A new biography of Martin Luther King for a new generation

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This week, journalist and biographer, Jonathan Eig, joins Stephanie and Michael on Nonviolence Radio to talk about his new book, King: A Life. His new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. draws on sources that have only now been recovered (perhaps most notably, transcriptions of conversations recorded by the FBI). Jonathan speaks candidly about how important it is to remember King all his human complexity: his personal doubts and struggles, his admiration for figures he’s often remembered in contrast to (like Malcom X and Stokely Carmichael), and perhaps most importantly, for the depth and force of his moral vision, which, in some real sense, was revolutionary.

When you listen to his most radical speeches, he’s quoting the Bible and the Constitution in support of his radicalism. So, that’s going to mess with some people’s heads. And that’s what made him great, and it’s also what made him frightening…We remember that he said, “I have a dream,” and we remember that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, but we forget that in the same speech he called for reparations and attacked police brutality.

We risk failing ourselves and King himself when we hold onto only a ‘hollow’ sense of who he was. With a fuller, richer, more nuanced understanding of him, we can stretch ourselves to embrace and perhaps manifest in our time now some of the powerful, challenging and deeply human values to which he was so steadfastly committed.

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Stephanie: Greetings everyone and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook. And I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. We’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California, and broadcasting from our mother station KWMR in Point Reyes Station.

Jonathan Eig is an American Journalist and biographer. He’s author of six books, exploring people such as Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Al Capone, Margaret Sanger, and Mohammad Ali. His most recent work is a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. entitled, “King: A Life.”

He said that for people like King, we need a new biography at least every generation. And this one is an attempt to draw out who King was, not just as a cultural icon, but as a person and a person who grappled with challenges that would be familiar to so many of us.

He was also able to draw upon hundreds of newly released classified FBI files, which happened to document so much of the life of King and the movement.

This interview is in two parts. The first part is conducted by Michael, and it’s about King’s political and spiritual life. And in part two, I speak with Eig about King’s various persona’s and about the research that he undertook for the book, and what it all meant for him personally. Let’s hear from Eig.

Michael: Yeah. Well, Jonathan, I just want to say, you know, I was a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley and so, I have read my share of books. But I cannot tell you how much I admire your book. The miracle of it is the richness of detail which could – I mean, you’re telling us the mileage on a used car [laughs] detail like that which should be extremely boring. But somehow it’s quite alive. I mean, it’s – I don’t know how to describe it. I’m sort of blathering here. But as an author myself –

Jonathan: You’re doing great. Keep going. [Laughs]

Michael: No, it’s – it is kind of – it’s kind of a miracle. When I picked up your book, I said, “Oh, Stephanie, this is much too big. I can’t read the whole thing.” And now I’ve taken more notes than I’ve ever taken on any book before, and I’m sure I’m going to read it right through to the end.

Jonathan: Wow. Thank you.

Michael: So, let me get started with some questions then. And then later on, I’ll hit myself over the ones that I forgot, but at least we’ll get into these ones. You have said that King was the greatest American. Period. I deeply appreciate that assessment. I completely agree with you. And partly, this is an obvious question, but partly not. What gave him that greatness? What made him Martin Luther King?

Jonathan: The Bible. Morality, you know? The ability to stick to his beliefs when it wasn’t easy to do so. You know, politicians compromise. And he didn’t think of himself as a politician or a compromiser.

And that made it hard for him because other people couldn’t understand why he insisted on sticking to his ideals, why he insisted on doing things that were not politically pragmatic or even convenient.

He insisted on holding himself and others to this higher moral standard. And that never changed no matter how powerful, famous, no matter how pressure he faced, no matter how much fear he had to live with. That, to me, I think if I had to boil it down, would be the answer.

Michael: I think that’s very insightful. It seems to me that it’s very difficult to apply those moral standards to everyday society and make it work. That would be an additional dimension to his greatness, it seems to me.

Jonathan: Yeah. I agree.

Michael: He makes a famous comment in Stride Toward Freedom that the Bible gave him the orientation – I’m not quoting his exact words – and that Gandhi furnished the method.

Now, that would be important enough, of course, but do you think that there’s much more than that, that maybe King was downplaying the influence of Gandhi because he felt that people would dismiss what he had to say? And say, ‘oh, you know, that was for them over there. But that’s not our problem.’ What do you think? What would you say about that?

