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Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Stephen Oates writes a masterful biography of one of the pivotal figures of the twentieth century. Today we view Martin Luther King Jr. as a saint, and a model of what the human spirit can achieve. In his day, he was viewed by many in the South with fear, hatred and loathing.

It is easy to view this situation in hindsight, and assume that everyone was just ignorant. Oates writes of the complex history, the battles within and outside "the movement" and how divided the nation was at the time. Oates also does not shirk away from many of Martin Luther King's personal weaknesses. In this sense, he humanizes the great leader, instead of canonizes him.

In the end, I am left with three conclusions:
1 - Martin Luther King Jr. indeed found a way to overcome hatred with love, and in doing so helped America avoid a race war.
2 - The message of civil rights was both religeous and personal. Despite today's views of the right being the party of religeon, in his day the southern liberal movement was galvanized in the church.
3 - Despite this, he was a flawed individual. His human weakness does not diminish his accomplishment.

The book is not light reading. Read it. Let it soak in. And comprehend.

I didn't know much about Martin Luther King, Jr. before I found this book in a second hand store and picked it up just because it looked interesting. I am glad I did. I finished this book respecting MLK and his message more than I ever thought possible. It amazes me that MLK so accurately pegged the United States attitudes about racism, social injustice and the Vietnam War in the heat of the moment--a true visionary. It is a shame that whenever somebody in this world tries to change things for the better somebody feels the need to kill them. Stephen Oates' portrayal is honest and forthright. An admirable performance. I highly recommend it.

For many of us, the Civil Rights era happened when we were too young to understand. This is a good overview of the man and his times. Many people who were just names before, became people to me.

Although, I believe King made some serious mistakes, I understand for the first time why he should have a national holiday. I had no idea he was such an impressive person. Keep in mind, this book was written by a serious historian; not just someone who wished to canonize King.

I was fortunate enough to study under this brilliant and passionate man at the Univ. of Massachusetts. his heart-felt lectures are tangible, leaving the listiner hungry for more when the damn bell rings. Compassion, sympathy, and an overwhelming desire to understand, are the standards which seperate this man from most.

A very moving and interesting book, about a time which seems very distant now.

Interesting that King was born to a family of preachers and that he was very highly educated. His education won him great honours and until circumstances intervened he anticipated a life as a scholar of comparative religion. He was also extremely well read in philosophy and sought desperately in his studies to answer questions about morality and social reform, being a huge fan of Gandhi. His talent in these fields was such that his professors expected great things from him.

However on completing his PhD he took a job a pastor in Montgomery, and very shortly found himself challenged to walk the walk his ideas led him to, a challenge which this biography says he never really flinched from his whole life.

This book presents a picture of a man who committed himself wholly to his work, almost from the beginning prepared to sacrifice just about everything, working incredible hours bringing deep thought and great eloquence to all his actions.

Along with his commitment to racial equality were a series of complex and carefully thought out political ideas about class, political reform, and also in later years the Vietnam war. Towards the end of his life his struggle broadened out to embrace these wider issues, much to the dismay of most of his more eminent followers. But then opposition was nothing new to him.

This book is also fascinating for what it reveals about the Kennedy brothers and Lyndon Johnson. It presents the picture of the Kennedys most people had at the time before the revisionists had a crack at them.

The picture of Johnson is extraordinary, but then seemingly he was. He passed a torrent of brilliantly marshalled and effective civil rights legislation which overnight solved many problems at a statutory level, and then moved on with equal vigour and efficiency to massively escalate a hugely destructive and pointless war.

This book is carefully researched as the notes reveal, but exceptionally easy to read as the scholarship is masked.

Highly recommended.

I read this book way back in 1987 and I still remember how stirring and accurate a biography it is. If I'm taking the time all these years later to say a few words about it, I hope you can tell that the book is that stirring.

Rest in peace, Martin, thou good and faithful servant.

This is the best biography I've read, not only about King but overall. Oates does a fine job balancing between illuminating details that help make King accessible to the reader without getting bogged down in this detail. Likewise, this balance provides a fine introduction to the Civil rights movement. (I don't consider a weakness of Let the Trumpets Sound that Oates doesn't dwell on certain of Kings weaknesses, as he instead focuses on King's message and actions; again, I think Oates concentrates on the myriad aspects of King's life, and the movement, that truly were important.)

Anybody trying to learn more about the Civil rights Movement should read this (along with such books the Autobiograpohy of Malcolm X and any of a number of books about Gandhi).

It makes me feel like I was in his place at the time. I got the tingles whenever I read the line "I have a dream!" Reading this book just makes me feelghtful, because now I know a little bit better of the struggles that the black race went through.

It has been a long time since I first read this book. A previous reviewer states that the incidents in this book seem to have happened "so long ago," but, really, Martin Luther King, Jr. walked this earth just a moment ago as time is measured, and were it not for James Earl Ray, his calm, reasoned, stentorian and now elder voice might still be speaking in our ears.

In LET THE TRUMPET SOUND Stephen B. Oates has written what is the definitive MLK biography. From his birth, MLK seemed destined to be one of W.E.B. DuBois's "Talented Tenth." The grandson of a slave, the son of preacher, and an intellectual prodigy who entered college at age 15, Dr. King lived only a scant thirty nine years, but accomplished more than many people who have been granted their biblical "threescore and ten" only to live them out in obscurity, or worse yet, wastrelism.

