Principal personages
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the preacher who helped transform the civil rights movement in the United States
Coretta Scott King, his wife, a prominent activist in her own right
Martin Luther King Sr., a.k.a. Daddy King, his father, a preacher
Dorothy Cotton, his close confidante, a civil rights leader
Bayard Rustin, one of his closest advisers; an openly gay civil rights leader
Stanley Levinson, his friend and adviser who had ties to the Communist Party
Understandably, given Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s status as an icon of the twentieth-century civil rights movement in the United States, there has been much published about his life. The first time any biographical material about King was put into print was when he was still a young man with the comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (1957), which chronicles his work with the 1955 bus boycott in the eponymous Alabama city. After his assassination in 1968, King’s life became the topic of countless lengthier biographies, including David Levering Lewis’s King: A Biography (1970), David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Bearing the Cross (1986), and Taylor Branch’s three-volume series Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (1988–2006), which also won a Pulitzer.
King: A Life (2023), written by veteran biographer Jonathan Eig, offers an illuminating and expansive installment in the ongoing literary effort of trying to understand who King was and the significance of his contributions to American society. Prior to writing King, Eig built his career on capturing and contextualizing some of the most iconic figures in US history. After his first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005), a profile of professional baseball player Lou Gehrig, became a New York Times Best Seller, Eig published other biographical works, notably Ali: A Life (2018), a full biography of boxer and activist Muhammed Ali. In King: A Life, Eig attempts to step away from the civil rights leader’s sanitized popular image to provide a fuller, more balanced picture of King.
To accomplish this, Eig incorporates material from a variety of new sources, including recently declassified files about King from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The government agency was obsessed with King during his lifetime, closely monitoring his movements while frequently bugging his hotel rooms and tapping his phones. In turn, the FBI was able to collect damaging information about King, such as the extramarital affairs he had over the years. These FBI files also included far more damaging claims; Eig casts doubt on some of these, based on extensive research and interviews with experts and FBI agents. Ultimately, the biography makes it easy to conclude that while King was a flawed man who struggled with self-doubt and depression, some of the most extreme detracting claims about him were likely the product of the FBI’s relentless campaign to destroy his reputation and undermine King’s lifelong quest to help Black people achieve equality in the United States.
A more interesting and intimate source that Eig uses as a central reference throughout the book is that of Coretta Scott King, King’s wife and close ally in the fight for civil rights. After her husband’s assassination, she began recording her thoughts about him, their relationship, and her experience in the civil rights movement. Eig uses excerpts of these recordings and other materials, including Coretta’s posthumously published memoir, Coretta: My Love, My Life, My Legacy (2017), to humanize King, who, in many ways, was not easy to be married to. Although he had pursued Coretta when they were both graduate students in Boston, Massachusetts, because she was smart and passionate about civil rights, King was hesitant to stand up to his father’s resistance on his decision to marry her. Furthermore, once the couple was married, King expected she would play the traditional role of a pastor’s wife by deferring to his decisions and ensuring that her primary focus was tending to their home and children.
Despite these issues, as well as King’s infidelity, Coretta thought of their marriage as a good one, and Eig draws on her view of King’s life and legacy to help make sure readers see him in a positive light. Eig may aim to leave no flaw of King’s unturned, but at the same time he makes it clear that these flaws pale in comparison to the amount of good that King accomplished during his short life. The book begins its documentation of this life by chronicling King’s parents’ own impressive accomplishments, which include his father’s successful rise from an impoverished sharecropping family to the middle class when he became a well-respected preacher in Atlanta, Georgia. Eig’s narrative then moves on to King’s childhood to reveal that inklings of his brilliance that were evident from a young age; as a gifted child, King skipped several grades before being accepted at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, at the age of fifteen and eventually earning his PhD at Boston University. He also stood out early on as someone special early on to his mentors, peers, and girlfriends—he was a stylish dresser, charismatic, and extremely driven.
