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A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
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It's not mindless scrolling.
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B
It's a fashion pursuit. And when you score that rare Adidas collab or the Dior saddlebag you've been manifesting, it's a rush. Ebay has millions of pre loved finds from hundreds of brands backed by authenticity guarantee. Ebay Things people Love this episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Jonathan Eig, the author of A Life. King A Life is the first full biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King written in decades and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. IG's work mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world. The best selling biography gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He cast fresh light on the King's family origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, his father, with fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice, even if it proved to be a fight to the death. In this landmark biography, I gives us an MLK for our times, a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, a perplexing husband and father, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Jonathan Eige is a former senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including highly acclaimed bestsellers Ali A Life, Luckiest man, the Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day, the Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. Jonathan Eig, welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Thanks, Tom.
- [03:41]
C
Thanks again for taking the time to talk today. And I want to start our conversation with what is probably going to be a pretty complicated question. Your previous work focused on figures from the world of sports. Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. What made you want to tackle a life of someone like Dr. King?
- [04:01]
B
Well, you forgot that I also wrote books about Al Capone and the inventors of the birth control pill, so I was never completely focused on sports. In fact, my career as a journalist was never in sports. So I love sports and I've tried to strike a nice balance between sports books and other books. But I have to confess, having said that, that it was the Muhammad Ali book that led me to King, because I was interviewing people like Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, Andrew young people who knew Ali. And just out of curiosity, I interviewed all of them in person and spent quite a bit of time in their homes in some cases. And I just started asking them, what was Martin Luther King Jr. Like? Because I was curious and and King and Ali overlapped a little bit. They met twice and their stories certainly overlap in terms of their opposition to the Vietnam War, among other things. But I just realized I had this unbelievable opportunity to sit with people who knew King and to ask what was he really like as a man? And, you know, we've turned him into a national holiday and a national and a monument in Washington and almost turned him into a Hallmark card, it feels like at times. And I realized that I would be given a great gift if I did nothing but just travel the country interviewing people who knew King and that what an opportunity that would be for me personally. And then if I could also get a book out of it and share what I learned with other people, that would be a great use of my time.
- [05:37]
C
And we should also point out it's a moment that's going to be past us pretty soon. Right? I mean, some of the people who knew him are not going to be with us for very much longer. This is also an interesting moment to reconsider King. There seems to be part of my post pandemic reading has been to kind of go back and study King. There is recently a volume that came out that considers the political thought of Dr. King. He's also a very prominently featured in a book that kind of takes him into more of a Marxist humanist. Dr. King. And I think one of the things I admire so much about your book is the way that there seems to be a threat. And you said we've sort of almost turned him into a kind of a secular saint. And at the same time I also think that there's this threat risk maybe that King is starting to fracture. People are reading into his message, the things that they want to read into his message because he's such an appealing figure to try to do that. And you've reassembled that. I know this is. I should have asked you this to begin with, but if you have your copy of the book handy, there's a passage on page 557 that I think speaks to some of this. I was wondering if you could read that first Full paragraph.
- [07:10]
B
Page 557. On my most recent Junior Memorial in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2022, I found none of King's books for sale in the gift shop. Our simplified celebration of King comes at a 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.
- [07:52]
C
Yeah, so that part of the inspiration here as well.
- [07:56]
B
It's frustrating to those of us who care about history to see it being misused and to see King being. King's words being used for. To support the nra, for example, or to support, you know, military invasions that. Or to, to attack affirmative action.
- [08:17]
C
Right.
- [08:17]
B
You can find a quote for any purpose. And King is being misused by people on all political sides, every, from every issue. He's also being used to sell, you know, laundry detergent and, and high end luxury automobiles. So I wanted to try to return King's agency to, to make us hear his words again and understand what he. What really mattered to him again, because I feel like it's one of those side effects, you know, and it's a great thing that we celebrate him. It's a great thing that we teach kids about him in kindergarten. It's a great thing that we honor him with a holiday every year. But sometimes we don't get much beyond that kindergarten lesson and we don't assign people to read his, his books. At most we might assign. I think my kids have been assigned to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail in school, but nothing beyond that. And I think that's, that's not really fair to what he was trying to say.
