Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. To mark the occasion, we're bringing you a pair of long-form conversations we've had on the show about newly released biographies. We call that series Full Bio. We have two of them that interlock for you to hear today.

In the next hour, you'll hear about historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin's biography of Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to ever serve as a federal judge, and who was the first Black woman to make an argument before the Supreme Court as one of the architects of Brown v. the Board of Education. The biography is called Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. She also happened to represent MLK during her long career. Let's start with one of her most famous clients, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Last summer, we covered the release of the first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in three decades. The book is called King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. Armed with newly released FBI documents, discovered diaries, White House logs, audio recordings, and first-person interviews, Eig has written a 500-plus page book full of detail about the civil rights movement. At its heart, this is not just a history book. The book is about a person. We'll jump into the part of my conversation with Eig about who Dr. King surrounded himself with, who he trusted. During his leadership, King had his wife Coretta, who we'll hear about later in the hour, and he also had by his side several important advisors, friends, fellow freedom fighters, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin.

Here's a clip from the WNYC archives of MLK in New York City at the 369th Street Regiment Armory in 1964, speaking shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, acknowledging that the fight for civil rights was the work of many across the country.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Your expressions of support and your expressions of confidence tonight will give me renewed courage and vigor to carry on in the struggle that is taking place all over our nation. Now, naturally, I was deeply moved to be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As I said the other night in Oslo, Norway, I could not consider the Peace Prize as a tribute to me personally. I hope I will never get that egotistic or that arrogant, but I see it as something much larger. The Nobel Peace Prize was an award to the whole civil rights movement in the United States and to its dedicated leaders.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: As King's power and the power of the movement grew, so did the pushback. His home was bombed. He was arrested dozens of times. As Andrew Young, who joined King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told Jonathan Eig, King was scarred by one particularly brutal incarceration; being transported to Reidsville Prison, a 200-mile ride to the middle of nowhere in Georgia, in the back of a wagon with a German Shepherd snarling. Undeterred, King pushed through and began to expand his work beyond the Jim Crow South and into Northern cities with mixed results.

Here's today's conversation with Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a team of advisors, and I've called them the Black Justice League, who would be with him throughout the civil rights fight. Let's start with Bayard Rustin; a brilliant mind, wrote many of the speeches, was gay. How would you describe Rustin's role in King's work?

Jonathan Eig: When King starts to become famous in Montgomery, the Northern media discovers him and they love this story. Here's this brilliant, well-educated, telegenic, photogenic, Black Baptist preacher from the South who's sticking it to the white Southern segregationists, who's as bright as any Harvard professor, and they can't get enough of it.

Immediately, other activists around the country see the attention that King is getting and they're thinking, we've got to make use of this guy. He can't just confine his talents to Montgomery. We need him in New York, in Los Angeles. We need him in Oklahoma City, in Chicago. We need to spread whatever he's doing, we need to do it everywhere because he's electrifying, and he's forcing white and Black Americans to think about what can be done differently. Nobody really to that point has had this gift for speaking to both Black and white audiences the way that King does.

Bayard Rustin arrives in Montgomery, in the early days of the boycott, saying to King, I'm here to help. I'm going to show you the way. I'm going to help you establish this and replicate it all around the country. He's fascinated to see that King is using a lot of the language of Gandhi and nonviolent protests, but he still has a gun in the house. It's Bayard Rustin who says, oh, we're going to have to do a little talking about that. We're going to have to talk about your message and how we're going to take this national. It's not just Rustin. It's a lot of people who are recognizing that this is a huge opportunity that King is offering.

Alison Stewart: I would love for people to hear Bayard Rustin's voice a little bit. This is actually from the March on Washington in 1963. Before we play this, I know we're jumping around the timeline a little bit, would you share with people what his role was in the march on 1963?

Jonathan Eig: I should preface this by saying that Bayard Rustin was a former communist. He was openly gay. It was very difficult for him to take any kind of a visible role. In fact, when he was working in Montgomery, he had to live and hide out pretty much in Birmingham, stay away from the spotlight because he was a liability. He and others are part of the reason why the FBI began to really pay attention to King and surveil him because they were concerned about him hanging out with people like Rustin.

Rustin is a genius organizer. He has experience and he understands logistics. He understands how to motivate crowds. It's Rustin, more than anyone else, who pulls off the March on Washington, who literally hires buses and considers traffic patterns, and recruits churches and gets people from all over the country to get there on time and to pull off perhaps the greatest march in American history. Bayard Rustin is the engineer behind all of it.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

Bayard Rustin: Friends, at five o'clock today, the leaders whom you have heard will go to President Kennedy to carry the demands of this revolution. It is now time for you to act. I will read each demand and you will respond to it so that when Mr. Wilkins, and Dr. King, and the other eight leaders go, they are carrying demands which you have given your approval to. The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation, no compromise, no filibuster, and that it include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FAPC, and the right to vote. What do you say?

