shivered.” They had no running water and no indoor toilet. “But Mama was at peace with herself,” Michael wrote, “because of her abiding faith.” No matter what misfortune befell her, Delia King would never “close her eyes so tight in sorrow or rage that she did not see God’s hand reaching out to her.” Every Sunday, Delia and the children walked to church, carrying their shoes so as not to wear them out. They alternated between Methodist and Baptist churches. Jim King did not attend either one. “He didn’t care anything about church,” Michael recalled. “He wouldn’t go to church … My daddy would work all week and at the end of the week he would get drunk and then scrap with my mother … I got to where I hated Saturdays and Sundays for what my father was going to do and how he was going to act up.” But as long as Delia and the children were in church, they were safe from Jim King’s anger. Black Baptists outnumbered white Baptists in Georgia. Black culture and Black political activism rose from the pews and pulpits of the Black church. For many, religion offered release from the pain of ordinary life. Black Baptist preachers frequently imparted the radical message that all people were free and equal under God’s laws, that the rules and regulations handed down by white men were wrong, that the racial hierarchies invented by men to justify slavery were false and craven, that the savagery of the Ku Klux Klan and the segregation laws of the South were abominations in the eyes of God, and that God would never love one group of people more than another based on the color of their skin. Prayers and hymns eased Delia King’s suffering. They offered hope that her children and grandchildren might live to see a better day. Faith in God also helped create a sense of community. Hog-killing time, for example, brought a festive sense of community and a living reminder of the spirit of Jesus’s love. As Michael King would recall years later, those who owned animals big enough to slaughter shared meat with those in need, knowing they would be repaid in kind one day. “That kind of sharing was to me Christianity in action,” he said. Martin Luther King Jr., Delia’s grandson, would often remark on the role Christianity played in the lives of the enslaved and indentured. The land they farmed was not their own. The crops they planted and sowed were not their own. Their bodies were not entirely their own. But their souls, he said, would never belong to a plantation owner, a landlord, a hooded Klansman, a prison warden, a sheriff, a senator, or anybody else; their souls would always be free. “So many things stood there to discourage them,” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but the old preacher would come up with his broken language. He would look out to them and said, ‘Friends, you ain’t no nigger. You ain’t no slave, but you God’s chillun.’” They were not educated, King said, “but they knew God.” They knew that the God they worshipped would not punish some of his children and exalt others. “And, so,” he continued, “although they knew that some days they had to go out into the field in their bare feet, that didn’t stop them. And they could sing in their broken language: I got shoes, you got shoes, All of God’s chillun got shoes. When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes And just walk all over God’s heaven.” * * * Much of the King family’s history can’t be traced back before the Civil War. Owners prevented the enslaved from learning to read and write. Births and deaths often went unrecorded. Tax collectors and census takers treated Black people as property, their names not worth noting. In the first census after the Civil War, taken in 1870, Jim King appears to be recorded as a five-year-old named James Branham of Eatonton, Georgia, in Putnam County. Jim’s age and the ages of his parents—listed as Nathan and Malinda Branham—match the ages of King’s ancestors, suggesting perhaps that the family chose to drop the Branham name, which was a vestige of enslavement, and become Kings in freedom. Tax records show that Jim and Delia King worked on a farm owned by a white man named William B. Martin, on land in Stockbridge partially occupied today by a Walmart Supercenter. Copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Eig

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WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award | Named one of the ten best books of...

Book Details

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award | Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post , Chicago Tribune , and Time A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 | One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023 One of The New Yorker’ s essential reads of 2023 | A Christian Science Monitor best book of the year | One of Air Mail’ s twelve best books of 2023 A Washington Post and national indie bestseller | One of Publishers Weekly’ s best nonfiction books of 2023 | One of Smithsonian magazine’s ten best books of 2023 “Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “[ King is] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” —Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post “No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome.” —Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer Hailed by The New York Times as “the new definitive biography,” King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

9780374719678

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“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades . . . and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently . . . [Eig’s is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Book Review Editors' Choice) " King: A Life might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography [. . .] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . Eig does a particularly nuanced job of conjuring up the mind-set of Coretta Scott King in the years before she emerged as a forceful activist in her own right . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” —Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post "[Eig] is an indefatigable researcher, and King is based on a vast array of material, old and new . . . Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery . . . [His] style is journalistic, with brief paragraphs driving the narrative forward . . . Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right." —Eric Foner, London Review of Books "No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . The result is not mythology but a portrait of a man who was all too human—making his remarkable moral choices and struggles relatable to his fellow mortals. In repositioning King as one of America’s true Founding Fathers, Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome." —Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer "A sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life . . . Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King . . . He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it." —Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker "Outstanding . . . [Eig] shows who King really was behind the famous speeches and celebrity . . . Eig offers an intimate, multidimensional biography . . . Most importantly, Eig weaves Coretta Scott King’s impressions of her famous husband throughout the book in ways that free her from the traditional housewife image depicted in Time magazine portraits . . . King: A Life forces readers to view King as more than a martyr, icon, or saint — to see him for who he was, instead of who people thought he was, or wanted him to be." —Ousmane Power-Greene, The Boston Globe "Jonathan Eig’s magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity. His book will inevitably draw comparisons with America in the King Years . . . [ King: A Life ] is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus. It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself. . . . Eig makes [King's] courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws." — The Economist "Eig’s monumental work, the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, challenges the image of him as a peaceful advocate of incremental change. There’s plenty of new detail, including from recently declassified F.B.I. files, allowing King to emerge as a complex, humane figure." —J. Howard Rosier, The New York Times "Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader . . . Eig’s balanced treatment of King’s manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass." —Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs "Eig is particularly effective at gently reminding readers that there are striking parallels between the way racial justice was framed in the 1950s and ’60s and the way it is framed in the 2010s and ’20s . . . Jonathan Eig has written a biography that points us to King at his best, to King convinced that words bear truth, that narrative moves us toward goodness, and that memory, well preserved, carries beauty that motivates and inspires." —Vincent Lloyd, Commonweal "Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated . . . [ King ] stirs a whirlwind of exhilarating feelings . . . Essential . . . A beautiful book that requires every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom, economic justice, and equality." —Michael K. Honey, Jacobin "Drawing on recently released FBI files, telephone recordings and interviews for this first full-scale biography in decades, Eig acknowledges King's frailties and failures, as well as his radical critique of economic inequality and the war in Vietnam . . . Eig enriches [the] familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories." —Glenn C. Altschuler, Minneapolis Star Tribune " King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King . . . A moving, and in places beautiful, account of King’s life." —Richard Lischer, America "In this biography, his sixth book, Eig writes like an Olympic diver who jackknifes off the high board, slicing the water without a ripple. He performs with sheer artistry, like Picasso paints and Astaire dances." —Kitty Kelley, Washington Independent Review of Books “Definitive . . . Monumental . . . An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[A] sweeping biography. Eig gives a rousing recap of King’s triumphs as a civil rights leader . . . [A] complex, nuanced portrait . . . Eig’s evocative prose ably conveys his bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory . . . An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King’s relevance to today’s debates over racial justice." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The most comprehensive MLK biography to date . . . Eig refuses to ‘defang’ King, instead pushing Americans to recognize the radical nature of his demands for justice and his resistance to not only racism but militarism and capitalism.” — Booklist (starred review) "Mining a trove of materials—many only recently available—augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights . . . [Eig] recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance . . . Engrossing . . . A must for readers interested in moving beyond clichéd catchphrases to see a more complete and complex King." — Library Journal (starred review) "Groundbreaking . . . King is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it’s like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room." —Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times "Jonathan Eig's book comes at a crucial time for our country. With the gains we've made for civil rights and workers’ rights under constant threat, Eig reminds us that, in Dr. King’s own words, ‘progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.’" —Sherrod Brown, United States senator from Ohio and author of Desk 88 "The first major biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in over a generation, King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human—and humane—King, whose contradictions, frailties, and shortcomings worked in tandem with his brilliance, resilience, and genius to fundamentally transform American democracy and the world. King brilliantly recovers the defiantly courageous, radically democratic, and revolutionary anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war activist who inspired as much hate and revulsion as he did love and compassion. A resounding triumph." —Peniel E. Joseph, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Sword and the Shield "Greatness and opacity more often than not seem to go hand in hand: the most important among us seem out of reach, inscrutable, indifferent to our entreaties for human detail beyond the sensational or salacious. But here, Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being—not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" —Ken Burns “Jonathan Eig's book is the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years. Digitization and the web have made a slew of new documentary resources available, and Eig has mined them superbly. He is thus able to paint the first 25 years of King's life more richly than ever before, and to offer fuller portraits of three of the most important people in King's adult life: his wife Coretta and his closest male and female companions, Ralph Abernathy and Dorothy Cotton. The result is a great leap forward in our biographical understanding.” — David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama "Finally, a biography of King that takes seriously Coretta Scott King's political, intellectual and personal contributions." — Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks “With the detective mind of an historian, the lyrical precision of a poet, and the techniques of a master storyteller, Jonathan Eig makes Martin Luther King, Jr. come alive as a complex personality. He retrieves King’s extraordinary gifts, incurable optimism, and amazing heroism as a leader while not ignoring his frailties, doubts, and vulnerabilities. This book is a perceptive and necessary contribution to the biography genre in King studies.” — Lewis V. Baldwin, author of The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Jonathan Eig’s King is an exemplary masterclass in biography: Eig's knowledge of the subject matter is scholarly, his discovery of new and untapped historical sources is relentless, and his prose is gripping. This is a captivating story of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: a child scarred by pervasive racism, a man haunted by racist violence and death threats, a minister hunted by his own federal government, a human being afflicted by all-too-common human frailties, and a citizen who somehow managed to have an uncommon Christian faith and the courage to speak truth to power. Eig’s King is not just a welcomed contribution to MLK biography, but also a call to confront our own humanity, and a summons to bear witness against the societal evils that plagued King’s time and persist in our own." —Dr. Lerone A. Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University "Jonathan Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is destined to be a classic. Eig elegantly depicts King’s life with a sensitivity and intimacy making him more than a static icon. In this biography filled with exhaustive interviews and wonderfully written vignettes, King is placed in the context of community, family, and friends, showing his powerful strengths and his all too human flaws. Most importantly, Eig depicts King’s single-minded commitment to radically transforming the United States from an unjust republic based on a hierarchy of race and wealth to one that encompasses the dreams of all God’s children. I hope it is read by everyone." —Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America " King is a deeply absorbing, powerful lens for examining the Civil Rights Movement. Jonathan Eig’s compelling look back reveals a complex leader, driven by his faith and an unflinching determination to stamp out racial injustice, yet dogged by personal conflicts and relentless secret government efforts to discredit him." —Karen Gray Houston, author of Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability

Not long ago, a Tennessee state representative named Justin J. Pearson delivered a familiar-sounding speech at a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson had recently taken part in a gun-control protest on the floor of the state’s House, in violation of legislative rules. He and a fellow-representative were expelled, but the commissioners in Shelby voted to reinstate him. Pearson is only twenty-eight, but his Afro evokes the Black Power era of the late nineteen-sixties, and the preacherly cadence he sometimes uses reaches back even further than that. “We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate, until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he said at the meeting, thrusting his index finger for emphasis. He was quoting the Old Testament (Amos 5:24: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), but really he was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who put a version of that phrase at the center of his speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. President Lyndon B. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker; the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. The 2014 film “ Selma ” reverently dramatized his voting-rights activism; some people these days focus on his anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War; others emphasize his advocacy of integration, and his vision of a time when Black children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The proof, and the price, of King’s success is that everyone wants a piece of him.