- [09:16]
C
No, in some ways it's heartbreaking. And that vignette that you start that passage with of the idea that none of his works are for sale at the, at the memorial is just. It's stunning. I had the chance to spend some time with where do we Go from here? Prior to this interview. And anyone who wants to really approach King, I think needs to look at that book just to get a sense of, obviously the heroism comes out in, as you say, all of those kindergarten lessons that we still hang onto. But the heartbreak that exists in that work is it's truly moving.
- [09:57]
B
Well, King was obviously much more radical than we like to teach our children today. As Harry Belafonte pointed out to me, we don't like to teach radicalism because we want to make everybody comfortable. But King was a radical long before he began fading in popularity. He was a radical from the beginning because that's because he believed Jesus was a radical and he was trying to follow the teachings of the Bible. So we do him a disservice when we try to water him down. All, all of our images that we'd like to have of him.
- [10:33]
C
Yeah. Again, even when it's well intentioned and we're trying to do something positive, I actually believe that. And again, I think your book makes an important contribution to this moment where people are reconsidering his message and trying to reframe it for our contemporary times. So this book is a really rich and layered biography of this extraordinarily complex person living through this extraordinary moment. And there are so many different ways that we could talk about this and enter into this conversation. But I'd like to focus on some of the relationships that are highlighted in that opening passage that I was talking about. One of the most complicated, I think, is his relationship to his father, or as you. As we call him here, Daddy King. So tell us a little bit about what you learned about not only his Daddy King, but also about his family of origin.
- [11:32]
B
It's difficult to trace the King family back as it is for many African American families, because slave names often weren't recorded. They were seen as property, and the government tax collectors and census takers didn't care. And. But I was able to trace the Kings back some further than some have. And I was able to see where they worked as sharecroppers, who they worked for as sharecroppers. And Daddy King's story is really an extraordinary one. I mean, we should be writing operas and plays about Daddy King because he comes from this family of sharecroppers. His father has basically been beaten down by the system, has turned to violence and alcohol. His mother remains faithful to God and a true believer in church every Sunday. And. And Daddy King is the one who, at the age of 12, decides he's got to do something different. He's gotta. He's gotta get out. He's almost illiterate, and he just starts walking toward Atlanta, takes a job at a railroad, teaches himself to read and write, starts preaching at a very early age because that's one of the few jobs that the black people at that point could have where they had some control of their own destiny. And marries into this also very religious family. It gives him a chance to become eventually the. The pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, one of Atlanta's biggest churches. So King grows up in this really. Martin Luther King Jr. Grows up in this extraordinary family that has, in just a very short time, pushed itself. You know, Daddy King, in particular, has really lifted himself out of these abject circumstances into a life of opportunity for his son.
- [13:12]
C
And.
- [13:13]
B
And. And of course, that makes. It puts a lot of pressure on. On young ML, as they call him, to. To live up to his father's expectations. And that push and pull, that relationship between Daddy King and MLK is a fascinating one. And it's a. It's a complicated, difficult relationship from. From beginning to end.
- [13:32]
C
Yeah. And because even throughout the entire civil rights movement, you had, again, Daddy King protect his son from some of the dangers that he was facing by putting himself in front of the movement.
- [13:47]
B
One of the things that really surprised me, I found an unpublished autobiography of Daddy King, something he wrote before his published autobiography, and it included the transcripts of his interviews for that autobiography. And he really says over and over that he didn't want his boys to become preachers. He wanted them to be. To choose something more stable, to, to make some money. And then once they, not surprisingly, defied him and, and when they both went into the. In, into the priest business, into the pastor business, he, he urged ML over and over again to, to get out of the, of this leadership role in the movement, that he was putting his, his risk, his life at risk. He was putting his family's life at risk. You know, Daddy King goes to Montgomery after the, after ML's house is bombed and says, you're coming home with me. And Martin and Coretta, to her credit, both say, no, we're not, we're staying here.
- [14:45]
C
Yeah, it's really, it's a fascinating. The two of them obviously struggled with each other, right? I mean, there was a deep and abiding love there, but at the same time, you know, kind of a power struggle in a sense. And that also leads to another really complicated relationship having to do with his wife, Coretta Scott. In the epilogue, you paint this incredibly poignant image, image of the blue suitcase that sits under the bed containing the letters written to her by King. And we don't know what's in those letters. There's a part of me that hopes we never find out. Probably some things that are best left private at the same time. Obviously the historian or the academic in me would certainly like to delve through those things to find out things. What can you tell us a little bit about King's relationship to his wife?
