The Glorious Life of Martin Luther King – 6/10/2023 – Elio Gaspari

“King: A Life”, by journalist Jonathan Eig, was released in the United States. It is an excellent biography of Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), the black man who helped change the country’s history.

Today, alongside George Washington, he is named after a national holiday. In just 8 of his 39 years of life, King went from being an unknown pastor in the racist town of Montgomery to being America’s greatest popular leader.

Eig details King’s rise, his religious background, his organizational skills, and his sense of opportunity. He emerged in 1955, leading a boycott of city buses, where blacks were supposed to sit in the back seat. (Rosa Parks, the woman who was arrested because she wouldn’t move, now has a statue in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington.)

Racial segregation had popular bases in the south of the country, but it was festering. A year earlier, the Supreme Court had declared it illegal to exclude black children from public schools intended for whites.
King entered the boycott hours late, drawing on an already existing militancy.

His meteoric rise lasted nine years. In 1963, he delivered the historic March on Washington speech (“I Have a Dream”). That was the time that John Kennedy was in the White House. In 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

King has crafted a glorious idea. He challenged racism with a pacifist message, exposing the irrationalism and illegality of segregation. He was arrested 26 times, stabbed and beaten.

With each attack he grew and strengthened the movement. He had something of a prophet, immune to the manipulations of the Kennedys and his successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Eig was helped by the release of Federal Bureau of Investigation documents and recordings of Kennedy and Johnson’s conversations. These collections show that, as King was growing up, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover pursued an obsessive pursuit of him.

Hoover was the epitome of disciplined, efficient, and ruthless police. Personally, he was what was called at the time a “bachelor with strange habits.” Despite this, he bugged the phones of King, his aides and 15 hotels where he stayed. From these clamps came a sexually promiscuous King. (Much less than Kennedy and less than Johnson.)

After 1964, when the struggle against segregation had triumphed, King became a fading star, her light still to be seen, but she was gone.

He recycled his platform fighting poverty and the Vietnam War, but he lacked the ground. In April 1968, he was in a Memphis hotel attending a strike, went to the balcony, was shot in the head and died shortly afterwards.

When the FBI notified Hoover that King had been shot, he said, “I hope that motherfucker doesn’t die. If he does, he’ll be a martyr.”

Hoover died in 1972, without seeing King’s glorification or the implosion of Richard Nixon’s presidency with the Watergate scandal, in whose exposition a resentful FBI agent played a prominent role.

The act that made King’s birth a national holiday was signed in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, who disliked him and his movement.

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