The first biography of King was published in 1959, a few years after the Montgomery bus boycott, his first big victory. It was written by Lawrence D. Reddick, who was not a neutral observer—he had helped King write his first book, “ Stride Toward Freedom .” The historian David Levering Lewis published a thoughtful King biography in 1970, which captured the pessimistic mood that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Lewis portrayed King as a gifted preacher who “moralized the plight of the American black in simplistic and Manichaean terms” but “failed” in his broader effort to promote “economic and political reform.” Between 1988 and 2006, Taylor Branch published the three-volume history “ America in the King Years ,” which ran to nearly three thousand pages; in 1989, Branch was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Rather than preëmpting future books about King, the trilogy seemed to inspire more of them. The latest is “ King: A Life ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Eig, whose previous book was a biography of Muhammad Ali. Eig wants to give readers an alternative to the “defanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected; notes from Reddick; and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, as well as the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault.

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What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, and one that can’t help but be admiring, given how much King accomplished, and how quickly he did so—he was thirty-nine when he was killed. Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it. King viewed nonviolent protest as both a moral imperative and a political winner, because it made protesters look good and segregationists look bad. This sense of how things would play on newspaper front pages and television screens, this exacting attention to appearances, marked King as a distinctly contemporary activist—a master of the viral moment. It also marked him as an unapologetic practitioner of what’s now known as “respectability politics”: the idea that a group is more likely to be treated with respect if its members behave respectably. Unlike King himself, respectability politics does not have a great reputation; the term is used primarily by critics of it who worry that this approach tends to “rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence,” in the words of one NPR report . This is the most paradoxical aspect of King’s long, glorious afterlife: fifty-five years after his death, he is almost universally respected, but his lifelong devotion to the politics of respectability is not.

“Nepotism” would be an unduly censorious word for the family dynamic that shaped King’s life, though not an inaccurate one. When he was born, in 1929, his maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, an Atlanta institution. Two years later, his father took over, thereby becoming one of the most prominent Black leaders in the city. (At the time, King and his father were both named Michael; the father renamed them both a few years later, in honor of the German theologian.) King was born rich and famous, at least by the standards that prevailed in Atlanta’s Black community. Eig writes that he and his siblings “were watched wherever they went and expected to behave.” Accordingly, King was intent on living up to expectations. When he was eighteen, during the second of two summers that he spent in Connecticut picking tobacco, he and some friends were pulled over by the police during a night out. When he called home to tell his parents, he also told them, perhaps strategically, that he had decided to become a preacher, like his father.

He was clearly gifted, with a resonant voice and a knack for rhythm and repetition—Eig compares him to “a talented jazz musician,” in part because he could make other people’s riffs sound like his own. King collected an armful of college degrees, including a theology Ph.D. from Boston University which became a source of controversy in 1989, when researchers discovered that his dissertation was partially plagiarized. He could have accepted a position with his father at Ebenezer, but he chose instead to move to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was in search of a new leader.

King played no role in Rosa Parks’s decision, in 1955, to refuse to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus, but shortly after she was arrested he joined local Black pastors who were organizing a bus boycott. He delivered his first real protest speech at a church meeting on December 5, 1955, employing those twin similes he later made famous. “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he said. He was putting prophetic language in service of a proposal that was actually a compromise: a system of self-segregation, in which white and Black riders would have an equal chance to seat themselves, filling up the bus front to back and back to front, respectively. It was only after the companies refused that King and his allies shifted to a demand—full integration—as bold and clear as his rhetoric.

The Montgomery boycott was impressive partly because of the efficiency with which King and other leaders mobilized to help boycotters get to and from work, and partly because of the astonishing abuse that they withstood, including a bombing at King’s house. But the boycott may have been less consequential than the work of a team of lawyers, associated with the N.A.A.C.P., who sued the city on behalf of four Black bus riders who had been subject to segregation. The boycott put pressure on the city government, but it’s unclear whether it influenced the two district-court judges who struck down the Montgomery ordinance requiring bus segregation, or the Supreme Court Justices who summarily affirmed that decision, ending the era of bus segregation. On December 20, 1956, King announced the Supreme Court’s ruling by paraphrasing an old abolitionist preacher: he reassured his listeners, not for the last time, that “the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.” The next morning, he became one of the first people to ride an integrated bus in Montgomery.

The triumph in Alabama transformed King from a local leader into a national figure, and in certain quarters a superhero—some of his allies turned the saga into a comic book, “ Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story ,” illustrated by Sy Barry, who went on to draw “The Phantom.” Eig, in his biography, shows how King viewed Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolence as an extension of the Christian ethic of sacrificial love. But there remains something mysterious and mesmerizing about King’s calm certainty, which reproduced itself in the minds of his followers. In one of his most popular sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” King delivered a startling warning to anyone opposed to the liberation of Black people in America: “Be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.” Any ordinary leader can promise his followers deliverance; it takes an extraordinary one to promise them tribulation.

During a disappointing anti-segregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, King encountered a wily chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who understood his strategy; after King was arrested, Pritchett arranged to have someone pay his bail, so that he would be involuntarily released. “These fellows respond better when I am in jail,” King said, years later, referring to the politicians he was trying to pressure. In Birmingham, he had a better—that is, worse—adversary: Bull Connor, the city’s public-safety commissioner, who kept King imprisoned long enough to compose “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his most celebrated essay, and whose brutal tactics were captured in a widely circulated photograph of a police dog lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy. King and his allies recruited children to their protests, on the theory that they could go to jail without missing work. In “Eyes on the Prize,” the indispensable public-television documentary from 1987, one of King’s allies, the Reverend James Bevel, recalled borrowing a police bullhorn to calm rowdy demonstrators, because he wanted to avert a riot. “If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement,” he told them.

For King, the civil-rights movement consisted of almost nothing but difficult choices. (The strategy of keeping adults out of jail by sending kids in their stead was controversial then, and would probably be even more controversial now.) What’s amazing is how, in the course of a decade, he got so many of them right, relying more on instinct than on any formal decision-making process within his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he pressed ahead with the March on Washington, even though President John F. Kennedy told him that it was “a great mistake,” and the result was the most celebrated demonstration in American history. He was at the White House when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but still risked upsetting Johnson by protesting the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Selma, Alabama; the protests spurred the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. At one point, King wrote to a friend, half complaining, “People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.”

Thirty years ago, a scholar named Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham published “ Righteous Discontent ,” a great book about a different group of Black Baptist leaders. Higginbotham told the story of the Church’s Women’s Convention, which was founded in 1900 and became one of the most effective Black advocacy organizations in the country. Higginbotham noticed that the group’s appeals combined “conservative” and “radical” rhetoric, and her book popularized a term for this approach: “the politics of respectability.” It was a wide-ranging strategy, encompassing everything from legal work to children’s toys—the Convention sold Black dolls, meant to “represent the intelligent and refined Negro of today,” as opposed to the “disgraceful and humiliating type that we have been accustomed to seeing black dolls made of.” The women who led this movement valued good behavior for its own sake. (One spoke about “the poison generated by jazz music and improper dancing.”) But they also viewed it as a tool to use in their struggle for equality. Higginbotham quoted the minutes from a 1910 meeting, in which the leaders acknowledged that “a certain class of whites” was refusing to make space for Black passengers to sit down on streetcars, and urged Black passengers not to try and squeeze in. The advice took the form of a moral commandment: “Let us at all times and on all occasions, remember that the quiet, dignified individual who is respectful to others is after all the superior individual, be he black or white.”

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Often, Higginbotham noted, respectability politics meant encouraging “middle-class ideals and aspirations” among the broader Black public. If propriety was part of the solution to Black oppression, then perhaps impropriety was part of the problem. “Respectability’s emphasis on individual behavior served inevitably to blame blacks for their victimization and, worse yet, to place an inordinate amount of blame on black women,” Higginbotham wrote. (A Women’s Convention report from 1913 declared that Black women who failed to run orderly households were “an enemy to the race.”) But Higginbotham concluded that these tactics were effective, and probably indispensable. “The politics of respectability afforded black church women a powerful weapon of resistance to race and gender subordination,” she wrote. The notion of respectability may have been entangled with these oppressions, too—but, then, so was everything else.

This is the Black Baptist world that King was born into: his mother, Alberta Williams King, was the organ player at Ebenezer and served for more than a decade as the president of the church’s Women’s Committee. (In 1974, she was playing the organ when a deranged worshipper shot and killed her.) Like the Black Baptist women who helped pave his way, King stressed the importance of “dignified” behavior; he knew that claims of Black incivility or criminality were often used to justify segregation. During the Montgomery boycott, organizers trained activists to be polite, to avoid confrontation, and not to respond in kind when they were cursed at, as they almost always were. And when King announced the boycott’s end he urged his supporters to respond with “calm dignity and wise restraint,” stressing that “if we become victimized with violent intents, we will have walked in vain.” King was a towering political figure, but he was also a pastor, necessarily concerned with personal virtue as well as social change. In 1957, addressing a crowd of demonstrators in Washington, he delivered a rousing speech centered on a firm demand: “Give us the ballot.” But, even then, he added a note of rebuke, warning of the danger of resentment. “If we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns,” he said, “the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.” This was political advice, calculated to keep the support of white moderates, but it was also spiritual advice: a way of urging the activists in the crowd to be guided by the force of agape, or Christian love, and to conduct themselves accordingly.

King knew that the appearance of propriety was especially important for someone in his position. According to some of his friends, including Harry Belafonte, the love of King’s life was Betty Moitz, a white woman whom he dated while at seminary, in Pennsylvania; King’s father was one of many people who told him that an interracial marriage would fatally compromise his ability to be a leader, and the couple split before he graduated. He met Coretta in Boston, where she was a conservatory student. He was, of course, a great talker, and she did not recoil when he asked her if she thought that she could be a “good preacher’s wife.” This was an important church role, although not a coequal one, and Coretta later remembered that King once explained the difference in stark terms. “You see, I am called,” he told her, “and you aren’t.” One of King’s associates, Hosea Williams, reported that King could be cruel to Coretta—he recalled hearing him tell her to “shut up” on numerous occasions. And King’s constant travel would have been difficult for her even if he had been faithful.