- [15:43]
B
Yeah, let me just say that the blue suitcase is my white whale. I will continue hunting it as long as I can, but we don't know where it is. Those are the. Believed to have a suitcase believed to contain all of the personal letters from Martin to Coretta. But one of the. I really worked very hard in this book to try to create a full portrait, a more multi dimensional portrait of Coretta because she hasn't received a really great biography yet. She's told her own story a couple of times. But she's fascinating and she's so important. And I think the reason Martin falls in love with Coretta is because she has experience as an activist, because she has this passion to really be involved to really work in the fight for justice and racial equality. And yet, because of the way Martin Luther King Jr. Is raised and because of the expectations he has around gender roles, she never really gets the chance. And she's obsessively frustrated by that. She begs him time and again, I want to do more. I don't need to be home with the kids all the time. Other people can help out with the kids. I want to be with you. I want to be protesting. I want to be putting my, you know, boots on the ground and, and going to jail if necessary. And, And Martin won't have it.
- [17:02]
C
He.
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B
He wants her home. He thinks that's the, that's her role and that's what the kids need most. And at the same time, he's not being faithful to her. And she, in my opinion, absolutely knows it. And, and that's another source of enormous tension. And then when the FBI starts using his. His sex life to try to destroy the marriage, destroy his reputation, she's got to stand up for him. She's got a, you know, she, she has his back all the way. There's never a moment of doubt, as far as I can tell, in her.
- [17:31]
C
Role as trying to.
- [17:33]
B
Yeah. She even to her dying day, refused to admit that. That there was any kind of adultery going on, that. That him all the way, despite, you know, enormous evidence to the contrary.
- [17:48]
C
So that leads to another theme in this book that they're terribly comfortable even talking about, and it has to do with King's other intimate relationships. But I think the more important thing, and you highlight this, I think, importantly, is the recently declassified FBI files that were really part of an ongoing project to, not merely to discredit Dr. King, but really to destroy him. I mean, you said to destroy his marriage, but really they were trying to compel him to commit suicide. And again, the shock of the. And shock is probably the wrong word because can any of us really be shocked about some of the things that our government has done? But the. The part on page 397, you talk about the journalists who are given this information, refused to use it, and no one questioned that the, The FBI was collecting this information.
- [18:55]
B
Right. And I, I want to be careful here because I, you know, I try to let people. I try to judge people by the standards in which they lived at the time. I don't want to apply 20, 23 standards to what we expect journalists to do, but I, I do believe that opportunity and a responsibility to report what they knew about the FBI's campaign against King and I worked hard in this book to be a fair and honest and to describe the true nature of King's, you know, marriage and his extramarital affairs. But at all times, I was conscious of the fact that what really matters about King's extramarital affairs is how they were weaponized by the FBI in a campaign to destroy him. And that campaign had nothing to do with the fear that he was a communist, even though that's how Hoover liked to portray it. It was strictly. Well, not strictly. It was largely a function of racism. The threat that a black man might lead the black community into a situation where they demanded real change was frightening to J. Edgar Hoover, and not just J. Edgar Hoover, because the white media, as I said, made that possible. Many members of Congress knew exactly what was going on. These documents were shared with members of Congress, and perhaps most importantly, they were shared in enormous detail with lbj, who not only was aware of it, but sanctioned it and in some cases, I believe, encouraged it.
- [20:23]
C
So. And that sort of leads to another question. Let's talk a little bit about his relationship to lbj. As you said, he was aware of what the FBI was doing at some point. He tried to keep kind of, according to your book, tried to keep his career arm's length distance from it, asking that the. The letters be put into a. A file, but. Or a vault. Right. By his secretary.