Jonathan: That’s an interesting point. You know, one of King’s great gifts and one of his great powers was his ability to appeal to a broad audience. And it may be that he felt like talking about Gandhi too much would be esoteric and might make him come across as a philosopher as simply as a Gandhi-ite, when he wanted to be much, much more. And he wrestled with that really all his life because he enjoyed the benefits of broad appeal.

He enjoyed the idea that he could really motivate Black people in the South who were joining him to march, as well as intellectuals in the North who were following him in the newspapers. So, he was trying to balance that all that time. And I suppose if you talk too much about Gandhi, he might lose some of those followers.

So, I think he used it as one of the weapons in his arsenal. I guess that’s a bad metaphor, given that we’re talking nonviolence. He used it as one of the tools in his belt, in his toolbox.

Michael: That’s better.

Jonathan: But he probably did have to think of it in terms of strategy.

Michael: Yeah. I should be more strategic myself, as a matter of fact. I make exactly that mistake.

Jonathan: Well, a lot of people who encountered him in those years felt like the Gandhi stuff was really just a ploy in many ways. He was accused of that by some people, of just using it to highlight the moral stakes, to give himself this sort of air of moral superiority.

And some people felt like he wasn’t really a dyed in the wool Gandhi-ite. Some of the cynics felt like he was just using Gandhi where it was best needed.

Michael: That would be another good reason for him not to over stress the influence of Gandhi. In my experience, Jonathan, various people have claimed the honor of having introduced King to Gandhi. Bayard is one. Glen Smiley is another. I would trust your opinion. Who do you think really did it? Did he just pick it up from Howard Thurman? Or what happened?

Jonathan: It’s hard to say. He no doubt heard about Gandhi in college. And no doubt picked it up from Thurman. It’s hard to imagine that Thurman didn’t talk about Gandhi. I think he met King very shortly after his visit to India.

I think King and Thurman watched the World Series together in 1954, I think it was? I don’t remember it exactly. And Jackie Robinson was playing in that World Series. So, I loved the idea of imagining that they might have talked about the qualities of Gandhi and Jackie Robinson shared. That would have been a really fun ball game conversation.

Michael: Oh boy.

Jonathan: But I think like most young people, you know, King picked it up from a lot of different influences until it began to really coalesce.

Michael: Good. Thank you. I know so many people, like Hoover, tried to smear King as a “communist.” And you quite rightly point out that there’s no basis in fact for that. I’m wondering – do you think that those people really thought he was a communist, or they were just trying to use some mudslinging word, that they could frighten people off from him by using that word?

Jonathan: I think Hoover and a lot of other people in and out of the FBI genuinely feared that he might be under the influence of communists. That he might wind up being used by people who had interest in promoting the communist party in America and spreading communism.

And some of that is a factor of the extreme paranoia in which we were living at that time. And some of it is simply connected to Hoover’s interest in maintaining the status quo and white Christian nationalism, putting down anything that posed a threat to the order, to the status quo.

So, I don’t think they really genuinely feared that King might turn out to be a communist. They thought it was just a bad look for him to have connections to communists, and that he might wind up being manipulated by these people with communist ties or communist backgrounds.

Michael: Yeah. When I was in the Free Speech Movement, in that era, people would accuse us of being influenced by communists. And we would say, “Why do you leave it to the communists to do all these moral things that we need to do to our society?”

Jonathan: Yeah, King said something similar. He said, you know, “Look, we’re just trying to join and improve the American democracy, what makes you think that anything we’re doing is remotely in the interest of communism? We’re trying to make America look better for democracies around the world and more open and more democratic.”

Michael: Yeah. You know, shifting something slightly different. When Mayor Daly kind of went back on an agreement that he had made with King. That interested me immediately because exactly the same thing happened to Gandhi. Both the British, and Jan Smuts in South Africa, made agreements with him and then went back on them.

And my question to you is, how did King respond emotionally and politically to that kind of – we might almost call it a betrayal?

Jonathan: It’s hard to say how King responded personally. He felt a great deal of disappointment that people weren’t as moral as he was, that they didn’t stick to their word, that politics and pragmatism kept getting in the way.

