Biography explores lesser-known side of MLK

There is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Jr. that the world knows and then there’s “Little Mike” introduced to the world by biographer Jonathan Eig in King: A Life. 

In the first few chapters, Eig gives an expansive glimpse of the upbringing and layered experiences that shaped the man who infiltrated the American zeitgeist and became a “founding father.”

Central to the King story is the resounding strength and brilliance of his life partner, Coretta Scott-King. Her story is hardly a supporting character in the book. She is front-and-center as the driving force behind solving many of King’s internal intellectual and existential dilemmas. Carrying her husband’s divine calling in one hand and his humanity in the other, she is resolute in being an active participant toward achieving King’s “beloved community.” 

The 669-page book uncovers never-before-seen papers, interviews and archives as well as King’s humanity. His depression and fear of failure are reminders that beyond his rise as the leader of the civil rights movement, King was a man with struggles and flaws. 

BridgeDetroit Engagement Director Orlando P. Bailey and Associate Editor Christine Ferretti spoke with Eig about the impetus of his book, the yearslong research and writing process and lifting some of the unheard voices and themes of King’s story. 

Editor’s note: This transcript was lightly edited for length and clarity.

BridgeDetroit: Jonathan, the book took you six years. Tell us about your process, what was the impetus for you to want to write a biographical account of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Eig: I was interviewing people for my Muhammad Ali book, and I began to realize that a lot of these people knew Dr. King and I started asking them questions out of curiosity. It’s an eye-opening moment when you realize that these guys weren’t just marching with him. They were hanging around with him and I began asking ‘what was he like?’ 

That’s when I realized it was an opportunity to do interviews with people who knew him and write a different kind of a book than David Garrow and Taylor Branch. Those books were magnificent, they were magisterial but they weren’t intimate. 

A biography can make you feel like you’re getting to know the person and I wanted to write a book that would make you cry at the end when you lose this person that you loved.

BridgeDetroit: Can you talk about the level of access you got with folks close to Martin Luther King Jr., his father’s unpublished memoir and other pieces of research and accounts that we have not seen or heard?

Eig: I did a lot of digging. When I had the idea to do this book, I asked folks who knew King if we needed a new King biography and if they would support my attempt to do this. 

I went to Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young and Harry Belafonte and John Lewis and less famous people, like Reverend James Lawson and Bernard Lafayette. Every single one said ‘we’d love to help’ and ‘we need to do a biography.’ I went to scholars in the field … They all agreed and offered to help, read materials and give me feedback.

It also helped that I discovered new information. For example, I found the unpublished autobiography of Martin Luther King Sr. King had a personal archivist named Lawrence Reddick. He was the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) official historian, and I found all of his papers in boxes that had never been opened.

When I thought about the King interview with Alex Haley for Playboy Magazine – the longest interview he ever gave – I had time to see if I could track down the transcript to see if there’s anything that Haley left out. That took years, but when I got it, it was a huge revelation because it turned out that Alex Haley and Playboy had made up quotes from King and really lied about what he said about Malcolm X and printed something much more inflammatory. When we think of someone like King, you may assume that everything’s already been reported and there’s nothing new to say but once you start digging in, there’s a lot to say. 

BridgeDetroit: Talk about the King that we all know and the King that you were introduced to when writing this book, because they’re different.

Eig: So different, and that’s one of the consequences of turning a man into a monument and a national holiday and thousands of streets. We forget about his rough spots, his flaws, but we also just forget about his humanity.

We forget that he’s a guy who chewed his fingernails and had doubts and worries, who felt like he was failing and nobody was listening to him. He was really human. 

One of the things that I really loved about getting to know him was to see that he was depressed sometimes and that’s OK. But it strikes me that he wasn’t having too much of a good time those last few years of his life because his life was hard, in part, because the federal government was out to destroy him. 

It’s so important to let him have some flaws. We don’t need our heroes to be perfect, we just need them to be heroes. 

BridgeDetroit: In this biography we not only get to see MLK’s humanity, but we also meet a side of Coretta that we haven’t met before. Was that intentional? 

Eig: Oh, absolutely. People assume she was this housewife who took care of the kids. Then of course, when King died, she became a figure of strength. But we missed the story on her because she was an advocate, an activist and an intellectual force and a real important shaper of his views all of their lives together.

 I say very clearly that the reason he fell in love with her is because she was an activist. He was dating plenty of smart, attractive women. Coretta stood out because she had a career, she had a history as an activist. She had more experience than he did when they met because she went to Antioch and was involved in protest movements there. He hadn’t done anything yet. That’s what really excited him about her. 

I wanted to write a book that would really show Coretta and all of her complexity. She was angry that she was relegated to housewife status. She was angry that her husband wouldn’t let her do more as a leader of the movement, but she kept doing what she had to do and she kept pushing him. She’s the one who was pushing him to speak out more on Vietnam. She’s the one who pushed him to focus more on human rights after he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

BridgeDetroit: Tell us how you got into writing biographies, specifically about figures in the African American community, like Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson.

Eig: Obviously, I’m white. I grew up in a mostly white community and my schools were integrated. I can remember the first day of kindergarten, seeing buses of white kids and buses of Black kids. When I got to college there was an African American Studies Department at Northwestern and I took a lot of those classes. 

When I became a newspaper reporter and moved to New Orleans, there was nobody covering the public housing beat there. I found that a lot of good stories had been missed by the media for a long time. It was an important part of my identity as an American, to try to understand our history and how it’s been shaped by race, by racism and by the scars of slavery. 

BridgeDetroit: We’re coming up on just over 40 years of MLK Day being a federal holiday. As we get ready to remember Dr. King as a city with such a rich history of activism, what do you want people to know and do?

Eig: Detroit is a hugely important part of the King story. Don’t forget King’s sister lived in Detroit and Rosa Parks. What we need to remember for the King holiday is not “I Have A Dream” and not “the content of our character.” 

We need to remember that this was a man who was pushing us to think about what we could do to change the world. He said we must stay awake to change and continue to push to make that change and to shape it to justice. That he said the long arc of history bends toward justice. But, he didn’t say it bends by itself. He said we have to be out pushing on it.

I always feel like the King holiday is great, but it should be more than just “I Have A Dream.” It should be a day of fighting for change and we should be out in the streets marching for whatever cause we are determined to make the most change for.

BridgeDetroit: How do you feel the revelations that you’ve uncovered through your years of work are being received? 

Eig: I was worried that people might not want to hear about King’s flaws and King’s personal life was weaponized by the FBI to try to destroy him. I was worried that people still wouldn’t want to hear that. But actually, the response to the book has been wonderful. I think people love King more when they see him as human.

About the author: Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of Ali: A Life, winner of a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize. He also served as a senior consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award. Eig’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.