- [20:49]
B
Right. But there was no arm's length at all, actually. LBJ was. Was wallowing in this. In this information. He was. He was a. Enjoying it, according to people who knew him, that he liked getting this salacious material, almost, you know, viewed it as. As titillating, I think, and, and to be able to laugh with the boys about, you know, King's sexual behavior. You know, it's. It's gossip of the worst kind, and it's pernicious and it's racist. And, And. And you'd like to think that LBJ would have recognized that King was a very important ally to him. LBJ said that the Voting Rights act and the Civil Rights act were, you know, his greatest accomplishments toward achieving civil rights and making America a more just society was what he was most proud of. And that who helped him more in that than Martin Luther King? He could not have done it without King. And yet he did not appreciate that or respect King enough to shut down J. Edgar Hoover or at least to say, I don't want to see this stuff. That would not have taken a great moral act of courage for him to do that. But he's getting and this is something I discovered at the LBJ library and files of. Of LBJ's secretary and his liaison to the FBI, Mildred Steagall, that he was getting upwards of one or two memos a week, personal memos. This is not just something that he was cc'd on. These were letters directly from J. Edgar Hoover to lbj. And that he was looking at the majority of them and filing them away in his safe because he knew that they were sensitive.
- [22:25]
C
It's astonishing. More than anything else, these files, whatever they may reveal about Dr. King, they say really something much more profound about our government and the misuse of power at the highest levels of our government. But at the same time, this effort had its effects. Right. So talk to us a little bit about the kinds of strains that this put on Dr. King.
- [22:51]
B
Well, first of all, it absolutely damaged the relationship between King and lbj, which may have been the greatest, most influential relationship between an activist and a president in American history. And when. When LBJ takes office and you. And we can hear his phone calls, they're. They're recorded and they're available. We can all listen to them online. He calls him Martin. And there's this very warm relationship that you. In the tone of their voice and the way they. They relate. And over the months and years ahead, that changes. That becomes icy or it becomes more formal. And Martin is now Dr. King. And that has an impact. And it had an even, perhaps even more profound impact on King's mental health. He felt enormous strain as he spoke out more aggressively, not just about the Vietnam War, but about Northern poverty and Northern racism and segregation. He felt under pressure from all sides, and he knew that he was destroying his relationship with what was left of his relationship with LBJ by attacking LBJ's war in Vietnam. And he did it anyway because he knew, he felt at his core that this was the right thing to do, that this is what his beliefs, his religious beliefs in particular, commanded him to do. So that took a toll. You've got the FBI trying to destroy your marriage. Every morning he woke up wondering whether the newspaper was going today, today, some reporter who had the tapes, who had the transcripts. Any day, any. Any newspaper in the country could have made the decision to publish that. And he woke up every morning wondering if this was the day that somebody published the story that he knew the FBI was spreading about him. So good, so good, so good.
- [24:41]
C
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- [25:06]
B
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- [25:37]
C
Yeah, and it's just, it's just remarkable. And again, you describe in, in really harrowing detail the, the, the stresses that this put on him and, and the effects that this had, not just on his message and his relationship, but as you say, on his mental health and his physical health. I was wondering if you could just, you know, describe a little bit of that to us.
- [25:57]
B
You know, it was surprising to me just how obvious it was. It's been sitting there for all of us to see. But Perhaps because biographers 25, 30 years ago weren't as keyed in on issues of mental health, they didn't notice how many times Coretta, in her memoir, uses the word depression, uses the word exhaustion, uses the word anxiety. You don't, you didn't notice that people like Andrew Young and others were saying that, you know, King started to drink more heavily. And, you know, for example, how obvious is it that when he gets the news that he's won the Nobel Peace Prize, where does he get the news? He's in the hospital. He's there for exhaustion, as they call it at the time, but now we would probably call it depression. And he actually lets the reporters come and interview him in the hospital, in his hospital bed. So he wasn't trying to hide it. And in the transcripts of the, of his phone calls, you know, his phones were tapped, his advisors, phones were tapped. We have a lot of transcripts of these conversations. And one of the things that's really stunning to me and it often gets overlooked, is how often he talks about his need for a vacation, how he really doesn't want to come back from when he is on vacation. Even when he's in the hospital, he asks whether somebody can help talk to his doctors to let him stay longer. So he's clearly under just enormous strain as anyone would be in that position. But he's human. And we forget that sometimes to our detriment.
- [27:21]
C
We forget that one of the other important Contributions that I think this book makes is that it brings to life this moment in American history that I think some people may not know or even want to know. The stories concerning the depth of racial hatred that King confronted are almost too depressingly varied to describe. But there is a single episode that I want you to talk about that I think highlights so much of both the absurdity that people were willing to go through. Tell us about Montgomery's Oak Park.