Some people would say he was naïve for that. I would say he was just better than the politicians. But, you know, he didn’t give up, certainly. I live in Chicago amd a lot of people here say, “Well, Daly squashed King. King came and left with his tail between his legs.” I don’t see it that way at all.

I say that King offered Chicago a solution. King offered Chicago answers, or at least a first step towards solving some of its deep, deep problems of racism and segregation. Problems that I’m still living with, and my children are still living with, in this city today.

We may still be the most segregated city in America. And that’s in part, perhaps, because King was rejected. He offered concrete solutions to Mayor Daly and then Daly just turned his back and walked away from those promises once King left town.

But I suppose that’s one of the occupational hazards for the activist who parachutes into a city and tries to bring change. That when you pack up your parachute and leave, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to keep their promises.

Michael: It also is, in a funny kind of way, encouraging to me because it makes me think that the moral arc of the universe really does bend towards justice. And that you cannot win against someone like King without cheating.

Jonathan: You know, it’s tempting to get cynical and say, “If the arc is bending towards justice, it’s doing it really slowly, and sometimes you can’t see that arc at all because we’re standing too close to it.”

But that’s one of the great dilemmas, not just for King but for all of history. The idealists are up against the pragmatists, the men of a true spirituality and faith are up against the cynics of running for office, who are trying to win re-election and not necessarily win the hearts and minds of people. So, I think that’s why the arc bends so slowly.

Michael: And the temptation is to just leave the whole situation to stew in its own inequity. And it really is a struggle that you have to go through to get engaged with that. Knowing full well – I mean as you point out repeatedly in the book, King knew full well that he was in grave danger of losing his life, but felt that because of his calling, he really could do other.

Jonathan: Yeah. I agree with you completely, that he felt like he had no choice, that he didn’t get to pick in choose which parts of the Bible he was going to believe in. That his job was to make the universe more fair, more just. And he couldn’t just focus on it in the South where he was most effective, even if, you know, Bayard and others were telling him that that might be the best strategy.

And, you know, what really shocks me again and again is that he never did compromise. He never did take the easier path. He never even took a break. He just kept doubling down on his beliefs, on his faith, knowing that his life was in danger.

It was not paranoid to think that someone might kill him for what he was saying. After all, his house had been bombed. His windows had been shot out. He had been stabbed in the chest. The FBI had sent him what amounted to a letter threatening that he better commit suicide.

He had to wake up every day knowing, wondering if that was the day that the FBI wiretaps appeared – were published in the newspaper, destroying his reputation. And he just kept going. There are no words for that level of faith and courage, really.

Michael: Yeah. I completely agree. There are no words for it. And when you think that he had a wife and the children. In some way, he was putting them at risk. It’s incredible to just try to fathom the calling that pulled him into all of this.

To get onto something a little bit easier, I’m always comparing Gandhi and King, and it struck me that Gandhi had a very concrete symbol that enabled him to approach all these different issues without losing coherence. And that symbol was the spinning wheel.

And it struck me that King could have used something like that. I have no idea what it would have been. But in some way, he needed to represent almost physically the moral force that he was trying to bring into society.

Jonathan: It’s interesting. He was relying on the Bible and the Constitution to summon people to follow him. And those were two great pillars. And it allowed him to, in some ways, appear conservative.

When he first made the cover of Time magazine, they said, “Here’s a radical for the modern conservative age of,” you know, this is the age of Eisenhower. And here’s this, polished speaker in his conservative clothing who isn’t calling for the destruction of American society. He’s calling for a more inclusive democracy.

So, he presents this very conservative image, in ways. Even as he’s saying – as he said in his very first important speech, December 5, 1955, in Montgomery. “If we are wrong, the Constitution is wrong. If we are wrong, the Bible is wrong. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of the United States is wrong.”

So, there’s nothing conservative about it. But he’s calling on these core beliefs that we all share that’s really, I think, what forces a lot of people to listen who might not otherwise have listened.

Michael: Do you think that also might have made him more threatening?

Jonathan: Certainly, to J. Edgar Hoover, it did, because he posed a greater threat than those who seemed more radical. Hoover was not worried that Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X was going to really unite the masses of Black people. They were fringe rebels in Hoover’s view.