Even as a child, King felt things deeply. Oates recounts the young man's rage, once when he is called an obscene name, and once when he has his face slapped by a white woman for no reason, and once again when he is rejected as a proper playmate by a white boy's family, and many times when he is subjected to the soul-corroding existence of segregation, being sent to separate seating, dining, and living quarters when he travelled. He attempted suicide twice, once when he believed his beloved grandmother had died, and once again when she did in fact die. And though he at first "fought off" the call to preach, his post-secondary education focused on philosophy and comparative religion, laying a deep and intellectual foundation for his ministry rather than the "whoop-and- holler" form of service which initially embarrassed him.

As King matured, however, he began to see the African-American Church as both a sanctuary and a gathering place for its adherents. It became the base for the Civil Rights Movement of which he was to become such a great leader. He was not its first leader; in fact, the first exponent of "Negro" equal rights in this nation was Abraham Lincoln, who, in his last speech, advocated limited black suffrage. John Wilkes Booth, in the audience that day, decided to kill the President for uttering those words, and he did. The 90 years from 1865 when Lincoln died to 1955 when King began his ministry, were a slow, undulating wave of advances, setbacks, and advances for African Americans. The modern Civil Rights Movement began during World War II, when the Federal Government, pressured by the almost exclusively black Union of Sleeping Car Porters and others, and in need of workers, employed blacks in wartime industries (over often violent local protest), and (belatedly) formed (segregated) black combat units.

Returning black soldiers chose not to passively accept the very indignities they had fought against in Europe, and the Movement began to gain momentum after the War. Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. The NAACP won a number of critical court victories desegregating universities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And in 1954, the young Rev. Dr. King took a job pastoring to the Dexter Avenue Church in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Confederacy.

Not long after Dr. King's arrival, Rosa Parks was arrested for violating the segregation ordinance on city buses when she sat, tiredly, in the "Whites Only" section one day. The uproar that followed gave birth to the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), headed by Dr. King, that organized a yearlong Negro boycott of the buses. While the boycott went on, the Supreme Court desegregated public schools in "Brown v. Board of Ed.", and ultimately, the Court held Montgomery's segregation statutes unconstitutional.

This victory made the erudite, articulate Dr. King world famous. Ultimately, he was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He became known to the media as the "unofficial 'President of the Negroes' in America." One of Dr. King's greatest weapons was Nonviolent Noncooperation With Evil, the same tactic used by Gandhi in India, called by the Mahatma "Satyagraha" or "Love Force." He undertook a punishing schedule to promote Nonviolence and to lend his name to the various Civil Rights actions springing up across America, most of which became coordinated under the umbrella of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Dr. King.
Oates does not really spend a great deal of time or energy analyzing King's effectiveness as a leader. LET THE TRUMPET SOUND is straight, pure biography, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Several points do stand out as worthy of mention:

First, King was almost universally admired in the late 1950s, even by his enemies and those who disagreed with the nonviolent approach. King used this time to promote Civil Rights effectively, but he was less effective in promoting the idea of Nonviolent Noncooperation With Evil. It should not just have been a tool of the Movement, but a social gospel that he spread to all, black and white;

Second, that the black leadership was indeed the "barrel of crabs" described by Booker T. Washington, and that King's preeminence as the youngest, arguably best-educated, certainly most articulate of those leaders caused fault lines in the Movement that impeded it from within;

Third, that King became the charismatic center of gravity of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s to such an extent that it became a Cult of Personality. Thus, his faults (like his overly-publicized but relatively limited womanizing), foibles and misstatements willy-nilly became the Movement's. Younger up-and-coming leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael might not have found their way to the world stage without his being there already, but they nonetheless found him easy to attack, as did the white establishment, particularly after 1965, when he began criticizing the Vietnam War, and by extension President Johnson, a Civil Rights President and former supporter, who perhaps not unnaturally, considered him ungrateful;

Fourth, that the Cult of Personality became so powerful that an adequate succession in the leadership was never developed, so that his assassination in 1968 crippled the Movement almost into immobility. His followers, men like Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, tend toward ill-conceived statements and a less-than-simon-pure committment to Nonviolence.

Thus, Dr. King is seen in these pages, quite rightly, as one of the Great Men of History, but still, a man and not a demigod. Moving, even to the point of tears in some places, but not hagiographic, LET THE TRUMPET SOUND should be on everyone's bookshelf, and should be required reading for people too young to remember back before a terrible April day in Memphis, Tennessee.

As a student activist during my college years, I was introduced to this book by one of many mentors. They said that this was a detailed account of how Dr. King and his soldiers pushed forward their agenda for change in America. It was more than that. It was a powerful testament of the conviction of Dr. King and the gameplan for dealing with racist America. He did not work alone but his analysis of each situation proved to be very timely and accurate. Later on, of course, his effectiveness lost a little of its punch but you can not change the success that came from his branch of the Movement. Stephen Oates so elequently noted the techniques and strategies used during the turbulant sixties. It gave me information on how to handle the media, the powers that be, other members of my allies and prepare for possible backstabbers. That was my reason for reading the book. However, I got SSSOOO much more.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a revolutionary. His faith in God was the driving force behind in nonviolent stance. His studies of Gandhi and Martin Luther further solidified his position. Destined for greatness from the time of his birth, MLK was always preparing himself (and being prepared) for that big moment. He was intelligent, charismatic and thorough in approach to segregation. A family man, a minister, a scholar and an activist. This book is a good starting point for not just learning about King but understanding him. He IS (not was) bigger than "I Have A Dream", bigger than boycotts, bigger than nonviolence. Thanks to Oates and this masterpiece, he can be celebrated for what he was, an instrument of change and the Prince of Peace.