POINT OF ORDER: A New Image of MLK – With Clay Feet by C. Ellen Connally

His natural life began on January 15, 1929. His public life — which lasted just over thirteen years — started on December 5, 1955, when, as an unknown 26-year-old Baptist preacher, he spoke out against segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

His natural life ended on April 4, 1968, with an assassin’s bullet as he fought to obtain rights for city sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee. But his legacy will live on in the hundreds of streets, roads and buildings that bear his name; as pilgrims visit his memorial on the National Mall; and on the third Monday of every January, as the nation celebrates the Martin Luther King holiday.

But during the 55 years since his death, the question is whether historians have discovered the real Martin Luther King Jr. Will revisionist history cast him in a new and perhaps tainted light?

This is the question that award-winning journalist and author Jonathan Eig seeks to answer in his new biography King — A Life (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2023). Based on recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other newly released materials, this new work updates David J. Garrow’s 1986 seminal biography Bearing the Cross (William Morrow and Co, Inc) which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

Eig relates one of the most puzzling events of King’s childhood which occurred in 1939. As the City of Atlanta celebrated the opening of the already controversial 1939 movie classic Gone With the Wind, King’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., allowed his church choir to perform at the premiere. The decision was to the dismay of members of the Black community, since Hattie McDaniel, the first Black woman to win an Oscar for her part in the movie, was not allowed to enter the whites-only venue. The choir members wore slave costumes and sang spirituals. The ten-year-old Martin, who was then known as Mike, appeared in the first row as a singer.

Eig’s King is a man that suffered with a troubled relationship with his often-dogmatic father, a family dynamic that many believe lead King’s younger brother, A.D. King to alcoholism. He describes Martin as a young man who twice during his childhood attempted suicide.

At age 15, young Martin started his career in higher education at Morehouse College, where his short stature and young age gave rise to the nickname Runt. Over his father’s objections he went on to study at Boston College and Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he fell in love with and nearly married a white woman — a decision that he came to realize would likely end any hopes of having a career as a Black pastor, especially in the South.

It was in Boston that he met and fell in love with Coretta Scott, while jockeying relationships with other women both in Boston and in his native Atlanta where his father encouraged him to marry the daughter of the city’s most prominent Black funeral director. This theme of King’s relationships with women before and during his marriage to Coretta is handled tactfully by Eig, especially when referencing King’s long-time relationship with Dorothy Cotton, a longtime aide. Coretta comes across as the long-suffering wife whose love for her husband and the cause overcame many of the hardships brought on by her husband’s infidelity.

In terms of dealing with women within the movement, King and the male leadership of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil tights organizations do not fare well. While women did most of the leg work and maintained the day-to-day operations, the men failed to give them credit and women were left out of leadership roles. Even the iconic Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery Alabama bus spawned the Civil Rights Movement, often felt rejected, especially when she and other women were snubbed at the 1963 March on Washington.

King managed to hide from the public that he smoked, shot pool, was perpetually late and often engaged in locker room talk with his contemporaries, especially about women. He was an insomniac who usually operated on four hours or so of sleep; suffered with bouts of depression; and was hospitalized several times for exhaustion.

After his death it was discovered that large parts of his Ph.D. dissertation were plagiarized, as were some of his sermons. While we want to think of King as a loving husband and father, he was not always kind to Coretta, spending a great deal of time away from her and his family.

While there are enough people to be seen as enemies of Dr. King and his movement, such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety “Bull” Conner, and ardent segregationists throughout the North and South, the real Darth Vader of the story is F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. His relentless pursuit of damaging materials against King became an obsession with constant attempts to link King to the Communist Party. Using taxpayer money and with the aid of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who authorized wire taps, Hoover was able to track King and his associates and record their phone calls for more than a decade.

Eig shows that during the last years of his life, King’s star was on the decline. Tensions existed between him and other civil rights leaders and the NAACP. Long-time supporters began to distance themselves. The SCLC struggled financially. His ranking in public opinion polls fell and there was no unanimity within the Civil Rights Movement.

King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam caused him to sever ties with President Lyndon Johnson, who had been an early but cautious supporter. He lost the support of many Americans who still supported the war. As King attempted to take his movement north and expand his demands for justice to include overcoming poverty, crime and joblessness, he lost the support of many white liberals and segments of the Black community. With his failures to achieve success, many Blacks, both in the North and the South, sought to abandon nonviolence and listen to the more radical arguments of Malcolm X. Nonviolence was losing its appeal. But it never lost its appeal to King.

When I first read a review of King – A Life and realized that it covered some 668 pages — 557 of which were text and the rest footnotes — I was not inclined to tackle a subject that I felt very confident about.  How much more could I learn about Dr. King?

Thanks to a very short waiting list at the Cuyahoga County Library, I got the book within a few days. I know it’s a cliché to say that “I couldn’t put it down” but honestly, I couldn’t. This is a readable, engaging and exceedingly informative work that tells not only the story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but also of America of the 1950s and 60s. It reveals the roots of many of the social struggles that we face today. It demonstrates the Gordian Knot that LBJ faced in Vietnam and makes the reader aware that many of the problems addressed by King still exist.

Eig lays bare King’s clay feet; the man behind the mirror; the man behind the iconic image whose life we celebrate as an American icon. But in doing so, he also shows us King’s humanity, flawed as it might be.

It was King and his movement that brought the evils of segregation into the homes of millions of Americans as they watched demonstrators attacked by dogs and sprayed with fire hoses on the nightly news. It was King and his movement that forced the Supreme Court to put teeth into Brown v. Board of Education and the other decisions of the United States Supreme Court that led to the end of segregation in the South. For this, America and the world should be forever grateful, and this new biography adds meaningful insights into the man and his movement.

C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she serves on the Board of the Ohio History Connection, is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission and president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.

 

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