And I think in some ways, Hoover is the only one who really understood just how radical Martin Luther King was. So, I don’t like to give Hoover credit for much, but I think that it touched his greatest fears that this was the person who had the power to really unite the masses, who had the power to really force a fundamental change in American democracy, to really force a change in our economic system and the inequality that it breeds. King was the biggest threat to the status quo, which is exactly what scared Hoover most.

Michael: And part of that threat, as you were saying, is precisely that he did not appear as an outsider, as someone from the lunatic fringe. He was trying to remind people of the commitments that they had given lip service to, but not fulfilled. And that always makes people feel very offended. Would you agree?

Jonathan: Oh, yes. I agree completely. When you listen to his most radical speeches, he’s quoting the Bible and the Constitution in support of his radicalism. So, that’s going to mess with some people’s heads. And that’s what made him great, and it’s also what made him frightening.

Michael: You know, when he says in a very famous speech, “I may not get there with you.” I’ve always wondered whether he had some concrete knowledge that assassination was being plotted against him, do you think? Or was it that he had a profound sense of the dynamics, the forces, working in society?

Jonathan: Well, he had been stabbed and beaten, and his home had been bombed, so it’s not irrational for him to think that he might be in danger. He was also getting repeated death threats.

But I think the other factor is that he was depressed, that he felt like he was losing his influence, that Americans weren’t listening to him anymore. Even his allies, his closest friends, were telling him that he’d lost his way.

And he wasn’t sure that he could find a way out. So, you know, some of his friends thought he was suicidal. Some of them thought that he had a death wish. Some of them thought that he didn’t know where to turn next, and that made him ever more morbid than he would have ordinarily been.

Michael: That is really tragic. What always seemed to a turning point in a very positive sense for him is what I like to call, ‘The Kitchen Epiphany,’ where he goes down, makes a cup of coffee and says, “I can’t go on.” And he hears, in effect, what you can only believe is the voice of some deeper reality, the voice of God. Do you agree with me that that played a seminal – a critical role in enabling him to continue through all of that harassment and humiliation and threat?

Jonathan: There’s no question about it. In fact, I found an interview that he gave that was never published, in which he talks about having a second encounter where he felt like God had spoken to him directly. And basically told him, “Keep going.” You know, that was the message. It wasn’t as if he had a long conversation. He just had a moment – two moments of great doubt, in which he felt like God assured him that he was doing the right thing.

But even without that, I think as we said earlier, so much of what King does every day of his life comes from his deep connection to the Bible. He learns to recite Bible verses before he learns to read. His father and his maternal grandfather are both preachers.

He tries, as a teenager, to explore other career options, but the church keeps pulling him back, and I think it’s that core belief that he’s doing what the Bible commands us that keeps him going.

Michael: But at the same time, a lot of people use the Bible and come out with a very different kind of politics. I’ve had quarrels with military chaplains at Berkeley who could quote chapter and verse at me but were very far from what appears to me to be the spirit of the Bible and especially of the Gospels of Jesus.

So, that’s what I find so admirable and inspiring about King, that he went to the core of the Bible and understood it. And then, and only then, used it in a very legitimate way.

Jonathan: I agree completely. And one of the really interesting things is that King knows that there are Southern segregationists who are using the Bible to defend white supremacy. And he is trying to change the hearts and minds even of those people.

And you see him starting to reach some of these white Southern preachers, sort of forcing them to reconsider. And some of them are quoted in articles about King, usually anonymously, saying that they’re beginning to reconsider segregation, that the words of the Bible are being read differently now in part because King is forcing people to hear them differently.

Michael: That is really powerful. And I like your quote from him where he says that he has faith in a creative personal power in the universe, who is the ground and essence of all reality. So, I think that enabled him to get to the core of the Bible in the way we’re talking about before.

Jonathan: Yeah. He absolutely believed that God was something personal and that we could all have a relationship with God, and it was not just an abstract philosophy. That was a big part of what animated his work.

Michael: Yeah. I have one last question, Jonathan. It’s on Page 556. You said – and I admire the rhetoric, but I winced at the truth of what you were saying, “But in hallowing King, we have hollowed him.” That is a prize-winning sentence, but a terrible truth, a terrible dictum.

