Review | A major new bio of Martin Luther King Jr. balances saint and sinner (2024)

Yet throughout the Norway trip, King struck his companions as depressed and distracted. By then, he had become aware that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was secretly tapping phones at hotels and even homes of friends where he stayed during his travels. Hoover’s stated objective was to find out if King was under the influence of communists, but in the process the FBI uncovered evidence of prolific marital infidelity that it threatened to use to humiliate King and destroy his moral standing and political clout.

For more than 40 years, the historian David J. Garrow has been documenting this campaign of surveillance against King, breaking new ground but also stirring controversy with his recent hints that more damning evidence about King’s behavior with women may lie in still-classified FBI files. In 1987, Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for “Bearing the Cross,” an 800-page biography that wove his FBI reporting into a dense account of the internal politics of the civil rights movement. Arriving a year later, Taylor Branch’s majestic “Parting the Waters,” which would be followed by two voluminous sequels, set a more admiring portrait of King against a sweeping tableau of a changing America in the late 1950s and ’60s.

Weighing in at a somewhat less hefty 669 pages, Jonathan Eig’s new book, “King: A Life,” might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography, an attempt to reconcile Garrow’s sinner with Branch’s saint, infused with the narrative energy of a thriller. A former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written best-selling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali, Eig conducted more than 200 interviews, including with scores of people old enough to have known or observed King, and pieced together numerous accounts gathered by other journalists and scholars, some of them never published before.

Eig begins the book with a revealing portrait of “Daddy King,” Martin Luther King Sr., the domineering, self-made preacher whom his famous son spent his life both emulating and trying to escape. In taped interviews for a never-published memoir, King Sr. — christened Michael at birth — recounted a harrowing upbringing as the child of struggling sharecroppers in rural Georgia. His own father, Jim King, was a nasty alcoholic who regularly beat his Bible-fearing wife, Delia. At 14, Michael tried to intervene in a marital fight and Jim King threatened to kill him, whereupon Michael fled to Atlanta in his bare feet. Unpolished but fiercely ambitious, he slowly built a reputation as a Baptist minister and set his sights on marrying Alberta Williams, the well-born daughter of A.D. Williams, the head of Atlanta’s long-established but then financially struggling Ebenezer Baptist Church.

After marrying Alberta and succeeding A.D. Williams at Ebenezer, King Sr. built up the church’s congregation and coffers and charmed Atlanta’s Black elite. But at home, he could be a controlling and violent figure, particularly toward his two sons — Michael, as Martin Luther King Jr. was also named at birth, and his younger brother, A.D. Eig blames the psychological wounds inflicted by Daddy King for A.D.’s difficult adulthood, which was marked by struggles with alcohol and ended when he drowned in a swimming pool shy of his 40th birthday. For King Jr., Eig suggests, fear of his father’s volcanic moods strengthened his childhood attachment to his nurturing mother and maternal grandmother, Jennie Williams, and later made the brave public protester privately conflict-averse, particularly in dealing with fellow civil rights leaders.

Yet it was also defiance of Daddy King that drove the two pivotal choices that put King Jr. on the path to greatness. After reluctantly agreeing before his college graduation to go into the family business and become a preacher, King resisted his father’s pressure to join him in the Ebenezer pulpit. Instead, he went to seminary school in Pennsylvania and then to divinity school in Boston, where he acquired the scholarly underpinnings for his gospel of nonviolent resistance and earned the degree that allowed him to be known thenceforth as Dr. King. Ignoring his father’s appeals to return to Atlanta, King then applied for an open position at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., a small but snobbish congregation that was willing to overlook the 25-year-old’s youth because of his erudite credentials and preaching style.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Eig treats it less comprehensively than cinematically. In dealing with the defining decade of King’s life, between 1955 and 1965, Eig skips over many details of civil rights strategy and infighting covered in previous biographies in favor of vivid reconstructions of the most dramatic turning points. He conjures up the mass meeting where King, chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott because he was a newcomer with no local enemies, finds “a new voice” and makes his first rousing protest speech. (“If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong…”) Eig reconstructs the road to the March on Washington, as King workshops the “I Have a Dream” speech in sermons out of town, and puts the reader inside the solitary-confinement cell where King scribbles on napkins, toilet paper and the margins of newspapers to craft his defiant “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

Eig covers the thornier aspects of this period in King’s public life with a light critical touch. He is mostly sympathetic to the way President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy dealt with King, despite their slow embrace of the civil rights cause, their political opportunism in making sympathetic calls to King’s wife, Coretta, and their persistent enabling of Hoover’s surveillance campaign. Similarly, Eig all but gives King a pass for his well-documented habit of plagiarism in his academic writings, suggesting that it was forgivable for a preacher who was used to drawing on multiple influences in composing sermons.

