Not long ago, a Tennessee state representative named Justin J. Pearson delivered a familiar-sounding speech at a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson had recently taken part in a gun-control protest on the floor of the state’s House, in violation of legislative rules. He and a fellow-representative were expelled, but the commissioners in Shelby voted to reinstate him. Pearson is only twenty-eight, but his Afro evokes the Black Power era of the late nineteen-sixties, and the preacherly cadence he sometimes uses reaches back even further than that. “We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate, until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he said at the meeting, thrusting his index finger for emphasis. He was quoting the Old Testament (Amos 5:24: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), but really he was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who put a version of that phrase at the center of his speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. President Lyndon B. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker; the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. The 2014 film “Selma” reverently dramatized his voting-rights activism; some people these days focus on his anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War; others emphasize his advocacy of integration, and his vision of a time when Black children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The proof, and the price, of King’s success is that everyone wants a piece of him.
The first biography of King was published in 1959, a few years after the Montgomery bus boycott, his first big victory. It was written by Lawrence D. Reddick, who was not a neutral observer—he had helped King write his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom.” The historian David Levering Lewis published a thoughtful King biography in 1970, which captured the pessimistic mood that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Lewis portrayed King as a gifted preacher who “moralized the plight of the American black in simplistic and Manichaean terms” but “failed” in his broader effort to promote “economic and political reform.” Between 1988 and 2006, Taylor Branch published the three-volume history “America in the King Years,” which ran to nearly three thousand pages; in 1989, Branch was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Rather than preëmpting future books about King, the trilogy seemed to inspire more of them. The latest is “King: A Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Eig, whose previous book was a biography of Muhammad Ali. Eig wants to give readers an alternative to the “defanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected; notes from Reddick; and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, as well as the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault.
What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, and one that can’t help but be admiring, given how much King accomplished, and how quickly he did so—he was thirty-nine was he was killed. Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it. King viewed nonviolent protest as both a moral imperative and a political winner, because it made protesters look good and segregationists look bad. This sense of how things would play on newspaper front pages and television screens, this exacting attention to appearances, marked King as a distinctly contemporary activist—a master of the viral moment. It also marked him as an unapologetic practitioner of what’s now known as “respectability politics”: the idea that a group is more likely to be treated with respect if its members behave respectably. Unlike King himself, respectability politics does not have a great reputation; the term is used primarily by critics of it who worry that this approach tends to “rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence,” in the words of one NPR report. This is the most paradoxical aspect of King’s long, glorious afterlife: fifty-five years after his death, he is almost universally respected, but his lifelong devotion to the politics of respectability is not.
“Nepotism” would be an unduly censorious word for the family dynamic that shaped King’s life, though not an inaccurate one. When he was born, in 1929, his maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, an Atlanta institution. Two years later, his father took over, thereby becoming one of the most prominent Black leaders in the city. (At the time, King and his father were both named Michael; the father renamed them both a few years later, in honor of the German theologian.) King was born rich and famous, at least by the standards that prevailed in Atlanta’s Black community. Eig writes that he and his siblings “were watched wherever they went and expected to behave.” Accordingly, King was intent on living up to expectations. When he was eighteen, during the second of two summers that he spent in Connecticut picking tobacco, he and some friends were pulled over by the police during a night out. When he called home to tell his parents, he also told them, perhaps strategically, that he had decided to become a preacher, like his father.
He was clearly gifted, with a resonant voice and a knack for rhythm and repetition—Eig compares him to “a talented jazz musician,” in part because he could make other people’s riffs sound like his own. King collected an armful of college degrees, including a theology Ph.D. from Boston University which became a source of controversy in 1989, when researchers discovered that his dissertation was partially plagiarized. He could have accepted a position with his father at Ebenezer, but he chose instead to move to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was in search of a new leader.
King played no role in Rosa Parks’s decision, in 1955, to refuse to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus, but shortly after she was arrested he joined local Black pastors who were organizing a bus boycott. He delivered his first real protest speech at a church meeting on December 5, 1955, employing those twin similes he later made famous. “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he said. He was putting prophetic language in service of a proposal that was actually a compromise: a system of self-segregation, in which white and Black riders would have an equal chance to seat themselves, filling up the bus front to back and back to front, respectively. It was only after the companies refused that King and his allies shifted to a demand—full integration—as bold and clear as his rhetoric.
The Montgomery boycott was impressive partly because of the efficiency with which King and other leaders mobilized to help boycotters get to and from work, and partly because of the astonishing abuse that they withstood, including a bombing at King’s house. But the boycott may have been less consequential than the work of a team of lawyers, associated with the N.A.A.C.P., who sued the city on behalf of four Black bus riders who had been subject to segregation. The boycott put pressure on the city government, but it’s unclear whether it influenced the two district-court judges who struck down the Montgomery ordinance requiring bus segregation, or the Supreme Court Justices who summarily affirmed that decision, ending the era of bus segregation. On December 20, 1956, King announced the Supreme Court’s ruling by paraphrasing an old abolitionist preacher: he reassured his listeners, not for the last time, that “the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.” The next morning, he became one of the first people to ride an integrated bus in Montgomery.
