A review by jdscott50
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
challenging
informative
slow-paced
5.0
A new biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. focuses on the man instead of the myth. A young preacher, only 28 years old, was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. He leads the nation in peaceful protest for rights. Instead of focusing on the larger battles, Eig focuses on the everyday. King was keeping SCLS together. King was trying to get people to protest. The stress of the first bus boycott and not knowing if enough would get involved. He had no idea how much the people needed his leadership at this time. He thought he would preach for a few years and then be a professor. Eig even uses the FBI tapes that expose King's infidelity. People knew at the time and now and expressed no interest in it. The records reveal how obsessed Hooer was with King. He even forced agents to retract what was obvious: that King was not a Communist.
The hard part is watching the movement fall apart. The goal was harmony, but not enough white people wanted to get along and then become resentful. Malcolm X, and Carmichael, would spring out of this gap to create a path for Black Agency. The assassination ends the story abruptly but the movement clearly stalle before. His legacy already solidified. Inspirational in that anyone can be a leader, and they don't have to be a saint. The mythology of kKing works against the present and future leaders. This book gives us the man.
Favorite Passages:
Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King; only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before.
The hard part is watching the movement fall apart. The goal was harmony, but not enough white people wanted to get along and then become resentful. Malcolm X, and Carmichael, would spring out of this gap to create a path for Black Agency. The assassination ends the story abruptly but the movement clearly stalle before. His legacy already solidified. Inspirational in that anyone can be a leader, and they don't have to be a saint. The mythology of kKing works against the present and future leaders. This book gives us the man.
Favorite Passages:
Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King; only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before.