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Martin Luther King, Jr. (Penguin Lives)

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This is one of the best of the often excellent Penguin Lives series. Martin Luther King is presented as a real man with insecurities, self-doubts, college plagarizing and womanizing. But he is also shown as the key individual in the incredible progress (I know it doesn't feel like it--but read the book and its picture of the country in the fifties!) we have made in the area of race relations.

MLK is portrayed as a man who rose above his everydayness to achieve insights into the areas of race, poverty and oppression which would move a nation. Blessed in his enemies--the egregious Bull Connor, the banty rooster George Wallace (in his first incarnation) and the despicable J. Edgar Hoover--gave the nation a contrast in possibilities. Despite the reluctance of the Kennedys, the backbiting of his own lieutenants and the inconstancy of the national media, MLK made a difference. To read about his speech at the Linclon Memorial still gives me shivers.

This is a fair, honest portrait of a man who made a difference.

In a short space, Marshall Frady has written an informative, inspiring and thoughtful biography of Martin Luther King Jr., of the nature of his achievement, of his America, and of his vision. The book does not engage in hero-worship or myth-making but rather presents Dr. King as a tortured.conflicted, and lonely individual. Frady writes at the close of his introduction (p.10) (itself a wonderful summation of the book and of Dr. King's achievement): "And what the full-bodied reality of King should finally tell us, beyond all the awe and celebration of him, is how mysteriously mixed, in what torturously complicated frms, our moral heroes -- our prophets --actually come to us."

A theme of this book is how Dr. King's moral vision and achievement emerged from moral conflict. Dr King spent most of his career walking a difficult path between extremes. At the beginning of his career, he was criticized by the more conservative black establishment which preferred to use the courts rather than demonstrations as a means to promote racial equality. Indeed, Frady tells us, the Mongomery bus boycott of 1955, which catapaulted Dr. King into national prominence, did not end the segregation of the city's bus system -- a court decision did.

Towards the end of his career, black leaders such as Malcolm X and Stokely Charmichael pressured Dr. King to abandon his philosophy of nonviolence. He did not do so. But Frady shows us how Dr. King and Malcolm X near the end of their lives each learned something from the other.

King's most difficult moral struggle was with himself. Frady gives us a convincing picture of how Dr. King, whose appeal rested upon an ability to convey moral and religous principle, struggled (unsuccessfully) with sexuality. A myriad of affairs followed him and his mission from beginning to end. Frady has insightful things to say about the relationship between Dr. King's tortured, complex personal life and his public mission.

Frady also describes how near the end of his career with segregation on the decline in the South, Dr. King tried to expand his mission by opposing the war in Vietnam and by his "poor peoples campaign" which Dr. King saw as an attack on the materialism, impersonality, and greed that he found pervaded American life. In so expanding his mission, Dr. King alienated many of his followers. His lasting achievement does not rest upon these later activities, according to Frady, but rather upon the idealism and moral committment with which he was able to infuse American life during a few short years.

Frady gives us an eloquent discussion of Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech in Washington D.C. Later in his career, Dr King set forth his vision for America by speaking in terms of a "Beloved Community", a phrase adopted from the early 20th Century American philosopher, Josiah Royce. Dr King said (p. 183) "When I talk about power and the need for power, I'm talking in terms of the need for power to bring about ... the creation of the Beloved Community." Our nation is still trying to recover something of Dr. King's idealism and of the best of his vision.

This book encourages us to think about and to formulate for ourselves the vision of America as a "Beloved Community" by reflecting on the life and achievement of a complex man.

Since his death in 1968, a plethora of books about Martin Luther King, Jr. has inundated the shelves of bookstores. Every angle about his life and work has been explored, critiqued and analyzed. Is there room for one more as we continue the quest for making King's dream for equality a reality? Penquin Lives says yes as it presents a brief biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. as seen through the eyes of a white southern reporter during the era, Marshall Frady.