Some of King’s associates knew about his affairs, and so did the F.B.I. During one of King’s trips to New York, the Bureau recorded him speaking to women in four different cities. Among the women in King’s life was Georgia Davis Powers, who later became the first woman and the first Black person elected to the Kentucky Senate, and who published a memoir in 1995 that detailed her relationship with King. She thought that they were merely friends and allies until the day King’s brother, A.D., told her, “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met.” Eig’s book makes clear just how closely the F.B.I. was watching King, apparently in the hope of collecting enough damaging information to prosecute him, intimidate him, or drive him to suicide. (William C. Sullivan, the head of domestic intelligence, sent King audio recordings of him with women, along with a note that said, “There is but one way out for you.”) The Bureau’s vendetta against King inevitably affects the way we view its report that, one night in early 1964, a pastor friend of King’s “forcibly raped” a woman during a hotel gathering; a handwritten addendum specifies that “King looked on, laughed, and offered advice.” The report is based on audio recordings that are due to be made public in 2027, and which may help us better understand how wide the gap between the public and the private King really was.

The criticism of respectability politics goes beyond the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. Ideas about who was and who wasn’t respectable helped shape the leadership of King’s movement, and sometimes constrained it. The activist and organizer Ella Baker served as the interim executive director of the S.C.L.C. in the late fifties, but said that she was never allowed to function as a true leader there, because “masculine and ministerial ego” prevented it. Bayard Rustin, one of the architects of the civil-rights movement, was widely known to be gay, and in 1960, after Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., threatened to spread a false rumor that King and Rustin were lovers, King accepted Rustin’s resignation from the S.C.L.C. This, perhaps, was respectability politics at its most coldly political and its least preacherlike. (King did not appear to have strong convictions about homosexuality.) King wanted to make sure that his movement commanded broad respect, so he had to pay close attention to what was considered respectable.

In the years after Higginbotham’s book came out, the phrase “respectability politics” entered common usage, often as a way to describe Black luminaries and leaders who urged other Black people to behave better—to be worthy heirs of King’s legacy. In “ The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics ” (2012), for example, the political scientist Fredrick C. Harris chastised Hampton University, a historically Black institution, for prohibiting its business-school students from wearing “braids, dreadlocks, and other unusual hairstyles”—a way of “policing the personal behavior of ‘wayward’ blacks.” Harris and others also criticized Bill Cosby, who in a 2004 speech pronounced that “the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” and President Obama , who declared, during his 2008 campaign, that in Black communities “too many fathers” had “abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” Harris thought that this kind of focus on personal responsibility made it sound as if Black people no longer faced “social barriers,” and so made it harder to dismantle those barriers.

Most politicians find it useful to deliver occasional admonitions amid all the promises. These leaders probably overestimate the effect of their moral exhortations. But critics of respectability politics probably do, too. Was Obama’s Presidency really hobbled by his promotion of family values, or by his infrequent remarks about the problems he saw in a community that he regarded as his own? The Black legal scholar Randall Kennedy has written perceptively in defense of what he calls “progressive black respectability politics,” insisting that Black people ought to have high hopes and high standards, for both themselves and their country. In the Black Lives Matter era, respectability politics has returned in a more upbeat and perhaps more patronizing form, with proliferating celebrations of “Black girl magic” and “Black excellence.” (The idea, it sometimes seems, is to do what parents are nowadays taught to do: praise the good behavior and ignore the bad.) And platforms like Twitter have made it easy to call out people who fail to hold respectable opinions or to use respectable language. Eschewing respectability politics altogether would mean ceasing to have strong views about how other people should behave, which would require even more self-control than King asked of his followers.

Respectability is an enduring concept, but a shifting one: you can disapprove of King’s infidelity and also lament the way Rustin was treated, just as you can find a ban on dreadlocks to be ill-judged without opposing dress codes altogether. In the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King found that his lifelong devotion to respectability may have cost him the respect of a new generation of leaders and followers. In 1967, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton published “ Black Power: The Politics of Liberation ,” which argued that the civil-rights movement was over, and deservedly so. “The traditional approaches failed,” they wrote, adding that “black people must make demands without regard to their initial ‘respectability,’ precisely because ‘respectable’ demands have not been sufficient.” This had become the conventional wisdom; the year before, the Times had announced, on its front page, that “the civil rights movement is falling into increasing disarray.” Major riots in Los Angeles, in 1965, and in Detroit and Newark, in 1967, were doubly damaging to King, linking his movement to violence while also illustrating the limits of his control over it. For his part, King widened his campaign, publicly opposing the Vietnam War, which he had previously declined to criticize, and taking aim less at specific laws than at poverty and inequality more broadly. “Racism is genocide,” King said at a press conference in Chicago, where he discovered that it was much easier to galvanize resistance to a cruel police chief than to a faceless landlord accused of neglecting his property. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, in particular, alienated President Johnson, and many of the moderates who had supported King’s earlier campaigns. “I figure I was politically unwise but morally wise,” King said, and the fact that he felt he had to choose between these two different kinds of wisdom was itself proof that his options were narrowing.

In Eig’s book, King’s death feels foreordained, and perhaps it felt that way to him, too. He had been not just threatened and bombed but also punched in the face (by a white man affiliated with the American Nazi Party) and stabbed in the chest (by a Black woman who was, in King’s word, “demented”); as a teen-ager, he had attempted suicide, and as an adult he was hospitalized a number of times for what was usually described as “exhaustion,” though many who knew him said that he struggled with depression. Despite these portents, it’s still disquieting to read his death-haunted final speech, delivered in Memphis, where he was supporting striking sanitation workers. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.” The next night, on his motel balcony, King was shot by James Earl Ray, a convicted felon and a committed segregationist. King was pronounced dead at a local hospital, about an hour later.

To many Black Power advocates, King’s Christian faith in the curvature of the moral universe seemed naïve. What proof is there that stoic suffering and good behavior will bring justice closer? King’s speeches often relied on anaphora, which could have hypnotic power. “How long? Not long,” he said, over and over again, addressing a crowd in Selma, in 1965. “How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” This was a rousing message of determination, and maybe also an acknowledgment that even an extraordinary leader can’t ask his followers to suffer with dignity indefinitely. King’s version of nonviolence really was radical: he persuaded people not only to forswear rioting or bad behavior but to forswear self-defense—and willingly allow themselves to be jailed, beaten, maybe even killed. This political strategy probably had an expiration date; King’s early success created a sense of accelerating progress that was impossible to sustain.

Yet even now many political leaders find themselves inspired by King’s language, and by his ability to frame political conflicts in a way that made it obvious which side was deserving of respect and which was not. The idea of King as a failure has not aged well: it is hard to argue that the civil-rights leaders who came after him were more effective. In the years since his assassination, we have found different ways to define “respectable,” and different forms of respectability politics. But it’s still not clear that we have learned to live without it. ♦

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How Martin Luther King’s new biographer broke news and shattered myths

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King: A Life

By Jonathan Eig Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 688 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The idea came to Jonathan Eig as he was researching “ Ali: A Life ,” the bestseller that won the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. It seemed that everyone he interviewed for that book — Harry Belafonte , Dick Gregory, the Rev. Jesse Jackson , Andrew Young — wanted to talk as much about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as Muhammad Ali . Initially, Eig thought about compiling an oral history of the civil rights leader. Then, he realized how long it had been since the last straight King biography. And so he set about climbing the tallest mountain of his career.

“It was hugely intimidating,” Eig says in a video interview from his home in Chicago. “Every biography is intimidating, because you’re taking someone’s life in your hands. But King was the most intimidating of them all, because it’s such a big subject. He’s an icon. He’s a saint to many people, and he’s complicated. There’s been a lot of great scholarship. I just tried not to think about all that too much, or else I would’ve maybe not even tried.”

If you’re going to write a book about King, you’d best come up with something new, and Eig’s “ King: A Life ,” the first such bio since Stephen B. Oates’ “ Let the Trumpet Sound ” in 1982, meets that mandate.

The author, who started his career as a newspaper and magazine journalist, draws from materials that weren’t available to previous biographers, including recently declassified FBI documents (which bring J. Edgar Hoover ’s obsession with King into even sharper focus), an unpublished manuscript from King’s father, the papers of King’s personal archivist and more. Eig finds further proof that King had a plagiarism problem dating back to high school; he also discovers that an oft-quoted King criticism of Malcolm X , from a Playboy interview conducted by Alex Haley , was likely fabricated.

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But he delivers all of this in the service of a thorough biographical study, not gotcha theatrics. What really comes across is a sense of how exhausting it must have been to be King: to always know your next breath could well be your last; to withstand pressures and hostilities from allies and enemies alike; to lead a movement defined by urgency, necessity and danger — in short, to embrace the burden and torment of being chosen.

From the day he was tabbed to lead the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama in 1955 to the moment he was taken down by an assassin’s bullet in 1968, King never stopped moving, evolving and fighting, at least insofar as his spiritual commitment to nonviolence would allow.

Eig, who has also written books about Lou Gehrig and the birth control pill , was struck by the weight King carried on his shoulders, the whirlwind of a life that found him hospitalized more than once for depression and exhaustion.

“He can never say ‘no,’” Eig notes. “There are riots in Los Angeles; he’s got to go. They call on him to come to Albany, Ga.; he’s got to go. It’s one of his great flaws and also one of his great strengths. He’s willing to try anything. He throws himself into situations, trusting that something good will come from it.”

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This wasn’t really the plan, any more than Saul of Tarsus planned to become Paul the Apostle on the road to Damascus. Yes, King wanted to fight Jim Crow . But he planned on doing so by following in his father’s footsteps as a Baptist minister or perhaps as a professor (he received a PhD in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955). Yes, he was always ambitious, skipping grades in school and occasionally even cribbing from other people’s work.

Still, he didn’t set out to become the leader of an international movement for racial justice. King landed in Montgomery, Ala., to minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, fresh from graduate school and just in time to show he had the mettle and charisma to lead the bus boycott. He found his voice immediately, and the rest is civil rights history.

Eig lays out his intent from the start. “This book seeks to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography,” he writes. “In the process of canonizing King, we’ve defanged him, replacing his complicated politics and philosophy with catchphrases that suit one ideology or another … 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.”