- [27:57]
B
Oh, man. So we know all about the Montgomery bus boycotts, of course. And we know that the people of Montgomery rallied and united and. And overcame enormous obstacles to force the city to integrate its buses. And they were trying to think about what to do next. You know, how do we continue this push in Montgomery? How do we make sure we keep the, you know, our foot on the gas and force the city to do more? And they consider an effort to integrate parks their next. Their next effort. And throughout the south, there was enormous segregation and enormous inequality in the city park systems and in state park systems. You know, there were more parks for white people than there were for black people. The white parks had more amenities than the parks for black people. There were swimming pools and tennis courts in the white parks. There were zoos in the white parks, and the black parks tended to be, you know, a swing set, if you were lucky. So the people of Montgomery. While King was now traveling more nationally and wasn't as deeply involved, the people of Montgomery decided to try to integrate the park systems. And city park in particular, was this jewel. It had this fabulous zoo. It had swimming pools. It had. It was, you know, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. It was one of the greatest parks in America. And the city shut it down rather than integrate it. They fenced it off and they. They killed the animals, the zoo animals. They drained the pools. They let weeds go across it. That's how adamant they were that they were not going to allow this uprising to continue. They were not gonna. You know, black people might have succeeded in getting the buses integrated, but that's. They're not getting anything else out of it. If they think this is going to become a city that. That. That. That integrates, they got another thing coming. And that was a powerful lesson. And it wasn't just. It wasn't just Montgomery. We see this happen in other cities, and eventually we also start to see schools shutting down, cities and counties shutting down public schools rather than integrate their schools.
- [30:00]
C
Again, it sounds naive to be astonished by it, but at the same time, there's something about that image of killing the animals in the zoo and paving over this, as you said, a jewel for the entire community rather than see it integrated. It speaks volumes to, obviously, to the race relations that were live at the time.
- [30:26]
B
Yeah. We sometimes forget, and it's easy to forget, just how much was at stake. White people had this stranglehold on power. They had these unbelievable opportunities and advantages in large part because they were able to cast the black community into a subordinate position. It made for cheap labor. It made for, you know, more.
- [30:49]
C
You.
- [30:50]
B
Know, lower taxes, all kinds of things. Letting go of that, you know, and that's how they viewed it. They viewed integration of the buses or integration of the schools as a crack that was going to destroy eventually, cause their whole system to come tumbling down.
- [31:05]
C
Yeah. And again. And so they, you know, talk about, you know, cutting off your nose to spite your face. They just, you know, they. They didn't have the zoo any longer. They didn't have that park any longer. It's just so. And there are so many stories like this that are contained in this work and. And also stories about so many different relationships with figures like a Philip Randolph, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, just to name a few. Are there any. Is there any one that stands out to you from your work that. That we should. That we should discuss in. In some more detail? I know you covered some things about his relationship to Malcolm X that I don't think are. Are as widely known as they might be.
- [31:44]
B
Right. One of the interesting things about King to me is that he really does not like conflict. He's the leader of a protest movement who doesn't like conflict. And that just tells you so much about him. But in all of these relationships with people who he sometimes had trouble with, he loved a Philip Randolph. He had trouble with Roy Wilkins. He had trouble with Stokely Carmichael. He didn't agree with them always, but he was always looking for common ground. He wanted to work with all of these people. I can't think of a single person where he just stubbornly or angrily said, no, that guy, I'm not returning this calls. He engaged with everybody. And the relationship with Malcolm is one that we really have misunderstood. And I discovered proof of just how the media. I was going to say the white media, but it wasn't just the white media, because Alex Haley, the black writer, was involved in this particular scandal. But the media was distorting and trying to stoke controversy and create conflict between these two men. So King and Malcolm only met once. Malcolm did go to Selma once to try to see King. King was in jail at the time. And Malcolm saw Coretta and had a good meeting with her. But after Malcolm's assassination, when. No, I'm sorry, it was before the assassination. Playboy interviewed Alex Haley, writing for Playboy, interviewed King for what I believe was the longest interview King ever gave. It was, you know, at least five, six thousand words long. And I. And in that interview, and this is a famous quote, it's taught in African American history classes around the country, King says he disagrees strongly with Malcolm's approach that violence is never the way and people who rely on stoking hate to achieve racial progress are going about it wrong. So I was able to track down Alex Haley's transcripts for that interview. And King didn't say that. He said that in regard to the Nation of Islam, the question was, what do you think of the Nation of Islam? And he said, I disagree with groups that stoke violence, that think that violence is the way to force change. And they changed to make that quote read as if it were a response to a question about Malcolm X. And when asked about Malcolm X, King was actually much more open minded. He said he looked forward to getting to know Malcolm more and that he thought that they had things in common.