So, I wanted to ask you, in what concrete ways do you see that our society and possibly even our world are different as a result of King’s work?

Jonathan: Well, the reason I wrote that we’ve hollowed him is because we have tended to ignore the meaning of what he said and chosen the interpretations that are easiest, that go down the easiest. We’ve candy-coated his words.

We remember that he said, “I have a dream,” and we remember that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, but we forget that in the same speech he called for reparations and attacked police brutality.

So, there’s no question that King forced us to rethink our prejudices, forced us to rethink our commitment to one another. But we’ve lost sight of that in a way because we focus on the words that we want to hear.

So, I think that King had a profound meaning. I think he had a greater influence on this country than all but a handful of people who ever lived. But if we don’t listen to his actual words, if we just focus on the simple ones, the easy ones, then he loses his power, and we lose our ability to be inspired by him.

Michael: Oh boy. You know, this reminds me very much of a film that we saw about Gandhi, in which Gandhi comes back as a revenant. And at the end of the film, he makes this very powerful statement, the actor does. He says, “Well, that’s it. You can either have my ideals, my meaning, or my image.” And it seems to me what you’re saying is we’ve gone to the image and, in some places, sidestepped the – but this is not to say that he didn’t, as you say, do a tremendous, tremendous lot of good for this country.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think we have the image right now. And unfortunately, it’s literally the image, you know, the monument in Washington, the holiday cards and sales fliers, you know, 20% on mattresses for the King birthday.

That doesn’t mean we have to stick with the image. We can still embrace his words and his meaning. We don’t have to settle for the images.

Michael: I want to make a final comment, Jonathan, that, you know, Thucydides, at beginning of his History, says that he wanted to create a treasure – a possession. “I wanted to create a possession for all time.” And I just wanted to say I think you’ve done it.

Jonathan: That’s amazing. That’s a beautiful compliment. Thank you.

Stephanie: You’re at Nonviolence Radio. And that was Michael Nagler interviewing Jonathan Eig, author of the new Martin Luther King biography, “King, a Life.”

Part 2

[Music – Hate is Too Heavy by Gary Nicholson]

Stephanie: We continue our interview next with my questions for Eig about King across his various relationships, as well as the research that went into this magnificent book.

So, Jonathan, you started writing this book about six years ago?

Jonathan: Yeah. I started doing my first round of interviews about six years ago. I was working on a book about Mohammed Ali, and I was meeting people who knew King at the same time, you know, just happened to be an overlap there with a lot of the people like Harry Belafonte and Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young.

And I just realized that there was an opportunity to talk to people who knew Dr. King, and I just began asking questions out of curiosity, really. And then it dawned on me that this was a limited window of opportunity. And it would be really interesting to just travel the country interviewing people who knew King. And maybe I would just do that as a hobby.

But I like writing books too, so when I realized it had been, at that point, 35 years since the last King biography, I just felt like that was an incredible opportunity to try to write a new biography. And we certainly needed a new King biography. We need one every so often, every generation at the very least.

Stephanie: Now, you list all of the hundreds of people you interviewed in the back of the book. Is there anybody you didn’t interview that you really wish you could have?

Jonathan: Oh, of course, there are people who passed away before I got started. I would have loved to have met Coretta Scott King, and that’s probably the number one person I most would have loved to have interviewed.

But then there were a few people who are still with us who declined to be interviewed. You know, Diane Nash, for example, who’s a great activist and who worked alongside King in much of the work he did in the South.

She just said she felt like too much attention is focused on King, that he was not the whole movement, that a lot of other people deserve to have their stories told. And I understand her argument, and that’s why she decided that she didn’t want to sit for an interview.

And there’s a danger in elevating, you know, a handful of great figures and making them the symbols of this great period of reform. You know, we need to remember that King was the tip of the spear. He was the primary focus of much of the media, but he certainly wasn’t working alone.

Stephanie: And who have you found since the book has been published, or even in the six years that you’ve been working on it, who is still interested in Dr. King?

Jonathan: Well, the book has only been out for a week or so, but I’ve been really thrilled by the response that it’s getting.

I’ve been traveling the country talking to people about the book. And young people, old people, Black and white – the audiences have just been beautiful. I’ve had events at churches. I’ve had events at synagogues. I’ve had events at museums and bookstores.