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Another person who was really important in MLK's orbit was Ralph Abernathy. He recruited King to be the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. How did he help keep MLK on track?

Jonathan Eig: Abernathy was a great activist, a great protest leader in his own right, a great preacher in his own right. If King hadn't been in Montgomery, it might have been Ralph Abernathy who becomes the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They were best friends. It is fascinating to think that their friendship began when Martin Luther King stole a girl away from Abernathy, and yet they remained great friends.

Abernathy understood King in a way that very few people did. Abernathy was the one who intentionally would get himself arrested whenever King got arrested so that he could share a cell. Because he understood that King really suffered enormous psychological strain when he was imprisoned, as maybe anybody would, but King in particular, Abernathy thought, really struggled with the isolation, and Abernathy wanted to be there with him. Abernathy really just wanted King to know that no matter how great the stress was upon him, and no matter how many people were gunning for him, no matter how much politics he had to play, that there was one guy he could trust, and Abernathy was always that guy that King could trust.

Alison Stewart: I'm glad you brought up the arrests. How many times, approximately, would MLK be arrested during his lifetime and what were the charges, usually?

Jonathan Eig: King was jailed more than- well, about 30 times in his career. When you think about that, it's extraordinary. It's a reminder of the way that we have used incarceration throughout history to try to intimidate Black people in general, but Black leaders and anybody who might protest the status quo. It's shocking that one of our great protest leaders, one of our great patriots would be arrested and jailed 29 times.

These were not always just like overnight in an urban jail cell. He was driven two hours through the middle of the night on dusty, winding roads with a German Shepherd in the back of a paddy wagon to Reidsville, Georgia, not knowing where or when he might be dumped on the side of the road. Then kept out of communication in prison several times, where he couldn't reach his wife, couldn't reach his advisors, and people wondered whether he'd be coming out. This is the way we treated Martin Luther King Jr. It was intentional, obviously. It was meant as a way of trying to break his spirit. He was often jailed for leading a protest, for kneeling in front of City Hall, a couple times for traffic stops, for really things that clearly he didn't need to be jailed for.

Alison Stewart: How did that weigh on his psyche?

Jonathan Eig: King's friends said that that was the hardest part for him, that he really struggled with the time that he was spent in isolation. Coretta talked about this a couple times. She said for white people in particular, it's difficult to understand the fear that comes with being thrown in jail for a Black person, especially a Black person in the South. That when they have you alone and nobody's looking, you don't know what they're going to do, and you certainly know that this is a way that you can be made to disappear forever. That every time King was incarcerated in that way, he had to know that this might be the way that they take him out for good.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Eig. The name of the biography is King: A Life. I did want to ask about Stanley Levison, a Jewish lawyer from New York City who was a trusted advisor and helped fund the cause, but also would prove to be a pain point for MLK because in his life, Levison had been associated with the Communist Party. What's an example of great advice Levison gave MLK, and what's a time when maybe he cost MLK something or created a problem, whether or not they both knew it?

Jonathan Eig: Levison was a brilliant advisor. It was really Levison who helped King with a lot of his writing, helped him organize his thoughts, helped edit his books for him, helped ghostwrite some of those books. Levison was also key to the financial success of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was the organization that King led.

It was Levison who understood the power of direct mail and how they could tap into fundraising without King having to go and give a speech. Until Levison really hit on the concept of direct mail, the only way the SCLC made any money was for King to go out and give lectures, and that was incredibly time-consuming and burdensome. Levison's creation of the direct mail campaign is a key part of the success of the SCLC.

Levison was also just a really trusted friend and advisor. They would have late-night conversations about philosophy, about the approach to politics and approach to organizing. Levison, because he had experience as an activist, really understood the way power worked. That doesn't mean that he was always a great advisor. Levison is partially responsible for the FBI scrutiny of King because he had these former communist ties. He did not fully cut those communist ties, even though he said he had cut them, and that continued to bring scrutiny down on King. It continued to bring the federal government's pressure down on King.

Then even at times, I think, sometimes King was too radical and too progressive for Levison. When King begins speaking out on things like materialism and militarism, and when he opposes the Vietnam War, Levison, and Bayard Rustin for that matter too, are telling him they think it's a mistake. They don't really understand that King is a minister, that he's a preacher first, an activist second, and that he has to be true to his religious beliefs. That's hard for these more pragmatic activists to understand.