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The portrait isn’t always pretty. The book contains new details on King’s serial philandering, which the FBI chronicled with near-pornographic zeal. And it takes note of King’s plagiarism habit. On this score, Eig is somewhat conciliatory. “Some people would say for a Baptist preacher, it’s not as big a flaw as it would be for an academic or college professor,” the author says. “Like jazz musicians, they borrow. They repeat phrases and make them their own. But King did it a lot, and he did it in an academic setting too, which is problematic.”

The flaws are part of the man, and Eig sees humanizing King as a crucial mission.

“I think it’s important that we treat all of our historical figures as human beings so that we can relate to them in a way that makes it possible to think about doing things with our own lives,” he says. “We don’t really do our heroes any good by turning them into mythological figures. But in King’s case in particular, I feel like the national holiday and the monument in Washington have really flattened him. We only know ‘ I Have a Dream .’ We see this giant figure carved out of stone and we forget that he chewed his fingernails and that he suffered from anxiety and that he had doubts. How can we really gain inspiration from him if we don’t treat him as a real person?”

The King who emerges from these pages begins as serious-minded but playful, a ladies’ man who likes a good party and an all-night bull session. He lives in the shadow of his father, a prominent Atlanta minister, and worries about carving out a space of his own. We see these traits throughout his brief life — King was just 39 when he was assassinated — but from the start of his career, he belonged more to the movement and to history than to himself. He rarely slept as the years progressed and hardly had any quiet family time at all.

His was a difficult, often tormented path. Eig wants readers to absorb just how much and how often King put everything on the line. He also suggests that such efforts remain instructive in the here and now, especially amid organized and widespread efforts to whitewash American history.

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“His story reminds us that we need to embrace radical ideas,” Eig says. “We need to embrace change and not be afraid of it, not be afraid to reckon with the fact that we have problems and that our country was built on slavery. Don’t run away from teaching those things. Let’s talk about them.”

Vognar is a freelance writer based in Houston.

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Entertainment | Jonathan Eig wrote ‘King: A Life’ about Martin…

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Entertainment, entertainment | jonathan eig wrote ‘king: a life’ about martin luther king jr. — the man this time, instead of the myth.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

Steve Marino / Chicago Tribune

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left, inspects an apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. with his wife, Coretta, right, on Feb. 10, 1966, in Chicago.

Al Phillips / Chicago Tribune

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd gathered at 63rd and Halsted streets as he headed a non-partisan get out the vote caravan which toured Chicago from the south side to the north side on Oct. 29, 1964, in Chicago.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Al Raby, right, clean the ashes from the apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1966.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left, and Al Raby clean up garbage from an apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1966. King and Raby shed light on the poor living conditions of black people in the Lawndale neighborhood in 1966.

Al Raby, second from left, and Dr. Martin Luther King, seated on right, meet with a group of residents of an apartment building, including Ruby Keys, Louis Mitchell and Rosie Townes, at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 10, 1966. The group had gathered in Mrs. Townes apartment to talk about living conditions for black people in poor neighborhoods of Chicago. Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy is in the background.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walks outside after a morning summit meeting at the St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush Street in Chicago on Aug. 17, 1966. "Chicago business, political, and religious leaders met for nearly eight hours yesterday with leaders of the housing demonstrations that have caused turmoil in Chicago in recent weeks. They failed to reach any agreement and after the meeting, the Rev. Martin Luther King, leader of the Freedom movement in Chicago, said demonstrations will continue," the Tribune reported on Aug. 18, 1966. Jesse Jackson is walking next to King.

Rosie Townes, of 1321 S. Homan Ave., greets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy and Al Raby at her apartment where the group gathered to talk about grievances against building owners on Feb. 10, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talks with reporters outside St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush St. in Chicago after a morning summit meeting on Aug. 17, 1966. The meeting was to discuss the city's racial problems.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. walks outside after a morning summit meeting at the St. James Cathedral parish house at 666 N. Rush St. in Chicago on Aug. 17, 1966. The meeting was to discuss open housing laws in Chicago. Jesse Jackson is at his side.

Ed Wagner Sr. / Chicago Tribune

Civil Rights Leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plays pool with his "best stick" in a match with Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby while on an anti-slum campaign on Feb. 17, 1966. The pool hall was located at 3251 W. Madison street in Chicago, but was destroyed in the rioting after MLK's death in 1968.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who met with a group of tenants at 1321 S. Homan Ave., leaves the apartment and is greeted by children as school was let out nearby on Feb. 10, 1966, in Chicago. He was hailed and cheered by the crowd. King is in front of his wife, Coretta, who is wearing a hat, on the center left.

Tom Kinahan / Chicago Tribune

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, in their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966. King and his family moved into the poor neighborhood to shed light on the living conditions of black people in Chicago in 1966.

A crowd gathers outside the new Chicago apartment rented by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, talk to the press outside their apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, look out the window of their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

A crowd gathers at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

Civil Rights Leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plays pool with his "best stick" in a match with Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby, standing next to him with pool cue, while on an anti-slum campaign on Feb. 17, 1966. The pool hall was located at 3251 W. Madison street in Chicago, but was destroyed in the rioting after MLK's death in 1968.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 48th and South State streets near the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project in Chicago on July 24, 1965.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 46th Street and South Ellis Avenue in Chicago on July 24, 1965.

A crowd swarms around a truck carrying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at 61st Street and South Park Avenue (now Martin Luther King Drive) as he heads a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote caravan that toured Chicago from the South Side to the North Side on Oct. 29, 1964.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a crowd from the back of a truck at 48th and South State streets near the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project in Chicago on July 24, 1965. Beethoven Elementary School can be seen in the background.

Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune

Jonathan Eig, a writer who has become one of the most accomplished biographers in the country, in his Chicago home office on May 16, 2023.

In the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spent much time visiting — and at one point renting a home in — Chicago to help with open housing initiatives and the civil rights movement in the city. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta pose with neighborhood children in their new apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin in Chicago on Jan. 26, 1966.

"King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

“That’s right, and all this,” a grinning elderly woman said, waving at the growing line queuing up behind her to get in, “is what you would call the Jonathan Eig Fan Club.”

They laughed.

You would also call this a decent part of the congregation at Eig’s synagogue. They came here the other day because the North Side resident and acclaimed biographer was about to publish “King: A Life,” the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in 40 years. Bright Star and Anshe Emet have had a kind of sister-congregation relationship for a decade. It also makes sense to honor a Baptist minister in a Baptist church. Plus, congregations coming together, one Black, one white, to discuss King is like a manifestation of King — America in harmony. The point is lost on nobody. But it’s another King, one with claws who posed a serious threat to white supremacy, that’s here.

The King who was a person, not a stamp, or statue, or national holiday.

That King is present.

The ceiling of the church was low, and rows of long banquet tables covered in blue tablecloths filled the room. Soon every chair was taken. Two members of the new cross-congregation book club offered thoughts on “King.” A Bright Star congregant noted King was depressed: “That stood out. I experienced depression.” An Anshe Emet congregant said one of Eig’s sentences resonated: King has become “so hallowed he’s hollow.” Then Rabbi Michael Siegel, soberly, pointed out that though Mayor Brandon Johnson was inaugurated that day, “Chicago is at a low ebb … Yet in this church, I feel a lot of hope.” Then Pastor Chris Harris, jocular and warm, looked out on the crowd and said: “This is the brightest, and the lightest, my church has ever looked.” More laughter, and then attention swung to Eig, the trim, serious, Paul Shaffer-looking guy waiting between them.

Harris: “It took a lot of courage for you, as a white man, to write anything about a Black man that is less than positive.” The Black community, he said, has long grown used to white writers tearing down the image of King or “discrediting his greatness.” But that’s not this, Harris said. This is six years of reporting, interviewing and reframing greatness.

Eig nodded, staring downward.

“King” does not take that subtitle, “A Life,” lightly. It offers what many of Eig’s biographies have offered: An American mythology — Muhammad Ali , Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Al Capone — stripped of its bloodless granite image, though not importance.

Yet history is often a mountain range, scalable yet unmovable.

Several years ago, Eig watched the 2013 Jackie Robinson docudrama “42? and groaned as it repeated a folk tale: During a Robinson road trip to Cincinnati, Red fans booed until a white Brooklyn Dodger, Pee Wee Reese, left his position at shortstop and put an arm around Robinson, silencing the stadium. It’s an image chiseled into monuments, repeated in books and even a documentary from Ken Burns, Eig’s friend. “But I proved pretty conclusively it didn’t happen,” Eig said earlier that day, before the Bronzeville event. “In this job, some stories are embellished so long, they’re cemented.”

King required another level of rethinking. To publish a new biography in 2023 — a book being hailed as the best, most complete biography of the civil rights leader, and one already dug into The New York Times Bestseller list — meant “scraping decades of barnacles off the hull of King until you can say, ‘Let’s look at this again,'” Eig said. “The truth is, we haven’t seen him in a while. Not since we put up a 30-foot-tall monument in D.C. Not since we created a national holiday. It’s gotten hard to see him as a person. Some of the people I talked with felt this was intentional. The government needed to strip away what made King so radical until he became a safe figure, the kind we can all hold hands and sing about. People I interviewed who knew him were mad about this.

“And with a lot of good reason. You know, when J. Edgar Hoover got the phone call about King being shot, before King was even dead, Hoover said: ‘I hope the bastard doesn’t die, because then they’ll turn him into a martyr.’ In a way, a national holiday allows the government to control the image of what King actually stood for, softening it.”

After six years of digging and documenting, the result is a biography of King that removed the godliness for something more profound and meaningful. The significance of the book is that it “takes us beyond hagiographical treatments of King to a serious consideration of the man’s frailties, doubts and vulnerabilities,” said Lewis V. Baldwin, a King biographer and professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. “Eig accomplishes this without calling into question Dr. King’s important contributions and place in history.” It is a portrait of an activist who did not like confrontation, a guy who bit his nails, tried to kill himself (twice) as an adolescent and gave up a white girlfriend as a pragmatic necessity for a career in the Baptist church. It’s also a profile of a man whose righteousness, calm and conservative style, as Hoover understood, made him palpable, and therefore a true threat to American leaders not eager to live up to American ideals.

“I feel like Jonathan was able to show this person was even more special than we know because he was not a god,” said Shannon Luder-Manuel, a sensitivity reader hired by Eig’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to study the manuscript and its treatment of Black history. “I’m mixed race, which factors into my viewpoint, but you walk away from the book understanding King had his faults and that didn’t negate everything he did.”

Indeed, last month, when Eig spoke to a history class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in Kenwood, the students asked what others have: Why was the FBI so obsessed with King? Was it hard as a white guy to research this?

“But then one student,” Eig recalled, “she asked point-blank: ‘How do we know you haven’t made all this stuff up?’ Which, fundamentally, may be the smartest question.”