And I come away really encouraged that King still has the power to speak to us. You know, we’re living in a divided age – in some ways, more divided than when King was alive.

At least when King was alive, people met in groups. They went to church. They went to community events together. And now we’re all cut off by technology in a strange way. And I think King still has the power to connect us. I’ve been really happy with the groups that have been turning out to hear about the book.

Stephanie: In your interview that you did at Politics And Prose in DC with Eleanor Holmes Norton, you said that something like, when you wrote this book you wanted to try to convey to people what it was like, through these interviews, what it was like to be in the room with Dr. King.

But I think that being in the room with King would depend on who you were to him as well, who you were in his life. So, as a son, who was Martin Luther King Jr?

Jonathan: Little Mike, as they called him when he was a boy, was very differential to his parents. Really respectful and a little bit scared of his father. He could call and talk to his mother on the phone for hours at a time, but he had a little bit of fear of his father. And he was afraid of confronting his father – which is one of the fascinating things to me.

When he finally admitted to his family that he had been dating a white woman, he couldn’t tell his father, only his mother. And when his father came to Montgomery and said, “You got to get out of here. It’s too dangerous here.” His home had just been hit with dynamite. King knew he wasn’t going to leave, but he still couldn’t tell his father that.

He really had a hard time challenging his father, and it’s a fascinating relationship. So, we think of this great protest leader, this man who is standing up to the entire American government, but he has a hard time standing up to his father. So, I found that really fascinating.

Stephanie: And you mentioned that he had episodes of depression and even possible suicide attempts as a teenage?

Jonathan: Right. He twice jumped from a second story window at his home. First when his grandmother was injured. And then again later when his grandmother died. And it’s – you know, there’s no way to know. He never addressed it.

Although, he was interviewed about it and when the reporter called it a suicide attempt, King did not challenge that description. So, it may be that he felt so upset that he couldn’t deal with what he was feeling and just flung himself from a window.

And he was hospitalized numerous times, you know, possibly in the double-digits. Hospitalized for exhaustion. He would say to his friends or to Coretta, that he just needed to stay, like he was hoping the doctors would let him stay longer. Because he just needed the break, and he couldn’t really find a break, couldn’t find an escape from the tension when he was out in the world and so much was expected of him.

So, you know, your heart goes out to him. He was in the hospital for exhaustion, as he described it, when he learned that he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And he invited reporters to the hospital, and they interviewed him in his bed.

Stephanie: Yeah, that’s not part of the story of King that I’d ever learned before, that very human side.

Jonathan: Yeah. We tend to overlook his frustrations and his challenges and his doubts. You know, he was full of doubts too, like most of us.

Stephanie: So, I want to go next to King as father and husband. If you were in the room with King in his life as one of his children, or as Coretta, how was he different? Who was this person, this family man?

Jonathan: When he met Coretta, he was deeply attracted to her experiences as an activist, her passion for fighting for justice. King dated a lot of women, and he was dating several women when he met Coretta. And she was certainly intelligent and attractive, but he was most interested in her, I think, because of her experience at Antioch, where she had really been engaged in protests, more so than he had been at that point.

So, that was a big part of their relationship. And she continued to challenge him. She was always one of his best advisors and someone who really expected a lot of him. And he respected her intellect and her passion.

At the same time, he was not a great husband in the traditional sense. He wasn’t home much. He was not faithful. He loved Coretta. He loved the kids. He was a wonderful father when he was home.

But, you know, weeks went by when he wasn’t home at all. And even when he was in Atlanta, he was often too busy to spend much time around the house. So, it was complicated, at best. It’s a troubled – it’s a troubling picture, not just because he was so busy, but because he made choices about his family, and he was not always faithful to Coretta.

Stephanie: And what about as a father? Did you interview any of the children and what they had to say?

Jonathan: No, the children declined to be interviewed for the book, but I did interview some nieces and nephews. And I interviewed the Abernathy children, who spent a lot of time around the house with King children. And they said he was a delightful parent, that he loved to play on the floor and get dirty and play ball in the backyard.

He had a game that the kids really loved where he would prop them up on the refrigerator, and they would jump – they would slide off the fridge into his arms. And each kid would get a kiss – each kid had a special spot that was reserved just for that kid, where Dr. King would kiss them. And each one had their own special spot that he liked to kiss them.

