Martin Luther King Jr, flaws and all

A new portrait of the US civil rights giant reveals a flawed, persecuted man who had the faith to reach for a vision of the future

Who was the Rev Martin Luther King Jr? In America, the civil rights activist and Baptist minister is now embraced across the political spectrum even as the teaching of the history of discrimination that shaped him is being actively suppressed in many parts of the country. Beyond the US, he is widely celebrated in nations confronting difficult questions about their own racial pasts.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, however, most Americans had a negative view of him, and the National Security Agency had tapped his overseas phone calls. As late as the 1980s, President Reagan could state that it was still an open question whether he had been a communist dupe, as King’s enemies at J Edgar Hoover’s FBI had long alleged. By the end of that decade, however, with a national holiday in his honour (reluctantly assented to by Reagan) and prize-winning biographies by Taylor Branch and David Garrow in print, King’s image had undergone a remarkable transformation. Scholars now argue about how much Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas influenced him, though the public often embraces a simpler image of King that renders his more radical racial and economic pronouncements in anodyne terms.

Jonathan Eig, author of a monumental biography of Muhammad Ali, promises to give us a new King, fully rounded and appropriate for our own moment. His book aspires to “help us make our way through these troubled times” and arrives bearing copious endorsements from past biographers.

His subject was originally called Mike King Jr, named after his Baptist preacher father. King Sr later adopted the more auspicious name of the reforming German theologian for himself and his son. The family home was in Atlanta, and King’s independent-minded mother Alberta was the daughter of a minister who presided at Ebenezer Baptist church, where both father and son would preach.

Eig traces the nattily dressed and flirtatious King’s progress through his studies at Atlanta’s Morehouse College to Crozer Theological Seminary (where he committed one of his many acts of plagiarism) to his doctoral studies at Boston University, during which he met his future wife, Coretta Scott. Scott’s passion for civil rights and social reform, we learn, probably exceeded King’s. Once her husband became famous, she became an activist in her own right, going on the road to put her vocal training and organising passion to use in the service of the movement – even while raising their four children.

The event that changed the 26-yearold King’s life was the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger in December 1955. King, a newcomer to the city as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist church, was selected to lead the boycott partly because of his willingness to fight, and partly because he didn’t yet have rivals or enemies among the local Black leadership. The boycotters succeeded, aided by a supreme court victory. That victory made King the national face of a newly ascendant Black freedom movement.

Eig does an excellent job of tracing King’s interior struggles and self-doubts amid the sudden onslaught of media attention, threats, the bombing of his home and his near-death after being stabbed by a Black woman in Harlem.

He also devotes sustained attention to the FBI’s campaign of harassment, which included sending King audiotape evidence of his extramarital affairs, along with a letter suggesting that he step down from leadership or perhaps kill himself before being exposed.

Those efforts intensified amid the events for which King is now most known: the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, King’s famous speech at the March on Washington, the Selmato-Montgomery march that pushed along the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his effort to bring the movement north to the slums of Chicago, his receipt of the Nobel peace prize and his opposition to the Vietnam war. Eig also repeatedly defends King against the FBI’s charge that he was being manipulated by the small and ineffectual Communist Party USA. Although, in belabouring the point, he perhaps inadvertently lends credence to the bureau’s framing of things – and lessens the reader’s appreciation of King’s own expansive vision of social justice for the poor and disenfranchised.

At times, Eig’s book does give us hints of a King who might speak directly to our own times – for instance, his advocacy of reparations for African Americans for centuries of bondage and oppression. But above all it reveals a flawed man, persecuted by his enemies in the government while still retaining enough faith to reach for visions of the future that went beyond those of many of his closest allies.

Each generation ought to grapple with his life and legacy. For those seeking a readable and comprehensive account of King’s life, buttressed by extensive and up-to-date archival and oral history research, Eig’s book is essential reading – but certainly not the last word on its subject.