In his new biography of Martin Luther King, the journalist Jonathan Eig promises to focus on telling the story of the man and not the icon. King does, of course, go into great detail on the triumphs of the civil-rights movement. The successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which kicked off King’s career as an activist in 1956, is the almost sole focus of chapters 14 to 17. The book also features a long and sympathetic account of the early 1960s freedom rides and the lunch-counter sit-ins. From Brown v. Board in 1954 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Eig documents one of the epochal eras of American history with depth and even some poetry as King details the way in which this consensus national hero worked his will and made his mark.

But it is to Eig’s credit that his 669-page tome also includes a good deal of controversial and negative material largely absent from the MLK biographies I was assigned as a college man two decades ago. Perhaps most notably, King’s long-running problem with plagiarism is tackled openly and honestly.

This issue was, apparently, far longer in duration and more serious than I had previously known. According to Eig and his sources, King “borrowed” his first sermon, at Atlanta’s legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church, from a text by then-popular preacher and motivational speaker Harry E. Fosdick. The recovered Fosdick monograph is titled “Life Is What We Make It.” King’s sermon was called “Life Is What You Make It.” Essentially the same thing was true of King’s first major paper at Crozer, his seminary in Pennsylvania. In one passage, the young divine copies “all but one word” from a passage in the theological text Prophecy and Religion.

As has been known (if only selectively reported) since 1990, King’s dissertation did not break from this unfortunate pattern. “Substantial portions were plagiarized,” with most of the stand-out introduction “copied…verbatim from a book called The Theology of Paul Tillich.” A different 50 to 60 sentences were directly copied from a thesis written at the same institution (Boston University’s Divinity School) just three years earlier.

Rather remarkably, King and the earlier writer (a Dr. Boozer) not only knew each other but had the same primary dissertation adviser, who apparently noticed none of this. King seems to have toned down the plagiarism in later years after finding his own voice, and how it should affect King’s standing among intellectuals is up to each scholar to decide for herself. But Eig forthrightly provides the tools needed to make that decision.

Eig also goes into King’s adventures with women, featuring a female friend of MLK’s at one point describing his approach to dating and sex as akin to “a competitive sport.” In this, it should be noted, King appears to have been a fairly typical high-status man of his time. The 1950s–’70s Mad Men era was a boom time for male philandering. Eig follows many others before him in establishing the context here, bluntly describing how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson chased (and caught) women beside their wives at a far faster pace than his biographical subject.

Eig is careful to show the ways in which King was indeed a man of his time. For example, while he was relatively enlightened for a pre–Griswold v. Connecticut Southern Baptist minister, King was no feminist and strongly disapproved of women working. On one occasion, he noted, “When a woman has to work, she does violence to motherhood…depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection.” King thought even of his own wife, the brilliant and conservatory-educated Coretta Scott King, largely in these terms, “primarily in terms of being a home-maker and a mother.” The great man certainly did not keep these opinions close to the vest, writing a witty agony-aunt advice column for Ebony at one point that would be un-publishably non-PC by today’s standards—and which was full of advice that the hard right today would unironically adore.

For example, the late-1950s King told a woman with a wayward spouse not only to seek counseling rather than divorce but also “to consider what role” her own nagging and complaining played in the affair. King was also a homophobe. Contacted by a gay man, he told the desperate young fellow that his feelings were “culturally acquired” rather than “innate” and were a serious “problem”—and again recommended a stringent course of therapy.

All that said, Eig’s biography is not primarily a negative one. “Martin Luther King did a lot of good things” may be among the least controversial statements of all time. Eig not only makes the accurate point that MLK’s civil-rights revolution was a national triumph of which all Americans can and should be proud; he also (intentionally or not) contrasts it with the very different “woke” movement of today.

Unlike modern self-declared social-justice warriors, who often seem to despise Western culture, the leading activists of King’s era are depicted as high-IQ preachers and lawyers who saw the United States of their time as a racially unfair but fundamentally good society. What they wanted, in a word, was in: a chance to enjoy the benefits of post–World War II American freedom to the same extent as their countrymen. By today’s standards, the life-worlds that produced these men (and women) and these desires were often staggeringly normal and bourgeois.

While Eig’s book at no point minimizes racism—how could it?— a young Martin Luther King is described as having grown up in a middle-class black Atlanta community that billed itself as “Sweet Auburn: the (best) Negro street in the world.” The headquarters buildings of the Atlanta Daily World, one of the first and most successful black newspapers, were nearby. So were at least two solidly performing black colleges.

Perhaps most notably, to modern eyes, the huge majority of families included two married parents. Recall that the “shocking” 1963 rate of black illegitimacy that prompted Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his eponymous Report in 1965 was 23 percent; today’s figures are 35 percent for whites and a bit over 70 percent for blacks. MLK is described as “fortunate to have grown up in a loving household, with educated parents in a stable marriage.” He was by no means alone: On his block and throughout this entire area of Atlanta, male heads of household were “business owners,” porters for the still-novel national railroads and airlines, and upper servants—all expected to remain married to their wives and to support their families.

The pillar-of-the-community church pastored by the father of Martin Luther King Jr. offered a full-service day care for families in which both parents did choose or were forced to work. King’s Sweet Auburn sounds, in many ways, like a better and more stable place than many black—and not a few white—’hoods today. The black men and women who emerged from this early-modern United States—MLK first among them—were, in the huge majority, functional and honest tax-paying citizens who demanded their due place at the general American table, not its reduction to kindling.

Interestingly, many of King’s more extreme later-life views seem to have been shaped not by his upbringing in black communities but rather by radical white advisers, such as Stan Levison, a probable Communist whom the FBI thought “did not turn up at (King’s) elbow by happenstance.” In a darkly hilarious moment chronicled by Eig, Levison critiques the portion of one of King’s books dealing with “Negro self-improvement.” This simply should not be a chapter, the white activist argued (mostly successfully).

“Rather than urging Negroes to ‘hold up the mirror’” and pursue character development, “Stan” argued that the total focus of the movement should be on laws mandating social equality. “Few people understand” that—for example—relatively high levels of black illegitimacy are entirely the down-river effect of slavery, went Levison’s pitch. This argument, which happens to be empirically wrong, is still heard almost verbatim today. It is a pity that King heeded it.

All told, Martin Luther King was not a perfect man. He was sometimes ill-advised, unchaste (in his terms) with women, and, let us say, poor at crediting primary sources on the note cards for his books and speeches. But he nevertheless was the Essential Man when it came to the rights revolution inside the United States, something Eig illustrates well. As with Washington and Lincoln (who liked the ladies, too), and King’s friend Bayard Rustin (who did not), we should understand the human inside the legend—but not tear down the statues anytime soon.

King sums all of this up and is worth reading.

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