So, I get the impression he was a very playful, fun-loving guy. And remember, he was young. You know, he was only 26 when he rose to fame and 39 when he died, so he was an energetic and loving father when he was home.

Stephanie: You talk a lot about his friendship with Ralph Abernathy. So, that’s a whole another relationship. Who was King with Ralph and his family?

Jonathan: I think Abernathy was the guy King felt most relaxed around. They could tell bawdy jokes. They both came from, you know, Southern families. They liked the same food. And they were both preachers.

They could make fun of each other. They’d tease each other about their looks and about – I think Abernathy also understood King’s insecurities. King felt – everybody felt afraid of being in jail. Certainly, Black people had extra reason to fear being locked up in the South.

Abernathy knew that for King it was more than that. That he felt like sort of a crippling sense of claustrophobia almost when he was locked up. So, Abernathy would go to great pains to try to be arrested with King and to try to share a cell with him as best he could to be there for him. Abernathy maybe understood King and spent more time with King than anybody.

Stephanie: You said that you spent time with Harry Belafonte, and you said that you’d go to Belafonte’s apartment or vice versa, and they would listen to music together, including Lead Belly and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Do you know which songs they listened to? Did you get that deep into detail? Like, what was his favorite Lead Belly song?

Jonathan: No. They were protest songs. You know, Belafonte said that they were songs of the movement, but he didn’t name them. And when I asked him that question, he really paused for a long time because he said nobody ever asked them before. I said, “You know, what kind of music did you listen to?”

Because he described how King would take off his shoes and sing along with these records. And I asked him, “Did King have a good voice?” And he said, “Let’s just say it was a powerful voice. I wouldn’t get carried away with the quality of it.”

But Belafonte was a tough critic. He also didn’t care much for Coretta’s singing. So, it was – it was just nice to think of them. It was just nice to think of them, you know, sitting around listening to records like a couple of pals without the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Stephanie: Yeah. That was a nice image.

We hear a lot about King as a movement leader. What did you learn about him as a political rival, if you were on the opposite side of him? You know, what was he like, what would it have been like to be in a room with King if you were his rival?

Jonathan: Well, King really tried to avoid conflict with his political rivals, just as he did with his father. And that included, you know, allies who were, you know, had different angles, including people like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. King hated to be in conflict with them.

When it came to other allies like Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X, King not only avoided conflict, he actually seemed openly curious, eager to learn from them. He enjoyed walking through Mississippi in 1966 with Stokely Carmichael, even as Carmichael was pushing him relentlessly to embrace Black Power. And King kept saying, “It’s not going to happen. I really don’t like that phrase.”

But he enjoyed the debate. At one point, Carmichael says to him, “You know, I’m using you, right? Like I’m getting all this attention, that I’m positioning myself as the more dangerous radical by putting you in this awkward position.”

And King said to Carmichael, “Yeah, it’s okay. I’ve been used before.” He understood. And he was just really genuinely interested in learning from these folks.

And some people would say when it came to negotiating with real politicians like LBJ, that he was naïve because he wasn’t Machiavellian, and he still believed that people made decisions based on morals and maybe that was naïve. Maybe that’s part of what set him back. But I don’t think he could have been any different if he tried.

Stephanie: So, speaking of LBJ and the others, how would you characterize King then as an American citizen? Like, the embodiment of the American ideals, and democracy, and so forth.

Jonathan: Well, he represents the dilemma that runs through the heart of American democracy. That we have mistreated the descendants of slaves. We have mistreated people who have been enslaved and brought here into chattel slavery.

And yet, these descendants of slaves who have every right to be angry are actually trying to make this country better.

And King embodies that, in that he could’ve been angry. He could’ve just raged against the machine. But he didn’t. He tried to improve the machine. He tried to make us a better country. And that was the core of his work.

Stephanie: And even beyond American citizenship.

Jonathan: King is a patriot in that he’s trying to bring America up to the ideals that are contained in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. He’s trying to help the nation get where it ought to be.

And at the same time, because he’s challenging America and he’s calling out its failures, and he’s reminding Americans that God didn’t create nationalities. God didn’t create racial distinctions. Men have done that. That we’re all the children of God.