Jonathan Eig works from a small thin office in the back of his apartment in Lakeview, which he shares with his wife, Jennifer Tescher, founder of the nonprofit Financial Health Network, and their three children (one of whom had been mentored by Eig in the Big Brother program and later became part of the family when his mother died). It was a laundry room until recently. There are framed black-and-white portraits of some of his subjects, but also Miles Davis, Bob Dylan. There are Mold-a-Rama busts of King on his desk and a stack of new thank-you cards and a pile of King stamps and a flood of paperwork. At one end of the room is a wall of books on whatever he happens to be writing about; when he moves on to the next subject, a new library of books is shuffled in. During the years of writing and researching “King,” books and papers spilled out of the shelves and were stacked in tall traffic cones around his chair, requiring navigation.

His papers, he said, caught the eye of the archivists at Northwestern University (he’s a graduate of its Medill journalism school), and since he’s always concerned about the chance of a burst pipe or something destroying research, he’s been eager to see it go.

For the first year he worked on “King,” he did nothing but travel the country and interview sources — King’s family, friends and colleagues who were alive, and getting old. He needed them now. This was pre-pandemic. He met with a who’s who of the civil rights ’60s and beyond: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Juanita Abernathy, John Lewis, Louis Farrakhan, Mavis Staples. He tracked down King’s childhood friends and King’s barber. Among the first interviews was comedian Dick Gregory, who looked square at Eig and wondered, rhetorically: Did Eig even know King was real? That someone so pure of heart and dedicated passed through this world? “What makes King different from Jesus?” Gregory asked. “Jesus is hearsay. Don’t mean it didn’t happen, but there’s film of King. Can’t nobody change nothing.”

In time, Eig built what he calls “a community” of academics and firsthand witnesses to King; from many, he sought a kind of blessing and goodwill to even work on the book.

“I thought the idea for the book was solid, if only because there hadn’t been a major one in decades,” said Peniel Joseph, author of several books on King, Malcolm X and the history of the Black Power movement, as well as the founder of Centers for the Study of Race and Democracy at both University of Texas and Tufts University. “There had been so much fresh information on King since then — good and bad. Something more complex felt overdue because the King we knew was starting to feel a little dated.” But many of those Eig approached initially assumed he was there for the scandals and questionable characteristics — the King of plagiarism charges and womanizing, the King who spoke about “power” but, afraid of scaring off allies, avoiding saying “Black Power.”

“I would say to them, ‘You knew King, but we don’t know him anymore because we have turned into this saintly, passive figure,'” Eig recalled. “I would say that I wanted to write something that both restored his humanity and reminded people of how radical he really was. And everyone I said that to would reply, ‘If that’s what you’re doing, then I’ll help.'”

When Eig notes the strange absence of a new MLK biography in 40 years, he means a single, self-contained focus on a full life, from birth to death. David Garrow’s “Bearing the Cross,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography is centered on his civil rights years; Taylor Branch’s 2,900-page trilogy, “America in the King Years,” which won the 1989 Pulitzer for history, was the far more expansive story of the period itself.

“Biography,” Eig said, “is a weird medium. Lots of academics don’t really like it — they see it as artsy, ephemeral. And for a generalist like me, a book on someone like King sounds daunting. You’re interpreting a life. That needs analysis and psychology, so by definition, a biography is a failure. I can’t tell you what was going on in his head. I don’t know what his life really was. I have breadcrumbs left behind to assemble his portrait.”

Eig, 59, talks like he writes, in tidy, direct paragraphs that don’t veer much from his point. He grew up in the Hudson River Valley, outside New York City. On a wall in his office is a picture of his grandfather at work as the foreman of a New York City bra company. His father was a bookkeeper who worked at the kitchen table; his mother ran a parenting program in schools. Eig went to work initially for newspapers and magazines, angling upward: the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal. He came to Chicago when his wife took a job here. He began his first book, on Lou Gehrig, with the assumption that “if I wanted to stay in newspapers, which I did, there’d always be those jobs to go back to.”

He stayed in the land of biography.

The Gehrig book (now being developed by Lorne Michaels’ production company as an Apple+ series) led to Jackie Robinson; his book on Capone (shaped out of thousands of pages of investigative material found in Nebraska) led to Eig’s wife suggesting he try something less masculine, which became “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex.” For the most part, if there is a uniting theme here, he said, it’s that each is about rebels. “Even Gehrig, timid and insecure, when he got sick (with ALS, ending his life at 37), he had to step up at a time when people didn’t speak publicly of illness. The pill was created by a scientist at Harvard denied tenure, who worked out of his garage. I don’t know why I am drawn to this type of person. I’m the oldest child in my family, the most conformist guy, a rule follower attracted to people who shake things up.”

Until “King,” Eig’s best-known work was 2017’s sprawling “Ali: A Life,” the research for which inspired Ken Burns to make his own documentary on Ali, and established Eig as a confident, thorough master of the thoughtful, sensitive historical reevaluation. He says Ali’s family was hard to deal with, and navigating through the politics of the family and three of Ali’s wives (a fourth had already died), “became messy but also the most fun I have had working on a book.” With “Ali,” he learned to love interviews. The Gehrig book was written using around 30 interviews. “Ali” came partly out of 500 conversations.

“King,” which Eig gravitated to while researching Ali’s meetings with the civil rights leader, required around 200 interviews. Rabbi Siegel describes Eig as “classic mensch,” the sort who is “intensely conscious of how important another person’s ideas might be.” So as he wrote “King,” Eig turned to “War and Peace” for insight on power. He modeled his “I Have a Dream” chapter on the work of novelist Don DeLillo (who gave his blessing to Eig); he studied thrillers to quicken the pace during King’s murder. To capture King’s tone of spiritual reckoning, he adopted the cadence, repetition and drama of preachers.

But where “King” veers from mere biography to literary landmark is in the use of fresh materials, papers, letters, most seen here for the first time. Eig draws from an unpublished memoir by King’s father; tapes made by Coretta Scott King for a biography; unreleased FBI files; notes from collaborators who worked with King on his books; new telephone transcripts. He gained access to archives gathered by an official Southern Christian Leadership Conference historian who traveled with King; it had never been opened. Biographer David Garrow — who shared his own archive with Eig — said the big leap forward here is in the richness of Eig’s depiction of King’s early years. Some of the arguments about King that Eig’s book tackles — how much of a democratic socialist he actually was, how critical of Malcolm X he could be — have been debated for decades.

“By the early 1990s, partly because of (the landmark PBS series) ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ so many historians and journalists turned to civil rights history that people like John Lewis would have more people angling to interview them than they could count,” Garrow recalled.

But at least on the question of Malcolm X, Eig has broken ground.

For generations, there’s been a broad teaching among historians and students that King and Malcolm X stood at polar ends of the civil rights movement — King the nonviolent mollifier, Malcolm the provocateur who demanded equality by “any means necessary.”

Much of the evidence for this came from a 1965 interview King gave Alex Haley for Playboy: King accuses Malcolm of “fiery, demagogic oratory.” (Malcolm X, for his part, portrayed King as “a modern Uncle Tom.”) Going through transcripts of the interview in Haley’s papers at Duke University, Eig figured out that Haley — who was working then on Malcolm X’s autobiography, and has since been accused often of fudging facts — shifted around quotations. King’s use of “fiery, demagogic oratory” was a more general response to extremists. Haley assigned this phrase (and others) to King’s quotation about Malcolm X, significantly downplaying just how open King actually was about Malcolm X, admitting that he didn’t want to come off as if “I think I have the only truth, the only way.”

Eig, uncertain what he had, called scholars.

“I had been pushing — as had others — against that conventional narrative of the King-Malcolm relationship for a long time,” Peniel Joseph said. “But here’s concrete evidence that led to a constrained vision of history. I think it’ll open the way they are taught. King and Malcolm were dual sides of the same coin, not diametrically opposed. It may take time for the public to understand, but because of Jonathan, that process is underway.”

That night in Bronzeville, Eig smiled and cringed and burst a few bubbles. Heads shook, sometimes out of frustration at what had long been assumed, sometimes out of simple amazement. Pastor Chris Harris leaned over to Eig: Is it true, he asked, that during the “I Have a Dream” speech, Mahalia Jackson felt King losing the crowd and urged King to “Tell them about the dream!” The story is a cornerstone in Black mythology.

“Sadly,” Eig said, “it’s not true.”

Groans throughout the church.

Eig, while researching the speech, got ahold of a recording that Motown was making from the stage; the order of her words and his words don’t jibe. But the speech itself, Eig pointed out, that hard to argue nugget of American history, rewind it back five minutes and King, in the same speech, urges reparations and calls out police brutality.

“The people who were running the cameras and editing that footage probably believed they were sending a message of harmony,” Eig said, “but as a result, they skewed our understanding.” And about King’s time in Chicago, when he marched against segregation in housing and education, and was met with some of the ugliest racist episodes of the decade, North or South: The understanding is King’s time in Chicago was a bust. “And it didn’t go well,” Eig told me earlier. “Advisors advised him against going. He was up against forces he hadn’t dealt with. Chicago was not open to change.

“But he didn’t come here and just get defeated. He offered Chicago concrete solutions that might have made a difference to how this city operates. They were rejected. He did not have a good relationship with Mayor Daley. You can hear recordings. Daley would call President Johnson: He wasn’t open to King, he viewed King as a threat to LBJ.”

At the end of the Bright Star evening, Pastor Harris urged togetherness, then added: It wasn’t enough. An event like this, about King: “Let me be honest. This is safe .” He said the assembled “continue to take credit for what folks did five decades ago.” He asked them, instead, to “keep the old frames and put new pictures of us marching in it.”

Then Harris turned in his seat:

How would Eig challenge them now?

The author looked uncomfortable. He noted that he wasn’t just inaugurated mayor of Chicago. Much laughter. Instead, he would tell a short story: King, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and other civil rights leaders were meeting at the White House, talking to John F. Kennedy, who thought the upcoming March on Washington was “a mistake.” The president asked them why “you people” can’t encourage Black parents to bring up their children better — why can’t “you people” be like other ethnic minorities? Finally, Wilkins turned to Kennedy and replied: “Mr. President, we are doing our part. You do yours.”