The triumph in Alabama transformed King from a local leader into a national figure, and in certain quarters a superhero—some of his allies turned the saga into a comic book, “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story,” illustrated by Sy Barry, who went on to draw “The Phantom.” Eig, in his biography, shows how King viewed Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolence as an extension of the Christian ethic of sacrificial love. But there remains something mysterious and mesmerizing about King’s calm certainty, which reproduced itself in the minds of his followers. In one of his most popular sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” King delivered a startling warning to anyone opposed to the liberation of Black people in America: “Be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.” Any ordinary leader can promise his followers deliverance; it takes an extraordinary one to promise them tribulation.
During a disappointing anti-segregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, King encountered a wily chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who understood his strategy; after King was arrested, Pritchett arranged to have someone pay his bail, so that he would be involuntarily released. “These fellows respond better when I am in jail,” King said, years later, referring to the politicians he was trying to pressure. In Birmingham, he had a better—that is, worse—adversary: Bull Connor, the city’s public-safety commissioner, who kept King imprisoned long enough to compose “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his most celebrated essay, and whose brutal tactics were captured in a widely circulated photograph of a police dog lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy. King and his allies recruited children to their protests, on the theory that they could go to jail without missing work. In “Eyes on the Prize,” the indispensable public-television documentary from 1987, one of King’s allies, the Reverend James Bevel, recalled borrowing a police bullhorn to calm rowdy demonstrators, because he wanted to avert a riot. “If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement,” he told them.
For King, the civil-rights movement consisted of almost nothing but difficult choices. (The strategy of keeping adults out of jail by sending kids in their stead was controversial then, and would probably be even more controversial now.) What’s amazing is how, in the course of a decade, he got so many of them right, relying more on instinct than on any formal decision-making process within his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he pressed ahead with the March on Washington, even though President John F. Kennedy told him that it was “a great mistake,” and the result was the most celebrated demonstration in American history. He was at the White House when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but still risked upsetting Johnson by protesting the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Selma, Alabama; the protests spurred the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. At one point, King wrote to a friend, half complaining, “People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.”
Thirty years ago, a scholar named Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham published “Righteous Discontent,” a great book about a different group of Black Baptist leaders. Higginbotham told the story of the Church’s Women’s Convention, which was founded in 1900 and became one of the most effective Black advocacy organizations in the country. Higginbotham noticed that the group’s appeals combined “conservative” and “radical” rhetoric, and her book popularized a term for this approach: “the politics of respectability.” It was a wide-ranging strategy, encompassing everything from legal work to children’s toys—the Convention sold Black dolls, meant to “represent the intelligent and refined Negro of today,” as opposed to the “disgraceful and humiliating type that we have been accustomed to seeing black dolls made of.” The women who led this movement valued good behavior for its own sake. (One spoke about “the poison generated by jazz music and improper dancing.”) But they also viewed it as a tool to use in their struggle for equality. Higginbotham quoted the minutes from a 1910 meeting, in which the leaders acknowledged that “a certain class of whites” was refusing to make space for Black passengers to sit down on streetcars, and urged Black passengers not to try and squeeze in. The advice took the form of a moral commandment: “Let us at all times and on all occasions, remember that the quiet, dignified individual who is respectful to others is after all the superior individual, be he black or white.”
Often, Higginbotham noted, respectability politics meant encouraging “middle-class ideals and aspirations” among the broader Black public. If propriety was part of the solution to Black oppression, then perhaps impropriety was part of the problem. “Respectability’s emphasis on individual behavior served inevitably to blame blacks for their victimization and, worse yet, to place an inordinate amount of blame on black women,” Higginbotham wrote. (A Women’s Convention report from 1913 declared that Black women who failed to run orderly households were “an enemy to the race.”) But Higginbotham concluded that these tactics were effective, and probably indispensable. “The politics of respectability afforded black church women a powerful weapon of resistance to race and gender subordination,” she wrote. The notion of respectability may have been entangled with these oppressions, too—but, then, so was everything else.
This is the Black Baptist world that King was born into: his mother, Alberta Williams King, was the organ player at Ebenezer and served for more than a decade as the president of the church’s Women’s Committee. (In 1974, she was playing the organ when a deranged worshipper shot and killed her.) Like the Black Baptist women who helped pave his way, King stressed the importance of “dignified” behavior; he knew that claims of Black incivility or criminality were often used to justify segregation. During the Montgomery boycott, organizers trained activists to be polite, to avoid confrontation, and not to respond in kind when they were cursed at, as they almost always were. And when King announced the boycott’s end he urged his supporters to respond with “calm dignity and wise restraint,” stressing that “if we become victimized with violent intents, we will have walked in vain.” King was a towering political figure, but he was also a pastor, necessarily concerned with personal virtue as well as social change. In 1957, addressing a crowd of demonstrators in Washington, he delivered a rousing speech centered on a firm demand: “Give us the ballot.” But, even then, he added a note of rebuke, warning of the danger of resentment. “If we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns,” he said, “the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.” This was political advice, calculated to keep the support of white moderates, but it was also spiritual advice: a way of urging the activists in the crowd to be guided by the force of agape, or Christian love, and to conduct themselves accordingly.