Mr. Frady was one of those reporters assigned to interpret and bring some sense of clarity to the public about the rising civil rights movement and its major leader, King. As a young reporter, he carried out his mission and now as an older statesman of the press he gives us another view about King, his work and his impact on the national scene.

Martin Luther King, Jr. focuses on the success, failures and conflicts of a leader caught in a movement that swept him up into the pinacles of history. We see another dimension of King who is vain, unorganized, guilt ridden and a womanizer. His lieutenants are egotistical, mystical, self-serving and dedicated to the cause of freedom. King's genius in keepint these varied personalities in check for a greater cause is a testament to his genius.

Frady really doesn't tell the reader anything new about King that hasn't been said before. He merely encapsulates previous information into a format that is readily accessible to those who want to get a brief history of King and the movement but can't endure reading works of countless pages of information. In this Frady excels and does a fine job of being brief but doesn't offer the reader in better insights about the man.

I would recommend this book to those who want to get a brief snapshot of King from the perspective of a white southerner. Otherwise I would encourage readers to explore other books that give a more in depth look at the complex life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Simply put, this is the finest of the Penguin Lives series. It gives Dr. King in simple sentences, does not ignore the complexities of his life, and does not indulge in the myth making of previous biographers. You get the man, with his failures, successes, obsessions and ironies, all in one tight package. Wonderful read.

Marshall Frady's book is an invaluable addition to the historical, sociological, and psychological understanding of this country's race relations. In particular, he does not limit the story to what happened decades earlier, but relates the historical events to more recent history. Thankfully, the book treats Dr. King as a human being with faults (e.g., his insecurities, self-doubts, womanizing), and not as a saint (as sometimes portrayed in MLK day celebrations) or as a commodity (as marketed by his family). The value of discussing Dr. King honestly is that his vision for society is not limited to the saints, but can be more practically considered by us regular folks with our shortcomings.

In the introduction "Martin Luther King Jr.: A Life," Marshall Frady argues that Americans have sought "to remember King by forgetting him," suggesting that the civil rights leader was never a mere painted icon and that current and future generations actually do him a disservice by remembering him that way. In this trim biography of barely 200 pages, the author presents the full measure of King as a man, his quick intelligence, burning ambition and oratorical genius, alongside his more human, vulnerable dimensions, his frequent self-doubt, his contentious relationship with his father, his often plagiaristic academic affairs, his licentious personal life. The reader gets a sense of both his greatness and his humanity; what made him so special and what made him so ordinary. All of this is delivered beautifully by Frady, with exquisitely constructed prose, capturing the raw emotion of the civil rights era, the vibrancy of the people and the movement, the oppressive, heavy sticky heat of the long, violent summers of the 1960s.

Frady delivers a riveting narrative, beginning with King's relatively privileged, cosseted youth in Atlanta to his emergence, almost accidentally and with great foreboding, as the leader of the bus boycott in Montgomery at the improbably tender age of 26. The author chronicles King's career from the unexpected success of Montgomery to the disappointment of Albany, Georgia to his redemption -- indeed "apotheosis" according to Frady -- in Birmingham and then the March on Washington in 1963 to the lows and highs of St. Augustine and Selma, and finally the frustrations of his lofty aims in Chicago, against the growing war in Vietnam and the revolutionary, pan-racial Poor People's Campaign.

Several themes run throughout this marvelous work of biographical synthesis. First, King was, for over a decade, haunted by his bęte noire, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed him as, at best, a fraud and, at worst, an active agent of communist subversion. Frady maintains that King's priapic thirst was insatiable, regularly bedding multiple women in a single night, including the evening before his assassination in Memphis in April 1968. These assignations were regularly taped by the FBI, complete with King's allegedly ribald intercourse outbursts, which Hoover and his cronies shared with Washington leaders in a vain hope to crush the civil rights leader's credibility and cripple his movement. According to Frady, threatened exposure weighed especially heavily on King in Oslo when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963. Furthermore, Hoover believed that King was under the direct influence of Moscow via his close relationship with Stanley Levison, a known communist and longtime King confidante, although no such ties to Marxist operatives have ever been verified.