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King: A Life Kindle Edition

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award | Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post , Chicago Tribune , and Time A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 | One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023 One of The New Yorker’ s essential reads of 2023 | A Christian Science Monitor best book of the year | One of Air Mail’ s twelve best books of 2023 A Washington Post and national indie bestseller | One of Publishers Weekly’ s best nonfiction books of 2023 | One of Smithsonian magazine’s ten best books of 2023 “Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “[ King is] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” —Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post “No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome.” —Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer Hailed by The New York Times as “the new definitive biography,” King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

• Print length 841 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date May 16, 2023
• File size 25427 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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Praise for King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Editorial Reviews

“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades . . . and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently . . . [Eig’s is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Book Review Editors' Choice) " King: A Life might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography [. . .] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . Eig does a particularly nuanced job of conjuring up the mind-set of Coretta Scott King in the years before she emerged as a forceful activist in her own right . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” ―Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post "[Eig] is an indefatigable researcher, and King is based on a vast array of material, old and new . . . Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery . . . [His] style is journalistic, with brief paragraphs driving the narrative forward . . . Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right." ―Eric Foner, London Review of Books "No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig’s sweeping and majestic new King . . . The result is not mythology but a portrait of a man who was all too human―making his remarkable moral choices and struggles relatable to his fellow mortals. In repositioning King as one of America’s true Founding Fathers, Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome." ―Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer "A sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life . . . Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King . . . He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it." ―Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker "Outstanding . . . [Eig] shows who King really was behind the famous speeches and celebrity . . . Eig offers an intimate, multidimensional biography . . . Most importantly, Eig weaves Coretta Scott King’s impressions of her famous husband throughout the book in ways that free her from the traditional housewife image depicted in Time magazine portraits . . . King: A Life forces readers to view King as more than a martyr, icon, or saint ― to see him for who he was, instead of who people thought he was, or wanted him to be." ―Ousmane Power-Greene, The Boston Globe "Jonathan Eig’s magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity. His book will inevitably draw comparisons with America in the King Years . . . [ King: A Life ] is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus. It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself. . . . Eig makes [King's] courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws." ― The Economist "Eig’s monumental work, the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, challenges the image of him as a peaceful advocate of incremental change. There’s plenty of new detail, including from recently declassified F.B.I. files, allowing King to emerge as a complex, humane figure." ―J. Howard Rosier, The New York Times "Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader . . . Eig’s balanced treatment of King’s manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass." ―Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs "Eig is particularly effective at gently reminding readers that there are striking parallels between the way racial justice was framed in the 1950s and ’60s and the way it is framed in the 2010s and ’20s . . . Jonathan Eig has written a biography that points us to King at his best, to King convinced that words bear truth, that narrative moves us toward goodness, and that memory, well preserved, carries beauty that motivates and inspires." ―Vincent Lloyd, Commonweal "Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated . . . [ King ] stirs a whirlwind of exhilarating feelings . . . Essential . . . A beautiful book that requires every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom, economic justice, and equality." ―Michael K. Honey, Jacobin "Drawing on recently released FBI files, telephone recordings and interviews for this first full-scale biography in decades, Eig acknowledges King's frailties and failures, as well as his radical critique of economic inequality and the war in Vietnam . . . Eig enriches [the] familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories." ―Glenn C. Altschuler, Minneapolis Star Tribune " King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King . . . A moving, and in places beautiful, account of King’s life." ―Richard Lischer, America "In this biography, his sixth book, Eig writes like an Olympic diver who jackknifes off the high board, slicing the water without a ripple. He performs with sheer artistry, like Picasso paints and Astaire dances." ―Kitty Kelley, Washington Independent Review of Books “Definitive . . . Monumental . . . An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.” ― Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[A] sweeping biography. Eig gives a rousing recap of King’s triumphs as a civil rights leader . . . [A] complex, nuanced portrait . . . Eig’s evocative prose ably conveys his bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory . . . An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King’s relevance to today’s debates over racial justice." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The most comprehensive MLK biography to date . . . Eig refuses to ‘defang’ King, instead pushing Americans to recognize the radical nature of his demands for justice and his resistance to not only racism but militarism and capitalism.” ― Booklist (starred review) "Mining a trove of materials―many only recently available―augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights . . . [Eig] recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance . . . Engrossing . . . A must for readers interested in moving beyond clichéd catchphrases to see a more complete and complex King." ― Library Journal (starred review) "Groundbreaking . . . King is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it’s like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room." ―Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times "Jonathan Eig's book comes at a crucial time for our country. With the gains we've made for civil rights and workers’ rights under constant threat, Eig reminds us that, in Dr. King’s own words, ‘progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.’" ―Sherrod Brown, United States senator from Ohio and author of Desk 88 "The first major biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in over a generation, King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human―and humane―King, whose contradictions, frailties, and shortcomings worked in tandem with his brilliance, resilience, and genius to fundamentally transform American democracy and the world. King brilliantly recovers the defiantly courageous, radically democratic, and revolutionary anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war activist who inspired as much hate and revulsion as he did love and compassion. A resounding triumph." ―Peniel E. Joseph, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Sword and the Shield "Greatness and opacity more often than not seem to go hand in hand: the most important among us seem out of reach, inscrutable, indifferent to our entreaties for human detail beyond the sensational or salacious. But here, Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being―not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" ―Ken Burns “Jonathan Eig's book is the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years. Digitization and the web have made a slew of new documentary resources available, and Eig has mined them superbly. He is thus able to paint the first 25 years of King's life more richly than ever before, and to offer fuller portraits of three of the most important people in King's adult life: his wife Coretta and his closest male and female companions, Ralph Abernathy and Dorothy Cotton. The result is a great leap forward in our biographical understanding.” ― David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama "Finally, a biography of King that takes seriously Coretta Scott King's political, intellectual and personal contributions." ― Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks “With the detective mind of an historian, the lyrical precision of a poet, and the techniques of a master storyteller, Jonathan Eig makes Martin Luther King, Jr. come alive as a complex personality. He retrieves King’s extraordinary gifts, incurable optimism, and amazing heroism as a leader while not ignoring his frailties, doubts, and vulnerabilities. This book is a perceptive and necessary contribution to the biography genre in King studies.” ― Lewis V. Baldwin, author of The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Jonathan Eig’s King is an exemplary masterclass in biography: Eig's knowledge of the subject matter is scholarly, his discovery of new and untapped historical sources is relentless, and his prose is gripping. This is a captivating story of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: a child scarred by pervasive racism, a man haunted by racist violence and death threats, a minister hunted by his own federal government, a human being afflicted by all-too-common human frailties, and a citizen who somehow managed to have an uncommon Christian faith and the courage to speak truth to power. Eig’s King is not just a welcomed contribution to MLK biography, but also a call to confront our own humanity, and a summons to bear witness against the societal evils that plagued King’s time and persist in our own." ―Dr. Lerone A. Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University "Jonathan Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is destined to be a classic. Eig elegantly depicts King’s life with a sensitivity and intimacy making him more than a static icon. In this biography filled with exhaustive interviews and wonderfully written vignettes, King is placed in the context of community, family, and friends, showing his powerful strengths and his all too human flaws. Most importantly, Eig depicts King’s single-minded commitment to radically transforming the United States from an unjust republic based on a hierarchy of race and wealth to one that encompasses the dreams of all God’s children. I hope it is read by everyone." ―Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America " King is a deeply absorbing, powerful lens for examining the Civil Rights Movement. Jonathan Eig’s compelling look back reveals a complex leader, driven by his faith and an unflinching determination to stamp out racial injustice, yet dogged by personal conflicts and relentless secret government efforts to discredit him." ―Karen Gray Houston, author of Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BBD5GXTF
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 16, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 16, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 25427 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 841 pages
• #8 in Biographies of Social Activists
• #13 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Kindle Store)
• #36 in African American Studies

About the author

Jonathan eig.

Jonathan Eig is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six books, including four New York Times best sellers. His most recent book is King: A Life, which the Times called a "the definitive biography" of Martin Luther King Jr. and a book "worthy of its subject." King: A Life won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Eig also wrote "Ali: A Life," which has been hailed as one of the best sports biographies of all time. Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award. Eig served as a senior consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

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Customers say

Customers find the biography masterful, compelling, and honest. They also describe the writing style as excellent, superbly written, and astounding. Readers find the content informative, illuminating, and passionate. They describe the characters as exceptional and the book as a worthwhile read that begins generations before King's birth.

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Customers find the book incredible, thought-provoking, and intellectually stimulating. They also say the author did a phenomenal job and that it's a massive and sweeping work.

"...Very informative and enjoyable read and at the same time made me reflect inside myself to evaluate just how I have lived and what I could have done..." Read more

"This is a fantastic and enthralling book on MLK. Once you start reading it believe me it is hard to put down...." Read more

"...Despite its considerable length, King: A Life remains captivating throughout , as Eig narrates King’s story with both eloquence and fervor...." Read more

"Voluminous (over 500 pages) but so engaging and well written that I haven't been able to put it down...." Read more

Customers find the writing style excellent, superbly written, honest, and impressive. They also say the book is descriptive in purpose and features short chapters that aid the reader in following the plot. Readers also mention that the detail is astounding and gives a much broader image.

"... Extremely well written by the author - the story pulls you in like a roller coaster until the sad end...." Read more

"... Eig's writing is readable and his accounts of events during the Civil Rights era reflect solid research based on interviews, newspaper accounts, Dr...." Read more

"...Jonathan Eig is talented. Thorough. Seemingly balanced. Descriptive in purpose (vs persuasive). Truth is of its own persuasive.Dr. King...." Read more

" Well written and completely engaging gives readers an opportunity to get to know the man and his terrible burden. A true American hero." Read more

Customers find the book very informative, inspiring, and detailed. They also say it's an inclusive, balanced, and human accounting of the life and work of King. Readers also mention that the book is comprehensive, meticulously researched, and incisive.

"... Very informative and enjoyable read and at the same time made me reflect inside myself to evaluate just how I have lived and what I could have done..." Read more

"This is a fantastic and enthralling book on MLK . Once you start reading it believe me it is hard to put down...." Read more

"King: A Life by Jonathan Eig is a comprehensive and meticulously researched biography delving into the life and achievements of Martin Luther King..." Read more

"...Hate. It is fascinating to observe how a movement full of love and hope became overwhelmed by circumstances in which hope died and love was redefined..." Read more

Customers find the biography masterful, well-written, and easy to read. They also say it provides good coverage of Martin Luther King's life and an incisive perspective. Readers also describe the book as uplifting, depressing, and sad.

"...A true American hero ." Read more

"...The biography is brand new , and includes MANY items released between the last biography, and is much more detailed in his roots, his wife and family..." Read more

"...I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that King is among the best biographies I’ve read in a long time, or maybe ever, and if you’re at all..." Read more

Customers find the storyline compelling, showing America's beauty, greatness, contradictions, and flaws. They also say the book is true and brings alive both the life of MLK and King in a very real, human, realistic, and thoughtful way. Customers say the author writes a compelling portrait of King and provides a deep understanding of King's spiritual journey.

