King: A Life
Jonathan Eig (Picador, $31, 669 pages)
Martin Luther King Jr. is probably the most famous civil rights leader in American history and as such biographies tend toward hagiography. Jonthan Eig’s King: A Life, released in hardcover in 2023 and paperback earlier this year, avoids that mistake, offering a rich and deep exploration of the slain civil rights leader. Eig, author of biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali, and a book about the birth control pill, is first and foremost a researcher and much of that research goes into exploring King’s foibles: his tendency early in his career to plagiarize (sermons, college papers, his college dissertation) and his marital infidelity. Eig discovers that King’s problems with plagiarism and womanizing were much larger than even King’s (sometimes racist) critics acknowledged. Eig quotes a female friend of King who described his approach to sex as “a competitive sport.” The focus on these sins brings King down a notch or two from his lofty perch in the pantheon of American heroes and is a useful reminder that we are all capable of being sinners and saints. (King-era presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were also notorious philanderers, as Eig points out.)
But King: A Life is no exercise in muckraking and we should not be distracted from the important leadership King provided in ensuring that American blacks would enjoy the promise of the American experiment. Eig details the civil rights activism of King including his unsuccessful Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1956, an event that led King to the path of civil rights activism. There are freedom rides and lunch-counter sit-ins, reactions to Supreme Court decisions and civil rights legislation, non-violent confrontation and rousing speeches. Sometimes, King: A Life reads like a relentless listing of facts without context. It would have been helpful to understand how a Baptist preacher squared his support for contraception or his own lax morals (the womanizing) with his religious beliefs, the same beliefs that led King to embrace non-violence to fight against civil rights injustices.
