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A review by komet2020
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Last May (2023), I went to the local main library - which is named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - to see Jonathan Eig speak about his new biography of Dr. King, KING: A Life. It is the first biography on the life of Dr. King in 40 years. As I recall, it was a very interesting, and at times, enlightening talk, which showed to some extent the degree of research Eig carried out on his subject, as well as the fact that Eig had interviewed personally many of the few surviving veterans of the Civil Rights Movement who had worked personally with Dr. King and known him very well.
For all its 669 pages, this biography reveals Dr. King in all his complexity, his greatness, his unwavering dedication to social, racial and economic justice, the challenges he faced as a public figure and in his personal life (inclusive of his private indiscretions and the attempts of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to impugn King and destroy his credibility), his relationships with many of the key people in the Civil Rights Movement and with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the hit his reputation suffered among the nation's leaders and general public when he spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 - one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone in support of striking sanitation workers there (overwhelmingly African American) with their grievances against the local government- and to initiate what he intended to be a Poor People's Campaign later in the year in Washington DC to press the federal government to enact into law legislation aimed at helping to bring about much needed economic reforms on behalf of the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised throughout the U.S.
Eig points out, as a summation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the following ---
"Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government or anyone, will ever fix those problems.
"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 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."
Indeed.
For all its 669 pages, this biography reveals Dr. King in all his complexity, his greatness, his unwavering dedication to social, racial and economic justice, the challenges he faced as a public figure and in his personal life (inclusive of his private indiscretions and the attempts of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to impugn King and destroy his credibility), his relationships with many of the key people in the Civil Rights Movement and with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the hit his reputation suffered among the nation's leaders and general public when he spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 - one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone in support of striking sanitation workers there (overwhelmingly African American) with their grievances against the local government- and to initiate what he intended to be a Poor People's Campaign later in the year in Washington DC to press the federal government to enact into law legislation aimed at helping to bring about much needed economic reforms on behalf of the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised throughout the U.S.
Eig points out, as a summation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the following ---
"Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government or anyone, will ever fix those problems.
"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 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."
Indeed.