"...Dr. King. It strikes me curious, fascinating , and revelatory (wrt the nature of God) how imperfect humans may become at times holy instruments of..." Read more

" Great story . Most in depth and descriptive read into ML’s life. Well described and fact supported. Research was thorough." Read more

" Insightful depiction of MLK . Great read!" Read more

"...This book is a thorough look at one of the most significant civil rights icons of the past era...." Read more

Customers find the characters in the book exceptional and genius.

"The biographical work impresses me. Jonathan Eig is talented . Thorough. Seemingly balanced. Descriptive in purpose (vs persuasive)...." Read more

"... Eig is a genius ! I could not put it down!" Read more

"... Exceptional man ." Read more

" Great Human , Great Read..." Read more

Customers find the book complex, inspiring, and knowledgeable about a very difficult time in our nation's history.

"...He was complicated , passionate, dedicated ANF mod complex than is always portrayed...." Read more

"...To be sure, Martin Luther King was a driven, complicated , inspired and flawed man...." Read more

"Very interesting. Very educational. Knowledgeable concerning a very difficult time in our nation’s history. Many things I did not know about Dr King." Read more

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Martin Luther King Jr. Biographer Wins American History Prize

The New-York Historical Society honor goes to Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” presents the civil rights leader as a brilliant, flawed 20th-century “founding father.”

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By Jennifer Schuessler

Jonathan Eig, the author of “King: A Life,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded annually for the best work of American history or biography.

Billed as the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on recently declassified government records and other new sources to take a panoramic yet intimate look at Dr. King. The book places him in the context of the many figures, inside and outside the civil rights movement, who shaped his thinking and actions.

The biography, almost 700 pages long, shows a young King struggling to establish himself in the shadow of his father, a prominent Baptist preacher and community leader in Atlanta. As King and his movement grew, Eig shows him in a complicated dance with white leaders like President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sometimes supported and sometimes hampered him, and with more radical Black activists who increasingly saw him as dedicated to an outmoded form of “ respectability politics .”

While hailing King as “one of America’s founding fathers,” Eig doesn’t stint on his personal struggles and flaws, including his marital infidelities and posthumous revelations of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation. Reviewing the biography last year in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a very human, and quite humane, portrait” that is “worthy of its subject.”

The historical society’s prize, which comes with a cash reward of $50,000, honors books that are accessible to a general readership. It generally focuses on works of political history that keep founders, presidents and other prominent figures at the center of the frame, if not always in a celebratory way. Last year’s winner was “G-Man,” Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine Dr. King , authorizing wiretaps of his home and office and planting bugs in his hotel rooms.

In a statement, the historical society’s board chair, Agnes Hsu-Tang, called Eig’s biography of Dr. King “a deft, multidimensional portrayal” that avoids hagiography, showing how “America — and its many founders — can be both heroic and imperfect.”

Other past winners of the prize include Alan Taylor , Drew Gilpin Faust and Jill Lepore.

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Jonathan Eig ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2023

An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.

Definitive life of the champion of civil rights.

Having placed Muhammad Ali in the canon of civil rights leaders with his 2017 biography, Eig turns to Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) in a monumental biography. He did not begin life with that name: His parents “named him Michael King, no middle name, no initial, no ‘Junior.’ They called him Little Mike.” Though small, he was a scrapper on the football field and basketball court, a smart and serious student who entered Morehouse College early and, having traveled north on a work program and seen the magic of desegregation, became committed to civil rights. The name change, writes the author, “was clinched during a 1934 trip to Germany, where King learned more about the sixteenth-century German friar.” King first forged the battle for civil rights in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955; in the 13 years he had left, he galvanized that struggle, carefully planning campaigns while refining his skills by, among other things, visiting India to study the nonviolent tactics of Gandhi. Though King “was a man, not a saint, not a symbol,” he was viewed both positively and negatively as the most important advocate of Black rights—a program he would expand to include an anti–Vietnam War platform and a widening effort to end poverty worldwide. That spread him thin, but not enough to elude the obsessive hatred of J. Edgar Hoover, who “saw King as the ultimate disrupter of societal norms.” That he was, even if he was seen as too conservative by some Black militants and too radical by many Whites. Unlike biographers hitherto denied access, Eig examined recently released FBI files to show that there is no evidence that King was a communist operative, as Hoover alleged, though the files do show “the extent and determination of the bureau’s campaign to thwart King.”

Pub Date: May 16, 2023

ISBN: 9780374279295

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jonathan Eig

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SEEN & HEARD

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s Acclaimed New Biography, King: A Life

In this excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s acclaimed new biography, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s days as a BU graduate student come to life

Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) was seen by his BU peers as “a charismatic figure, urbane, sociable,” writes author Jonathan Eig in King: A Life .

“ I’m Going to Kill Jim Crow ”

In 1951, martin luther king, jr., with degrees from morehouse college and crozer theological seminary under his belt, steered his chevy north from atlanta to begin his phd studies in systematic theology at bu..

At the time, he was thinking about a career in academia, perhaps after working as a preacher in a small town, writes Jonathan Eig in his new biography, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

During his time at BU’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, King (GRS’55, Hon.’59), known then as M.L., was recognized as a leader. He attended sermons by Howard Thurman (Hon.’67), dean of Marsh Chapel from 1953 to 1965 and the first Black dean at a mostly white American university, who became his mentor. (The two watched Jackie Robinson play in the 1953 World Series on TV at Thurman’s home, according to Eig.)

“King found lasting inspiration in Thurman’s beliefs on integration, community, and the interrelatedness of all life,” Eig writes. “‘There is but one refuge that one man has anywhere on this planet,’ wrote Thurman. ‘And that is in another man’s heart.’”

He would also meet his future wife, a New England Conservatory of Music opera student named Coretta Scott (Hon.’69), in Boston. After King finished his studies, he and Coretta left the city for Montgomery, Ala., “soon to be the crucible for the civil rights movement,” Eig writes. “After saying he wanted a job that would place him on the front lines of the fight against segregation, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been granted his wish.”

The following is an excerpt from Eig’s book, described as the first definitive biography of King in decades.

King: A Life excerpt

King earned a bachelor of arts degree in divinity from Crozer and graduated as valedictorian, winning a $1,200 scholarship for graduate study. His parents rewarded him with a car, a green Chevrolet with Powerglide, the new two-speed automatic transmission that allowed for quick, smooth acceleration without the use of a clutch.

But if Martin Sr. and Alberta King had hoped to see their son driving the Chevy around Atlanta, smoothly accelerating from home to church, and perhaps soon hauling grandchildren in the back seat, they were disappointed. In the fall of 1951, King took the car from Atlanta to Boston, where he enrolled at Boston University in pursuit of a doctorate.

Daddy King hadn’t been happy with his son’s decision to go to seminary. He had more reason to complain now that his son seemed intent on an academic career. M.L. knew better than to argue with his father. “Oh, yes,” he would say vaguely when listening to something he didn’t want to hear and didn’t wish to debate. He knew by now that he didn’t need to persuade his father to get his way. If there were any doubt that M.L. had his mind on a career beyond the pulpit, he confirmed it in his application to Boston University. “For a number of years, I have been desirous of teaching in a college or school of religion,” he wrote. “It is my candid opinion that the teaching of theology should be as scientific, as thorough, and as realistic as any other discipline. In a word, scholarship is my goal.”

Boston University was a historically Methodist school, with a predominantly white faculty and student body. Daddy King, despite reservations about his son’s decision, agreed to pay all of M.L.’s graduate school expenses not covered by his scholarship. Perhaps he was relieved that M.L. had chosen Boston University and not the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which had been among his top choices, and which might have set his life and career on a dramatically different path.

King chose BU, in large part, for the chance to study with Edgar S. Brightman, known for his philosophical understanding of the idea of a personal God, not an impersonal deity lacking human characteristics. [Brightman (STH’10, GRS’12) was the Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at GRS.] “In the broadest sense,” Brightman wrote, “personalism is the belief that conscious personality is both the supreme value and the supreme reality in the universe.” To personalists, God is seen as a loving parent, God’s children as subjects of compassion. The universe is made up of persons, and all personalities are made in the image of God. The influence of personalism would support King’s future indictments of segregation and discrimination, “because personhood,” wrote the scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp Jr., “implies freedom and responsibility.”….

…. In Boston, where he began to introduce himself as Martin, he didn’t take long to find new romances. His approach to women at times resembled a competitive sport, according to Dorothy Cotton [Wheelock’60], the civil rights activist who would later become close to King. He would “try to make sure he could win the girlfriend of the tallest…handsomest guy on campus,” Cotton said. “And that became a bit of a habit, I feel.”

One day, while he was eating lunch at a Sharar’s Cafeteria, he spotted a fair-skinned African American woman, seated alone. King got up from his seat and approached her.

“You’re not eating your beets,” he said. The young woman looked up and said she hated beets.

King said he felt the same way and asked if he could join her for lunch. Her name was LaVerne Weston, and she was a Texas native who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She and King bonded over the cafeteria’s failure to offer an alternative to beets with the chicken platter. LaVerne admired King’s natty wardrobe and warm personality. He talked a lot and bragged a bit, but he asked good questions, and he listened, too. It was obvious that he was flirting, but LaVerne wasn’t interested. King was too short for her taste.

“I’m going to kill Jim Crow,” King told her….

…. After his first semester at BU, King and one of his friends from Morehouse, Philip Lenud, a student at the Crane Theological School, affiliated with Tufts University, rented an apartment at 397 Massachusetts Avenue, a South End rowhouse. The place was piled high with books. Morehouse pennants hung on the wall above the sofa. Lenud, an Alabama native, did most of the cooking; King washed the dishes. King made frequent phone calls home, reversing the charges. The apartment became a hub for young intellectuals and artists. King hosted a weekly potluck supper for a group he called the Dialectical Society or, sometimes, the Philosophical Club. The men smoked pipes. Graduate students read their papers aloud. Spirited discussions followed. They recorded the minutes and reviewed them at subsequent meetings. At first the meetings were attended exclusively by Black men, but they diversified over time, accepting women and the occasional white person. King was more than comfortable taking a leadership role. With the Philosophical Club, peers saw King already as a leader and a charismatic figure, urbane, sociable, and pleased to be at the center of attention.

King (left) returned to Boston in 1964 to donate his personal papers to BU, a collection that’s housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. A massive crowd gathers on Marsh Plaza (right) for a memorial service for King on April 5, 1968, the day after he was assassinated. Photos by Boston University Photography

“Martin was the guru,” said Sybil Haydel Morial [Wheelock’52,’55], who grew up in New Orleans, attended Boston University, and went to parties as well as casual gatherings at King’s apartment. She would become an educator, an activist, and wife to the first Black mayor of New Orleans, Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial. “He was the leader of it,” she said of King. “He was so even-tempered and so self-possessed and so humble…. And he had a car!”