Eig is less circ*mspect, however, and most telling, in dealing with the messy details and physical and emotional toll of King’s complicated private life.

King’s struggles with monogamy had begun by the time he went to seminary school after graduating from college at 19. Still dating a Black girl from Atlanta whom his parents hoped he would marry, he fell in love with a White woman named Betty Moitz, whose mother worked at the school. King eventually ended the relationship for the sake of his professional ambitions, but he never got over Moitz, according to his friend Harry Belafonte. A decade and a half later, when the FBI started wiretapping his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington and the home of his lawyer Clarence Jones, agents sometimes listened in on phone calls to several different mistresses in one day. Meanwhile, King carried on a long affair with one of his top aides at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dorothy Cotton, whose residence in Atlanta would often be his first stop when he returned from his travels, before he went home to his wife and four children.

According to Garrow, FBI records under court-ordered seal until 2027 also contain a report that King was present at orgies organized by a fellow Black preacher, and that during one he was heard laughing and commenting while the preacher raped a female parishioner. Stanley Pottinger, a former Justice Department official who has listened to some of the tapes on which these reports are based, told Eig that the conversations in the crowded rooms were difficult to make out. “I think it’s questionable evidence,” Pottinger concluded, without categorically dismissing the possibility of a bombshell that one day might permanently alter the public’s perception of King.

Against this tangled backdrop, 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 elegant Alabama native was studying at a music conservatory in Boston when King met her on a blind date and immediately sized her up as the ideal partner for the places he was going. Piecing together Coretta’s reflections over the years — from audiotapes recorded shortly after King’s assassination to interviews she gave for a posthumously published memoir — Eig shows us a woman proud of her family and her husband’s accomplishments but wistful about her forfeited professional ambitions. Despite having been confronted with evidence of her husband’s unfaithfulness, and having endured occasional ugly scenes where King dressed her down in public, Coretta chose to compartmentalize. “I’m not saying Martin was a saint,” she recalled the year before she died. “Nobody is perfect. But as far as I’m concerned, our marriage was a very good marriage, and it was like that all the way to the end.”

For all his reporting efforts, however, Eig can’t provide similar access to King’s interior life. Unlike some historical figures, King wasn’t in the habit of keeping journals or writing confessional letters. In his two best-known books, “Stride Toward Freedom” and “Where Do We Go From Here?,” he deals with self-doubt in a mostly philosophical way. He never provides convincing answers to the query that Eig’s account invites: How did King ultimately judge himself, as a leader and as a man?

In recent years, Black scholars such as Peniel Joseph and Michael Eric Dyson have paid particular attention to the last three years of King’s life, when he diverged most strikingly from the comforting caricature that Eig laments in the book’s introduction. This was the period when a frustrated King widened his agenda to a more militant fight for fair housing and jobs in Chicago, to full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War, and to preparations for a class-based Poor People’s Campaign. Eig clearly did a lot of reporting on this more radical side of King. Most notably, he uncovered an original transcript of an interview for Playboy that King gave to Alex Haley, the author who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography, which suggests that Haley took answers out of context and even fabricated responses to make King sound far more critical of Malcolm than he actually was.

Yet in the book, Eig deals only briskly with the complex and evolving rivalry between King and Malcolm X over the years, and devotes scarcely more than 50 pages to those fraught last three years between his detailed reconstructions of the Selma march in 1965 and the assassination at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968. In a brief chapter titled “Black Power,” Eig conjures up the challenge King faced during this period from a rising generation of more militant Black youth. But he doesn’t grapple with how relevant their critiques of King’s hopeful focus on integration and nonviolence look today, in an America so addicted to racial grievance, gun culture and militaristic policing.

Perhaps because he wants “King: A Life” to have a timeless quality, Eig doesn’t engage in speculation about what King might say or do if he were still among us. But that question isn’t merely academic. Like the parables he preached on Sundays, King’s words and legacy no longer exist in a historical vacuum: They’ve become touchstones for fierce contemporary debate. Just last month, Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson cited King’s example of civil disobedience as inspiration for their protests in support of gun-control legislation and against their ensuing ugly ouster from the legislature. But in a month or so, if the Supreme Court as expected strikes down affirmative action on college campuses, conservatives will remind us of King’s call for a society where people are not judged “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation, Eig’s won’t and shouldn’t be the last — for America will never definitively be over the battles that King so nobly, if sometimes imperfectly, fought.

A Life

By Jonathan Eig

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 669 pp. $35