Customer Reviews

Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century)

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The maturing process is a journey full of "seasonings". We crawl before we walk. We babble before we speak. Most of us view Dr. King's life from sound bites and cliff notes bios that give us more of a mythic hero as opposed to a flesh and blood man.

Before Martin Luther King made it to the mountaintop, he spent a great deal of time building a base. This base was Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King learned to walk and find his voice and his impeccable sense of timing. Troy's exhaustive research has given us the gift of insight into the making of not just a leader but of a movement of which he became King. Troy reminds us of the people, decisions and timing that all came together to give Dr. King and the rest of the world a view from the mountaintop.

This is a fascinating and enjoyable read, especially in light of our recent election. I would highly recommend it for any student of history or leadership.

This is a fully readible yet well researched book that gives more information than any other has done on the black activist movement in Montgomery Alabama before Martin Luther King, Jr. came there to his first church pastorship. The black activist leaders who preceded King there laid the groundwork that made the famous bus boycott possible, and which in the beginning, in effect, led King into the civil rights movement. Once in, he began to lead the Montgomery uprising against the obscene bus practices, but in the beginning he was following the lead of others who had been long working for black causes in Montgomery. The author shows how much King learned from this experience, much of it from the working people who never faltered in their perseverence in a boycott that required big sacrifices from them, things leaned by King that went with him as he moved beyond Montgomery onto the national scene. Anyone who wants to understand the early development of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a (in my mind) great revolutionary leader, to be ranked with Washington and Lincoln, should read this book.

Before Dr. King was a national hero and an international Nobel prize winner he was a 25 year old preacher in Montgomery, Alabama taking care of his church members. Jackson shows King's leadership abilities and the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

I just recently read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (1988), edited by Clayborne Carson. In it Carson has put together in roughly chronological order autobiographical passages by Dr. King from numerous sources. I was pleasantly surprised by just how readable this admittedly composite autobiography is. I was also pleased to read King's own account of various events in his life, including his education and his intellectual struggles.

Next, I read Troy Jackson's BECOMING KING: MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL LEADER (2008), which includes a ten-page introduction by Clayborne Carson. Since 1985, Dr. Carson has served as the senior editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. Jackson has used those King papers extensively in his book.

Carson begins his introduction by asking us to imagine that King had not accepted the invitation to become the minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Had King not become the minister there, he probably would not have become famous as a civil rights leader. Up to the juncture in his life when he preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as Jackson shows, King had honed and developed his preaching skills, and had embraced the social gospel, but he had not yet embraced non-violent civic protest, as he did later in his life.

As a young undergraduate (from the age of fifteen to nineteen) at Morehouse College in Atlanta, his hometown, he had heard the president of Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, speak admiringly of Gandhi, Jackson reports. Gandhi's approach to non-violent civic protest is not incompatible with the social gospel. But figuratively speaking, Gandhi was in one compartment of King's mind, and the social gospel was in another when King became a minister in Montgomery.

Jackson devotes most of his book to discussing Montgomery. Long before King became a minister in Montgomery, members of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had been active in civic protests. Without knowing what was going to emerge in Montgomery, King arrived there at a crucial time. He was able to participate in the Montgomery bus boycott. Because he was better educated and more articulate than anybody else involved in the bus boycott, he emerged as a leader and spokesperson. His role as the public spokesperson during the lengthy bus boycott catapulted him to national attention, leading to invitations to speak in different parts of the country.

Had King not moved to Montgomery, he would not have emerged as a leader and spokesperson for the bus boycott there and would not have been catapulted to national attention at that time. However, regardless of whatever contributions he may have made to developments in the Montgomery bus boycott, the primary responsibility for the lengthy bus boycott there should be credited to local people, Jackson claims.

Troy Jackson, author of Becoming King, says that it was the people of Montgomery who shaped Martin Luther King Jr. rather than Martin Luther King Jr. who shaped the people of Montgomery.

Civil rights advocate Virginia Durr described Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950's as a place of "death, decay, corruption, frustration, bitterness and sorrow." And Jackson convinces us that she wasn't exaggerating. Blacks were oppressed, intimidated, and abused, and they were ready for change. Durr wrote: "I think the Negroes are stirring and they won't be held down much longer."

Through Jackson's thorough research and extensive quotes, we come to know and appreciate many of the African Americans working for change in Montgomery before King arrived--those like E.D. Nixon, a Pullman Porter and "tireless fighter for justice," and his secretary, "a local seamstress" named Rosa Parks. Along with Nixon, there were other courageous men like Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist church, who posted the title of an upcoming sermon on the church billboard (which was only a block from the State Capitol): "It's Safe to Murder Negroes in Alabama." But Jackson shows that it was the women who were most essential to the movement:

"Though many black men in the city were just as frustrated with the racial status quo, they had more to lose by being outspoken. Whites believed they had much more to fear from black men, and therefore they responded more quickly, and often violently, to any who got out of line. As whites fixed their attention on black men, several black women were stirring the waters of racial change in Montgomery."

When the young Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery in 1954 to replace Johns as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he didn't plan to lead a civil rights movement. But plans change.

Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington High School, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in March of 1955. When an officer tried to physically move her, "she fought like a little tigress" and was arrested. Soon after, Rosa Parks was also arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat. Jackson writes: "After a little more than a year in Montgomery, Park's arrest thrust King into the front lines of a local movement for civil rights." The bus boycott began. "Because the people of Montgomery were willing to walk, King had the opportunity to lead."

The newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which elected King as president, led the boycott for the next thirteen months. Jackson gives a detailed account, telling the good and the bad, and correcting the idea that it wouldn't have happened without King. It was Nixon's idea, and the working people carried it out. "King brought the refined dimension required," but never took any credit for himself:

"If I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us."

The locals responded to the boycott with threats, legal action, and violence. King's house, along with Nixon's and several others, was bombed. And the city government wouldn't budge until the U.S. Supreme Court found bus segregation unconstitutional. Even then, Jackson says there were minimal gains for the local blacks:

"The U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting integrated buses in the city proved more of a victory for King and the burgeoning civil rights movement than it was for the Montgomery African American community."

While "King became the face for the national struggle for civil rights," the conditions in Montgomery worsened. Violence increased, and lots of those who took part in the boycott lost their jobs. Many had to move, including Rosa Parks.

In the introduction to Jackson's book, Clayborne Carson writes:

"By acknowledging that the bus boycott had only a limited impact on the lives of Montgomery's black working class, Becoming King is a necessary correction to romanticized versions of Civil Rights progress and Great Man historical myths."

When King announced that he was leaving Montgomery in 1960, a Dexter member wrote: "The history books may write it Rev. King was born in Atlanta, and then came to Montgomery, but we feel that he was born in Montgomery in the struggle here, and now he is moving to Atlanta for bigger responsibilities."

E.D. Nixon put it less politely: "If Mrs. Parks had gotten up and given that cracker her seat you'd never heard of Reverend King."

We can't say whether Nixon was right or not, but Jackson makes it clear that it was in Montgomery that King became the leader we remember. Jackson's work is as engaging as it is important, and I highly recommend it.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the University Press of Kentucky in exchange for an honest review.