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I never know whether it's encouraging or
depressing to read books about history and feel hit over the head again
and again with parallels to what we're dealing with today.
This biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., is fantastic. Author Jonathan Eig does an amazing
job truly bringing King to life. He never puts King up on a pedestal;
his King is fully human and his more problematic traits--particularly
his womanizing and his plagiarizing--are addressed throughout the book.
(Also, and it comes up a lot, King was not tall. He was 5'7". People
throughout the book are like, "He was shorter than I expected.")
Eig
brings home that King never really planned what wound up being his
career in civil rights; he wanted to preach, maybe go into academia. (I
wonder how that would've affected his plagiarism?) He basically wound up
caught up in events; he knew he wanted to preach in a Southern church,
but it was luck or fate or what-have-you that brought him to a church in
Montgomery, Alabama to be there for the bus boycott.
Reading the
book, it also hit home how much King (and other leaders) were winging
it. They'd try to create organizations but didn't really have much in
the way of plans or goals or methodology. Decisions frequently were made
spontaneously, which was understandably frustrating for many people
involved. And King wound up walking a tightrope of the fight for civil
rights while trying to leverage his relationship with the Kennedys/LBJ.
He was blasted by other activists as not doing enough; he was blasted by
many as being too radical. And there was no clear path for what he was
trying to do.
His commitment to nonviolence was striking. He was
attacked and literally kept his arms at his sides. Eig takes us on
King's journey; his thoughts weren't always on nonviolence being the
best path, but when he committed, he committed. His acceptance of his own death also made an impression. There was just so
much violence all around him, from the violence during marches to bombs
being thrown into people's home and churches to activists getting
murdered, King knew his own murder was inevitable, particularly as the
1960s progressed. He was under so much stress, felt all the pressure of
winning the Nobel Peace Prize and being Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., the leader everyone looked to, agonized over the knowledge that the
FBI was trying to plant stories in the media about his adultery and
what that could mean for him (not to mention the FBI trying to get him to kill himself, good Lord, J. Edgar Hoover really was the worst).
It all weighed on him as he took the civil rights battle to the north,
where he discovered people were just as bad as in the South. Some people
thought his job was done, with various civil rights bills signed into
law, but he saw more and more how much needed to change. He became more
radical in his thinking, speaking out against the Vietnam War, which Eig
points out again and again was still fairly popular with the general
population, and more people hated him and he felt he wasn't doing enough
and he was tired. There was so much to do, and he knew he didn't have
much time.
King's gift was in his words, both spoken and
written. The story of "Letter From Birmingham Jail" was fascinating, but
what impressed me about Eig's storytelling is how he managed to convey
King's speeches and preaching via the written word. His descriptions of
how King actually spoke was stellar. And I just wanted to go through and
underline so much of what King said because it remains powerful and
applicable. His words resonate today as they did 60 years ago.
This
book is incredibly worth the read. Eig's narrative is engaging; it's a
big book, but it goes quickly. And the acknowledgments and notes are
also worth a look.
I'll end with how Eig ends his story:
Young people hear his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his call for fundamental change in the nation's character, not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materials, militarism, and racism.
...Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. 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.
"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. (pp. 556-557)
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