Still, it is not until Eig describes the beginnings of King’s activism at the end of the biography’s first section that the full sense of King’s remarkability comes into focus. As Eig reveals, King’s participation in the civil rights movement began somewhat by chance; a group of Black ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, Alabama, needed someone to become the representative of their effort to support the bus boycott and King was a neutral newcomer who happened to give great sermons. When these Montgomery leaders asked King if he would become the president of their organization in December 1955, he agreed, even though at that time he was an unknown preacher and only twenty-six years old. By the end of the 381-day boycott, considered a landmark event of the civil rights movement, King had become a national figure whose galvanizing eloquence helped spark the nonviolent revolution that made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 possible.
The biography’s final two sections chronicle the incredible things King accomplished as a civil rights activist up until the day he died—from the protests and his arrest in Birmingham, to the 1963 March on Washington, to earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and beyond. Eig provides fresh insights into these events by utilizing material he gathered from the hundreds of people he interviewed for the book. Many of these individuals either knew King personally or were present at the events described; their testimonies help Eig infuse the biography with an intimate feeling. Eig’s biography feels most revelatory when it uses these interviews to shine a light on all the small actions of King and his supporters that led to their big accomplishments. For example, the ability of King and other Black leaders to organize action among their communities using word-of-mouth messaging, church services, and flyers seems especially incredible in the digital age.
Yet most impressive is the way in which King’s unique blend of nonviolence and Christian love succeeded in taking down the establishment of segregation. Although this story was well-known before Eig’s biography and he is not the first scholar to examine this part of King’s legacy, King and his followers’ determination to turn the other cheek in the face of violence, harassment, and persecution to convince the world of the injustice of racial prejudice remains deeply compelling. Where King: A Life proves especially effective is in its demonstration of just how brilliant, ruthless, and effective this strategy really was. As Eig writes, “We’ve mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity. We’ve forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they’d hoarded.”
The magnitude of what King was able to accomplish through nonviolence becomes clear in Eig’s depiction of all the harrowing obstacles King faced. The book’s chapters document all the times King and his family were shot at, received death threats, had bombs launched at their house, and had crosses set ablaze on their lawn. At one point, King was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener during a book signing and narrowly avoided a fatal injury. He was also arrested dozens of times during his life for civil disobedience and at one point the FBI tried to use his extramarital affairs to blackmail him into killing himself. As such, it is easy to embrace the idea that Eig establishes that King was somehow ideally suited to become one of the civil rights movement’s most important leaders—he may not have achieved everything he set out to, but he was perhaps one of the few people with the mind, talent, and tenacity necessary to accomplish so much in the face of so much adversity.
King: A Life was met with mostly positive reviews after its publication, with many critics commending Eig’s deft writing style. In his review for the New York Times, Dwight Garner touched on that point, writing, “It’s a clean, clear, journalistic voice . . . [Eig] does not dispense two-dollar words; he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum; he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him.” Here, Garner highlights one of the biography’s best qualities, which is the way in which it relays a density of facts smoothly, accessibly, and engagingly, making the book something that readers from all backgrounds can easily enjoy.
Meanwhile, criticism of mostly focused on what the book could not achieve when it came to breaking new ground on its subject. In his review for the Guardian, for example, Kenneth W. Mack wrote, “In general . . . the King we find here is one that previous biographers have charted.” As King has been one of the most studied figures in modern US history, it is perhaps unsurprising that Eig’s biography is limited in the new information that it can offer on its subject. An argument can also be made that it expands upon what others have written about King to provide a different perspective on who he was and who he might have become had he not been assassinated. While exploring the last three years of King’s life, Eig’s biography emphasizes just how radical and transformative his beliefs had become—King had not only become extremely vocal in speaking out against the Vietnam War and anti-Black police brutality, but he had also begun calling for reparations for African Americans and demanding fair housing, jobs, and wages for impoverished people of all races with his Poor People’s Campaign.
In turn, Eig proves that King was in some ways more like Malcolm X, another civil rights icon traditionally viewed as less compromising and more combative than King, than the media and other biographers have historically portrayed him. Furthermore, King’s views on these issues feel relevant to the contemporary United States, where the fight for racial equality, peace, and economic justice continue. In this sense, King: A Life offers not redundant summary of other biographers’ work, but rather a reexamination of King’s life with new details and an updated, modern perspective. An anonymous reviewer for Publishers Weekly concluded as much, calling the book “an enthralling reappraisal that confirms King’s relevance to today’s debates over racial justice.”