I became aware of Dr. King in the late summer of 1963 as a ten-year-old in perpetual motion moving past our black and white TV and seeing pictures of a black man speaking in drawn out syllables and a crowd that seemed to fill up Washington D.C. I remember his voice then. No one I knew spoke like that. The priests mumbled, the nuns’ sentences came in the form of commands and consonants precisely articulated.
In April of 1968, the turmoil of the 60’s had made its way into our high school. I do not know when I began to read about the civil rights movement and Vietnam. My friends and I were beginning to grow out of our childhoods. I was 15. I remember the photo of the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination. Men standing on a balcony of a motel and pointing.
I remember the burning and the rage that came afterwards.
Eig’s biography of Dr. King is superb, but it is not a hagiography. Dr. King, so incredibly young, is presented as heroic, deeply flawed, tragic. For me, after he spoke to thousands to begin his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 (at 25!), the rest of the book reads like an express tractor trailer hurtling along on a long downhill grade. You know what’s coming. In the end, again, for me, it is an immensely sad story. At the time of his assassination (at 39), all the cross currents of a 1960’s disintegrating American society, his own failures of character, the hostility of Hoover’s FBI, and the overwhelming burdens he shouldered, were tearing him to pieces. Like Lincoln, he sensed his own death approaching.
As he aged, he became more radical in his critique of American society. His vision grew to encompass a fight against racism and segregation in the South … and the North. He became a critic of our Vietnam policy and of militarism in general. He grew to believe that poverty was an affliction that must be addressed across racial lines.
What is more radical than loving your enemies and remaining devoted to nonviolence when violence has been the siren call of American life?
Read Eig’s pages about Dr. King’s final speech the night before he is murdered and watch the tape of that speech. He had come to Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike after 2 workers were crushed to death in a trash compactor. He spent hours sitting on the floor trying to talk sense into a Memphis street gang, the Invaders, who had disrupted an earlier march. He walked the route of the March among waves of abuse. He was exhausted. He believed the end was near. I wipe tears from my eyes when I watch it.
Dr. King asserted to a bland, often vicious white public that Black Americans possessed a humanity and dignity fully as real as their own. He gave those who loved him and followed his lead a great gift. He wiped away their fear of acting and speaking in their own assertion of their humanity.
It is impossible to imagine a figure like him in this country today.
