King: the man, the myth, the complex reality, and the alternative history

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful book in which Eig, in part with the help of recently declassified FBI files, access to materials from King's "unofficial archivist" L.D. Reddick, audio tapes by Coretta Scott King in the early months after Martin's assassination as editor's notes for her first memoir, and notes for an unpublished memoir by Daddy King, gives us a complex portrait of a complex person, and the times around him. In addition, more than 200 interviews went into the book.

First, a few notes about what I learned about the pre-famous King, from childhood to Montgomery bus time. They're behind a spoiler alert at Goodreads, but pulled out here:

1. Daddy King was a womanizer and MLK knew it before he went to Crozier. His pledge not to follow in daddy’s footsteps was doubted by a woman to whom he told it at the time.
2. King was non-academically plagiarizing sermons on occasion from early on.
3. Daddy King was a hypocrite over Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta premiere and big PR.
4. MLK seriously dated a white woman while at Crozier, but broke it off after accepting such a marriage would crush his reputation. Harry Belafonte and others said she was his one true love.
5. In the intro chapter, Eig says King made a couple of childhood halfhearted suicide attempts. It sounds like a mix of biological depression plus struggles already then with Daddy King’s full legacy.
6. And, this I didn’t know either. Guess it just never popped. His dad wasn’t born “Martin Luther” King and neither was he. It was “Mike.”  (To be more precise, I may have heard that before, but it never stuck. I do know that my racist conservative Lutheran pastor father hated Martin Luther King Jr. having that name.)

Moving to the adult King, Eig uses the new materials to show more of several things already known to some degree about his efforts with the SCLC. 

First is, from the additional FBI materials (and 2027 will reveal more) just how much Hoover’s hatred drove not just him, but senior assistants, on the spying on not just King, or King plus Stanley Levinson, but also tapping phones of Bayard Rustin and others. And, of course, the biggest laugh is that King only started to question the worst of capitalism, contra Hoover’s claim that he was a Commie, AFTER the taps and moles inside SCLC started. (The reality is that Rustin and HIS background were a bigger threat to “turn” King than Levinson ever was. Rustin knew that, and that’s why he often stayed in the background.

Related to that, and also in part from the new FBI materials, is just how much LBJ started signing off on Hoover’s claims, and how much, despite his trying to blame RFK (and a little, JFK) he wanted more. Sadly, Bobby’s first replacement, Katzenbach, was no better. It was only when Ramsey Clark became AG that the nonsense at least diminished.

Second is better discussion than other bios I’ve read of how not-so-popular King was, not with whites, but other organizations and their leaders. The NAACP and Roy Wilkins, as Eig notes, found him kind of a showboat early on and stressed that their legal victories, not King marches, were the big issue. Then, even before Stokley Carmichael and Black power, James Farmer at CORE, John Lewis preceding Carmichael at SNCC and others thought King too passive at times, too willing to compromise at times and also, not fully buying into nonviolence.

Through all of this, King walked various tightropes, often dependent on Ralph Abernathy as well as Coretta. Especially in earlier years, Eig fleshes him out well. (He didn’t want to move to Atlanta after Martin did, afraid of being under his PLUS Daddy King’s shadow, but eventually agreed.)

Third is King himself, as preacher and prophetic voice, movement inspirational leader, and movement manager. Eig, excerpting from sermons and speeches of his, notes his greatness in the first area while also noting the plagiarism problem that began pre-adult and went through academia never went away. The second? I think one good anecdote is of so many people meeting King in personal and being surprised that he was only 5-7 or so, expecting a much bigger man. His "presence" was huge and magnetic. The manager? Eig is honest on King's lack of organization at times (something he notes that — and notes was discussed by Blacks — seemed then at least to run through Black church denominations and ministers), also his battles for funding and focus with the other organizations mentioned above, but also his own sometimes scattershot approach to specific situations, like going north to Chicago. Plenty of details on all three aspects abound in this book.

