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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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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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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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The Making of a New M.L.K. Biography: A Q. & A. With the Author, Jonathan Eig

New archival material and a narrowing window in which to speak to people who knew Martin Luther King, Jr. fueled the work, said the author.

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By Benjamin P. Russell

Having written about Muhammad Ali, Al Capone, Jackie Robinson and other touchstones of the American imagination, Jonathan Eig says he recognizes a common trait in the disparate personalities he’s explored.

“Most of them, if not all of them, have a serious streak of rebellion running through their lives,” Eig said.

His latest biography sets out to show just how squarely Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs in that category, as a bold and often radical thinker whose forceful views on the Vietnam War, poverty and race relations were softened by time and political expedience.

“King: A Life,” will be published on May 16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Eig builds on the ongoing reappraisal of King’s legacy with new archival material and extensive interviews with people who lived, worked and fought at his side. Many of these interviews were conducted with some urgency: The window to speak to people who knew King personally is closing, Eig said. Harry Belafonte died last month.

“My approach was, if I do nothing but travel the country for the next year or two, interviewing people who knew M.L.K., my time will have been well spent,” he said.

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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.

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Author Interviews

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