And that’s really appealing to people around the world because he’s not falling for the sense of, you know, American exceptionalism. He’s not saying that America is God’s country, is special in some way.

He’s saying we are all the children of God. We’re all made in the same image. And I think that makes him a world citizen in the same way that my other biographical subject, Mohammed Ali, was a world citizen.

You know, he could speak strongly to people outside of America because he was willing to criticize America at the same time that he loved his home.

Stephanie: And I imagine too his stance on Vietnam also influenced his stance on a larger aspect of creating a more global community, of finding peace at home, being able to work in more diplomatic ways abroad.

Jonathan: Yeah. When King attacked the Vietnam War, he lost a lot of popularity in the United States. The war was still relatively popular, and King’s approval ratings fell dramatically. And he suffered for it at home, and fundraising for his work dropped off.

But at the same time, he was sending a message that he wasn’t just concerned with the American politics. He was concerned with the words in the Bible and that those words apply to everybody, not just Americans.

Stephanie: Well, you’ve really done your research. Thank you for running through those roles with me.

Jonathan: Those were good questions. Thank you.

Stephanie: I also want to give a shout-out to archivists because as a journalist, writer, you have benefitted from people’s personal archives, from national archives, organizational archives. Can you talk about the importance of, in your work, of these archives and of the archivists that you’ve met and the citizen archivists too, that just keep the records of their conversations? What was the role of the FBI as an archival committee?

Jonathan: Yeah. On the last one, I’ll just say that one of great bitter ironies is that this horrible invasion of King’s privacy helps us to know the man a little bit better because King was not someone who kept a diary. If he wrote a lot of personal letters, we haven’t found them yet.

But we have recordings of hundreds of his phone calls to some of his closest friends and advisors, and some of the women that he was seeing in his travels. And that helps us understand him better.

So, for me, as a biographer, any kind of primary source is golden. And I was very fortunate to find beyond – just his FBI transcripts, a lot of other private sources of material. You know, I found Coretta Scott King’s tapes that she made when she was working on her memoir. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick was the official historian of the SCLC and traveled with King and Coretta to India – just the three of them. Took notes on everything for more than a dozen years. I was, I believe, the first person to open those boxes of his papers. Hosea Williams kept papers that have recently been archived.

Over and over again, I just found new sources that really helped us to better understand King. And yes, shout-out to those archivists and librarians who kept those documents because if we don’t preserve our history, we’re going to lose it.

Stephanie: Just a couple more questions, Jonathan. You mentioned in the “I have a Dream” speech – I love that you portray in the book as the people who are listening and the way that they’re involved instead of it just being from King’s perspective, like the park ranger standing there with the mic. And he mentions in that speech, reparations. Did he speak about reparations at other times, and where does King stand on the topic of reparations and how it relates to democracy?

Jonathan: Yeah. King not only spoke about reparations, he wrote about it. And wrote about it in great detail and knocked down the argument that it was impractical or that it could never be calculated.

He specifically talked about how it might work and how easily a number could be arrived at. And there’s no question that he didn’t think this was a theoretical issue. He thought it was something that needed to be done and could be done.

Stephanie: Ok, great. So, my final question is, how have you been changed by learning about King?

Jonathan: I feel like King has opened my heart and my mind and forced me to think really about what matters the most, and it’s certainly not myself. That we have a responsibility to build a community and to be the best part of the community we can be.

If this book has any effect, I hope that its greatest effect, that it helps people create more of a community around King and to remember what he actually spoke for and what he stood for. And I know that I’ll be out there for the rest of my life proselytizing and spreading the word.

[Music – Make Good Trouble by Gary Nicholson]

Stephanie: That song was Make Good Trouble, by Gary Nicholson. 

You’ve been listening to Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our mother station, KWMR, to our guest Jonathan Eig, author of “King, a Life,” to Matt Watrous, Annie Hewitt, as well as to Bryan Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence, to the Pacifica Network and to you, all of our listeners.

You can find archives of this show at NonviolenceRadio.org, and you can learn more about nonviolence at MettaCenter.org.

If you want to learn more about our guest and his works, you can find that at JonathanEig.com.

Until the next time, everyone, please take care of one another.