- [34:11]
A
So.
- [34:14]
B
A lot of people, and Peniel Joseph has written nicely on this and so did James Baldwin, for that matter, a long time ago, said that King and Malcolm were a lot more alike by the time they reached the ends of their lives. They had more in common than they had separating them. And I think that history has borne that out, that they were both moving in the same direction. They were probably moving toward a potential meeting of the minds where they would have found that they were effective partners if they had had the chance.
- [34:46]
C
Although, again, still in the popular imaginary, there's that perception that they were in some ways antagonistic to one another. And especially I think in your book that the vignette that you describe where King meets with Coretta Scott, it's a very touching episode.
- [35:05]
B
They were antagonistic sometimes. I mean, Malcolm definitely used King as a foil and criticized him for trying to work with a white leadership, white power structure that was never going to really be open to true progress. But at the same time, this meeting, as you've made mention, Malcolm says to Coretta, very cleverly, let Dr. King know that I'm out there as a target, that they can really hate me, and maybe that'll make them more inclined to work with your husband.
- [35:38]
C
Yeah, it's really an astonishing moment. So we have to start to wrap up, but before I let you go I want to ask a final question. We've already discussed to some degree, Dr. King's legacy, but why is this important today? And I'm curious as well. What effect has spending this much time with the man had on you personally? Wow.
- [36:03]
B
Good question. You know, I feel like we need to hear King's voice again. Certainly he was warning us about so much that we see in our society today. So much that remains problematic. There's still so much racial division. There's still so much segregation. There's still so much inequality. We still have the police brutality that he complained about in his March on Washington speech, one that we often. A line that we often don't remember.
- [36:31]
C
So I think that speech that we don't remember.
- [36:34]
B
Yes, that is true. Please read the first half of that speech.
- [36:39]
C
Right.
- [36:41]
B
But we need to hear his voice again. And certainly we'll find that. That he has much to teach us today. That's partly why I. I wanted to write this book. And, and I guess for me, how this experience changed me. I don't think I've ever spent this much time somebody who was so deeply committed to his core beliefs, who was willing to walk that walk. I mean, Muhammad Ali was a truly inspiring hero, and he absolutely was willing to sacrifice everything for his beliefs. But King, over and over again, not only stepped up, but stepped up farther and farther. You know, every time he could have. He could have paused, he could have allowed someone else to come in for him, move the ball the next to the next marker. Instead, he just risked more and more. You know, he was absolutely not perfect, but so committed to his core beliefs and so really inspiring, and that he believed that, that we could change. He never lost hope. And, man, he had a lot of reason to lose hope, but I don't believe he ever did.
- [37:49]
C
No, again. And that's, I think one of the beautiful things that your book does and why I'm glad that we have it now at this point in our history, is because you've in a lot of ways, sort of restored his humanity. Again, it's easy to think about the inspiration. Right. It's easy to think about the. The compelling words that he offered. It's much more difficult to often grapple with the depths of despair that sometimes those things came from.
- [38:22]
B
Absolutely. And I think he can inspire us and move us more if we think of him as a human being and if we can relate somehow to what he went through. And I think we can and should try to do that.
- [38:35]
C
So again, the book is due out next week, correct?
- [38:39]
B
Yeah. May 16th.
- [38:40]
C
All right. So we'll be looking for it. I've got actually, I just received my hard copy today.
- [38:46]
B
Oh, good.
- [38:47]
C
Very excited to get that today. Once again, I want to thank you for your time and again, really thank you for this work. I think it's a beautiful book and it speaks so much to this present moment. So with much appreciation.
- [39:03]
B
Thank you. It's nice talking to you once again.
- [39:06]
C
My guest today has been Jonathan Eig, the author of King A Life, due out on May 16, from Farrar, Strauss and Drew. My name is Tom Disena, and you are listening to the New Books Network.