Boston was not free from racism by any stretch. The Red Sox would not integrate their team until 1959, although Sam Jethroe integrated the Boston Braves in 1950, before that team moved to Milwaukee. Public schools remained segregated in practice. But it was far better than in the South, Sybil Morial said. Boston had art and theater and integrated colleges. From September 21 to September 23, 1951, the Boston Garden hosted an all-star jazz concert with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Sarah Vaughan, and the Nat King Cole Trio, whose recording of “Too Young” had topped the charts that summer. The Boston Celtics, with Chuck Cooper, had one of the first racially integrated teams in the National Basketball Association. Boston also had a seemingly endless array of ambitious young Black men and women from prosperous families. King attended services at Twelfth Baptist Church, a congregation that had been founded by free people of color in 1840, served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and had a long history of organized protest.

“It was thrilling because everything was open,” Morial said. “Those of us from the South loved the freedom of the North.” The young men and women often discussed whether to remain in the North, or “Freedomland,” as Morial called it. At first, Morial said, most of her acquaintances in Boston vowed to stay in the North, but their views shifted as they began to miss home and began to see signs that cultural and political reform might be possible in the South. Even in Boston, King felt pulled to return to the South, in part because Boston’s Black community was “spiritually located in the South,” as the scholar Lewis V. Baldwin writes. “I am going back where I am needed,” King said in Boston.

Excerpted from King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) by Jonathan Eig with permission from the publisher.

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There is 1 comment on Excerpt from Jonathan Eig’s Acclaimed New Biography, King: A Life

In 1951, Martin Luther King, Jr. left Atlanta with a green Chevrolet, a valedictorian’s scholarship, and aspirations for academia. Opting for Boston University, King pursued a doctorate, embracing personalism under Edgar S. Brightman’s tutelage. Despite tensions with his father and scholarly pursuits, King found love in Boston, encountering Coretta Scott. His apartment became a hub for intellectual discourse and camaraderie. Boston offered a taste of freedom, cultural richness, and integrated spaces. Yet, the call to the South persisted, revealing King’s commitment to where he felt needed. Boston, a chapter in King’s journey, shaped his vision for a future marked by leadership, scholarship, and activism. #DNAQuarcoo #MLKLegacy #BostonUniversity #Terrier #CivilRightsLeader

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Watch CBS News

The stunning revelations in biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By Brad Edwards

Updated on: February 2, 2024 / 9:10 AM CST / CBS Chicago

CHICAGO (CBS) -- "King: A Life," the new biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was on virtually everyone's top 10 list of 2023 – including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine.

"No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig's sweeping and majestic new King," wrote Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Author Jonathan Eig was born in Brooklyn and raised in Monsey, New York in Rockland County north of New York City. But he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and has called Chicago home for many years.

He wrote "King: A Life" in his home office, which doubles as the laundry room.

Eig wrote about a persistent social problem in the book: "But in hallowing King, we have hollowed him - from Montgomery to Chicago along those streets named Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Martin Luther King Jr, Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Highway, poverty and segregation rates remain much higher than local and national averages."

Dwight Garner of the New York Times called "King: A Life" the "new definitive biography" – and also called the book "supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling, and compulsively readable." Mark Whitaker of the Washington Post said the volume was "infused the narrative energy of a thriller."

Did Eig know he was writing a "new definitive biography" for Dr. King? Actually, he says he did.

"I knew how important it was to tell King's story, and I knew how relevant it was to the world we're living in today," said Eig, "because look what's happening to us. We're still fighting over racism."

Eig did not mean he knew critics would laud him with such praise – though he is not disappointed that they did.

"No, I didn't know if people were going to like the book," he said, "but I felt like I did a pretty good job of it. So I was hoping the critics would like the book."

Eig spent six years – including an entire pandemic – in the laundry room writing. He was buried in unfolded clothes as he unearthed transformative firsts about Dr. King – many via newly released government documents. The book reveals, and it debunks.

Edwards: "Did you find yourself in this process being like holy cow, this is a bombshell?"

Eig: "Absolutely."

Playboy interview fabrication

One well-known purported quote from Dr. King that Eig debunked involved Chicago-founded Playboy Magazine. In the quote, Dr. King is alleged to have said, "Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice."

"I discovered that the quote from Martin Luther King about Malcolm X - this incendiary quote where he blasts Malcolm X - was fabricated. Playboy Magazine and Alex Haley made up the quote and attributed it to King. And when I discovered that, I immediately called Peniel Joseph, who's written this book about the relationship between King and Malcolm. And I said: 'This is a big deal, right? And he was like, 'Oh my God, yeah. And I've been teaching that quote to my college students for 20 years. I've been teaching all through Yeah, I've been teaching a lie. And now we know that the white media propagated this myth that King was critical of Malcolm X."

Generations later, we now know Haley – known for "Roots" and for co-authoring "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" - used a King quote assailing the Nation of Islam's urging of violence, and made it appear as if King was slamming Malcolm X.

The purported quote goes on to say, "Fiery, demagogic oratory in the Black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief."

According to an unedited transcript that Eig located, it turned out that Dr. King made the comment about "fiery, demagogic oratory" earlier in the interview and the remark had nothing to do with Malcolm X, according to Smithsonian Magazine .

We now know, to the contrary, King was actually deferential to Malcolm X in the Playboy interview, saying of Malcolm X, "Maybe he does have some of the answer."

In that case, Eig wrote, and righted, history. And there were other such instances.

FBI's obsession with King's sex life

Edwards: " You have proven, definitively, the FBI was out to get him - were they not?"

Eig: " At one point, they encouraged him to commit suicide."

Originally, the FBI wanted to know if King consorted with communists. The FBI only found he was cheating on his wife.

Eig: " So they become obsessed with King's sex life. They are using it to try to blackmail him, to try to get him to quit his position. They're even using it to try to encourage Coretta to divorce him.

"So they take a set of tapes. They make up 'greatest hits' from his hotel rooms - because they're also putting bugs in the hotel room, and the lamps of his hotel rooms, and they send that tape to his home - and along with a note saying: 'You are going to be exposed. We know you're a fraud. The whole world will know you're a fraud. The only way out for you is suicide.' And they give him a deadline by which they expect him to either quit or commit suicide."

The note was supposedly written by a Black man with animus toward King, but it was really the FBI – and King knew it.

"And he knows immediately that it came from the FBI and just refuses to be bullied by them," said Eig.

This was an FBI supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson – the greatest legislator of Civil Rights.

"It's very important that we remember that the same government that has created a national holiday for King was also out to destroy him," said Eig.

The record shows Johnson's administration also threatened to undermine everything King.

"I discovered that LBJ's secretary kept in her safe the most personal letters that came from [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover," Eig said. "And Hoover was writing directly to LBJ, sometimes two or three times a week - just on the subject of MLK - 'He's writing an article about this. He's speaking here. He's going to say more about the Vietnam War - and lots of details about the sex life; about King's personal life, like they were obsessed with it; almost as if they were just voyeurs."

It proves leaders' lives aren't a binary of hero versus villain, sinner versus saint – and Eig seems to pinpoint exactly where Dr. King fits on life's grayscale.

"The flaws don't diminish from his greatness. The flaws just show that he was human, which to me makes him greater - because he accomplished these things as a mortal," said Eig. "He had doubts. He had failures. And I wanted, I think, readers can handle that."

Dr. King's experience in Chicago

Dr. King visited Chicago several times and moved his family into a dilapidated apartment in a disinvested area of the city's West Side in January 1966. That summer, Dr. King began leading marches into all-white neighborhoods in support of fair and open housing citywide.

"When he got here, he felt like the city was more racist than he had imagined," said Eig.

On Aug. 5, 1966, Dr. King was struck with a rock during a march for open housing in the Marquette Park neighborhood – as an angry mob of white protesters blocked the streets. The impact was so great t that he was knocked down to the ground. But he got up and continued to march. Bricks and bottles followed, and a full-scale riot broke out with dozens of injuries and arrests.

"I've never seen - even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago," Dr. King told reporters at the time.

During Dr. King's 1966 visit, Mayor Richard J. Daley promised change. Late in August, Dr. King announced an agreement had been reached for city leaders to promote fair housing, the Encyclopedia of Chicago recalls.

"And then as soon as he left town, the city, you know, pretty much abandoned those promises that they made to King," said Eig. "So I think he was deeply upset. And I think that his relationship with Mayor Daley [Sr.] was a was a fraught one. Daley clearly was just looking to get rid of King."

About Jonathan Eig

As for Eig himself, he interviewed Mayor Harold Washington as a college student at Medill at Northwestern – from which graduated in 1986. He went on to write for The New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Dallas Morning News before returning to Chicago for the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.

Eig raised his kids in Chicago – on the second story of a three-story walkup on the city's North Side, where he still lives.

Eig was in Chicago when his first bestseller - the 2005 book, "Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig" - became a hit. It reached No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and on the Casey Award, and an adaptation is coming to Apple TV.

Eig also wrote, "Ali: A Life," a biography of Muhammad Ali. The 2018 book won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award – and he was also a consulting producer for Ken Burns' PBS series "Muhammad Ali."

Eig's fourth book, "The Birth of the Pill," was adapted into a play by the TimeLine Theatre in Chicago, his website notes.

And now, he has taken on Dr. King's story.

Edwards: " You're a white Jewish man. There's got to be some people who say…"

Eig: "I've been asked that question. I've been on the road now for seven, eight months talking about this book. And every once in a while, someone will say, what's up with the white Jewish guy writing about the greatest Black Christian leader in our country's history?" Or before that, I wrote about the greatest Black Muslim in American history in Muhammad Ali. And I think it's a legitimate question. And I think that for a biographer, you know, we have a special responsibility to be humble about who we write about."

"And I began really by asking a lot of King's friends and associates whether they would talk to me, whether they thought it was important, whether they would support me in writing such a book. And ultimately, readers will judge whether you did it right."

Eig concluded his interview with CBS 2 by reading some more of "King: A Life."

"Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them - only if we embrace the complicated king, the flawed king, the human king, the radical king. Only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before," Eig read from his book. "'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.'"

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• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• Martin Luther King

Brad Edwards is an investigative reporter and main anchor at CBS2 Chicago.

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Jonathan Eig's biography of MLK explores the activist's life and faith

King:A Life , the biography by Jonathan Eig, provides a fresh perspective into the life of one of America's most important activists. From his upbringing in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward neighborhood to his path through university and the frontlines of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career and impact is explained through his faith and relationships. In today's episode, Eig speaks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about how Dr. King rose to prominence at such a young age, and how he maintained his spirituality through deep scrutiny and surveillance.

To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday

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Jonathan eig's new biography examines the life of martin luther king jr..