Alison Stewart: There's a great passage in your book from, I think it's one of the first times Levison meets King in 1956. I'm going to read this. "Levison was impressed. He later recalled he didn't seem to be the type to be a mass leader. There was nothing flamboyant, nothing even charismatic about him. He looked like a typical scholarly kind of person, very thoughtful, quiet and shy, very shy. The shyness was accented, I felt, with white people. And even in his relations with me in the early period, there was not always a relaxed attitude. There was a certain politeness, a certain arm's length approach, that you could feel the absence of relaxation. It was as if Dr. King's Southern background, largely with the Black community, had its effect on him as far as thinking comfortably and easily in the company of white people."

How did MLK grow into his role as a leader? To Levison's point, he was shy and he wasn't flashy.

Jonathan Eig: Yes, you hit on something really interesting here to me. King is our great protest leader, our great conflict manager, and yet he's averse to conflict fundamentally. He is shy. He doesn't like for people to argue. He's constantly trying to avoid conflict with his father, with other civil rights activists. He seems like he's scared to death of Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. As Levison points out in that quote, it's particularly true with older white men. King does not like to challenge them. He has to really learn how to do this in a way that he's comfortable with. It takes him a while.

You certainly hear it in the wiretapped conversations with the White House, because King is heard on the phone with LBJ in later years. We can hear him a couple times in conversations with JFK as well. King is very respectful. He's not confrontational, he's not challenging them. He's not saying, "If you want this, I get this in return." He's not cutting bargains like a politician would. He still thinks of himself as a humble servant of God who happens to be in these positions where he's negotiating with authority figures, and he's learning to do it as he goes along in his own way, while still really being true to who he is.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Eig. The name of the biography is King: A Life. When do you think Martin Luther King Jr. hit his stride? When was he operating on all cylinders?

Jonathan Eig: Wow. Well, he was most comfortable and most confident in the pulpit. I think that he loved speaking, loved giving sermons. He recognized that his great talent, that his great power was in the ability to focus the nation's attention. The problem with that is that he doesn't really know when and where it's going to happen. He just knows he has to be willing to throw himself into situations of great tension. That comes with enormous risk because he threw himself into the protest in Albany, Georgia, and came away with nothing.

Then he decides that he's going to do it again in Birmingham. That Birmingham, they're going to focus on-- and some people would say Birmingham was his greatest triumph, but it's almost an accidental triumph. Because what he's basically saying is we're going to create a firestorm. We're going to go in there and we're going to protest all forms of segregation in Birmingham. We're going to try to ignite the community and try to get a reaction from the white leaders of the town and see if we can use that to force the federal government to give us voting rights, to give us legislation that will create a genuine sense of fairness in this country, but he's doing it flying by the seat of his pants. It fails for a while in Birmingham. They really can't seem to capture the attention of the nation until Bull Connor brings out the fire hoses and the police dogs. That's when King is at his best, though, when he's reacting to what's going on around him.

Alison Stewart: I think we all know and learned in school of the big protests: the protests in Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery. What do you think is an equally important but lesser known protest or march or action where Martin Luther King Jr. was successful?

Jonathan Eig: Well, we focus on these big ones, you're right, and we ignore the fact that King was often speaking out on Northern racism. He just wasn't getting the same attention because the Northern white media preferred to focus on the South where the issues were clearer. When he comes to places like Chicago and talks about school segregation there, the housing segregation, the job discrimination, these are issues that are still with us today. We often treat them as if they were failures for King because he left Chicago without the kind of clear-cut victory that he got in Birmingham or in Montgomery.

I think Chicago ought to be considered a victory for King. That's 1966. King comes and he forces the city to confront housing segregation and school segregation. He even gets the city to commit to making fundamental reforms, but because those reforms are not followed up, that the city really fails to follow through on them, we think of King as having failed. I don't think King failed. I think Chicago failed.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book that people said he didn't understand Chicago politics, that that was actually the weak point in that protest. Would you agree or no?

Jonathan Eig: Well, I think he understood it, but he wasn't prepared to really do anything about it and maybe there was nothing he could have done about it. The people around him said that you don't understand that many, many people in the Black community in Chicago are beholden to the Mayor for their jobs, that there are thousands upon thousands of civil service workers who are not going to join your protests. There are many, many preachers who rely on largesse from City Hall who are not going to join your marches. King certainly knew that, but he thought that he could nevertheless create enough of a force in Chicago, enough of a drama that people would force change anyway.

It's true that it was much more complicated. It's certainly true that whenever he went into the North, and this includes New York, and Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, which we refer to it as part of the Northern movement because it's not the South, but anyway, things got complicated for him there. He ran up against not just forces that were beyond his control, but he also ran into a sort of watered-down support from the white community. Because it's easier for white people to send their money when it's a campaign for voting rights in Mississippi, and when you start talking about segregation and white flight in the North, people are a little less supportive, I guess.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue my conversation with Jonathan Eig after a short break, when we'll look at Dr. King's wife Coretta and the role she played in the civil rights movement. This is All Of It.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.