Fourth, Eig talks about sexism in the civil rights movement in general. Part of this was due to its pre-feminist movement start. Part of it, he says, also relates to the Black church, and I think that's a fair judgment. On social issues outside of civil rights-related things today, even relatively more liberal Black church denominations and individual members tend to be more conservative than their White counterparts. There's a lot of details, most of it about simply refusing to accept women in leadership roles.

Fifth, per what he noted in the introduction?

There’s not a lot new to me on the personal side OTHER THAN Dorothy Cotton as his … mistress. THAT was all new, while Eig notes insiders called her his “second wife.” As part of this, I found Coretta Scott King’s denialism of it interesting, especially since she knew and accepted his womanizing foibles in general.

The epilogue is good in noting Reagan’s resistance to making his birthday a holiday, and how we still have failed to address King’s “call for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism.”

That said, Jason Sokol’s “The Heavens Might Crack” goes more into that resistance.

Note: While this is a biography, this leads to the speculative “What If” … as in, if King had not been assassinated by James Earl Ray. It’s beyond purview of a review, but as noted at Goodreads, I'm addressing it here.

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And with that, on to the alt history.

What would have happened had King not been assassinated? Starting with the nearest term, my first guess is that he might have got modestly more concessions for the Memphis strikers than Coretta but not a lot.

The Poor People's March? For reasons partially outside his control (the abysmal DC weather that hit the actual event), but largely reasons inside his control — his lack of focus, as noted above, and specific to this event, something warned about by Rustin strenuously, so much so that he refused to participate, and others as well — and the likelihood of a Vietnam tie-in "spoiling it" with national thought leaders, while probably not attracting "poor whites," many of them still (and today still) "mudsills" in their racism, means this would have been about as much a flop with him as with Coretta and with his name attached.

So, what then on his legacy after that? If Bobby is still assassinated, does King, who had never before endorsed a candidate but given hint that he might do that in 1968, swallow hard at the tail end and mention Humphrey's name after LBJ's bombing halt? Or does he call the halt itself hypocritical? And, what if Bobby is not assassinated? It's possible LBJ + Daley and other Northern urban bosses ram through the Hump anyway. 

Wiki's page on the 1968 convention notes that, after the Cal primary, Humphrey still had a plurality, albeit not a majority, of delegates.

At the moment of Kennedy's death the delegate count stood at Humphrey 561.5, Kennedy 393.5, McCarthy 258.

Those 1,200 or so delegates are less than half of the 2,600 or so voting at the convention, and they hugely rejected a "peace plank" and adopted a platform without one by a confortable margin before nominating Humphrey.

The platform was passed by a narrow margin, with 1,567 delegates voting for the platform while 1,041 voted against.

Sorry, Wiki, but that's not "narrow." It's 3-2, or 60 percent in favor. 

Getting into alt-history with RFK as well as MLK, I highly doubt he would have run a third-party candidacy. That means Bobby in 1972 vs. Tricky Dick. Does McGovern call Bobby a hypocrite in primaries, first? Or does he stand aside? In either case, Bobby running in 1972 covers up Teddy taking Mary Jo Kopechne to his favorite Chappaquiddick law firm of Weiner, Deiner, Dicher, Dunker.

So, King would have been stuck again. Side note: McCarthy, largely attacked years and decades later as "soft" on race issues, lost the California primary precisely because he was NOT soft and talked of having public housing for Blacks scattered throughout the LA Southland, a proposition radical for the time. Bobby explicitly rejected that in a debate just days before the primary vote.

Sidebar: While Eig doesn't go into details, just a bare statement of the facts of April 4, 1968, yes, yes, yes, James Earl Ray did it.

There are a couple of other points of alt-history to consider.

First, would Hoover have gotten more ruthless in his wiretaps, etc., and related, would Nixon had gotten more ruthless with what he wanted and did? A qualified yes to both.

Second, would King, having expanded his movement to accommodate poverty in general, and a focus on war, have ever come to terms with, let alone embraced, feminism? I doubt it, and I think the post-Roe world, especially, would have further diminished his reach. More feminists in general, and White liberal ones in particular, would have consider him yesterday's news.