A second theme is the central importance of an antagonist in King's many campaigns for racial desegregation and equality. Without race-baiting Neanderthals like Bull Connor or George Wallace, King's efforts often petered out, ending in sham negotiated settlements. Nothing hurt the civil rights movement more than superficially congenial whites in power, like Laurie Pritchett in Albany and Richard Daley in Chicago, men who refrained from using force against demonstrators and who were willing to meet in civil discourse, quickly striking bargains that they never intended to fulfill. Tragically, it was the dogs and water cannons and billy clubs -- all caught on nightly national television -- that propelled the civil rights movement forward in the King years.

Finally, there is the overarching presence of the flesh-and-blood King, short and podgy and chain smoking behind closed doors, living in constant fear of arrest and death, never truly believing in his own abilities or destiny, often swept along by events not entirely of his own making or choosing, without any real plan. By the time of his assassination, Frady argues, King was a spent force, on a steep decline in influence and respectability, out of touch with many black Americans increasingly drawn to the strident nationalism and Black Power movement of Stokely Carmichael and other firebrands, alienating his traditional white liberal base over his early and vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War and splintering his own loose coalition of acolytes in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) over his quixotic Poor People's Campaign, which was scheduled to kick off just after his fateful trip to Memphis. Indeed, Frady argues that had not King been assassinated in 1968 (like his hero and spiritual idol, Gandhi, in 1948), he likely would have receded to the margins of American history, remembered as a pivotal player in the early civil rights movement, but not the transcendent hero with a national holiday in his honor that he is today.

For those looking for a crisp, sharp, illuminating biography of King, this is the book. Frady writes with rich, florid prose and his vocabulary may be a bit difficult for some (as a few reviewers have commented acidly below), but that's even more reason to make this the one book you read on King.

Marshall Frady's little biography of MLK Jr is a beautiful reminder of how lonely a prophet can be in his own land. King's trials and travails so fully recalled, his victories so few and yet so important, the tale of a man driven further and further towards his own vision of what is true and right, and thus driven further and further from the madding crowd. King lives in this profile in all his dignity, all his courage, but also all the agony that being nothing more than human brought to him.
And it brought me back to that wonderful moment in our own history when it was possible to truly believe there might be an end to poverty, as the nation's leading moral prophet and its President joined in this assumption, and for a brief golden shining moment, we imagined it was really going to happen.
Frady lets us live the difficult, frightening, lonesome historical progression to that moment, all the while realizing how many defeats there were, and how likely it was that King would have been forgotten, despised, a man of but a brief historical moment he may have outlived had he not been assassinated in 1968.
One could not ask for a finer brief depiction of what it was like to be caught up in history beyond one's control, beyond one's intention, but history nevertheless grasped by a questing mind and a brave soul.

Marshall Frady has produced an insightful summary of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. for the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. Working within the limitations of the series, Frady's synopsis breaks no new ground - King's life, campaigns, struggles and death are covered in just over 200 pages. But the object here is less to broaden or shape understanding than to evoke the spirit of the man and his times.

The key events of King's life are well known; here the story unfolds in a progression grounded in Biblical narrative. An explicit conceit of this work is a view of King as a latter-day prophet, an American Moses destined to point the way to the Promised Land, but not to reach it. The book's four major sections reflect this theme.

The first, titled "Out of Egypt", recalls King's childhood and education; his assumption of pastorly duties in Montgomery; and the first dramatic act of his civil rights career as an (initially reluctant) organizer of the 1955 bus boycott campaign. The second, "The Wilderness Time", recounts the aimlessness that settled over King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference following the Montgomery victory. Although it was an NAACP-led court victory and not the boycott campaign which finally won the day, Montgomery had vaulted him to national prominence and de facto leadership of the civil rights movement. A potential follow-up act wouldn't present itself until 1961; even then, King's foray into Albany, Georgia in support of the Albany Movement to end segregation in that remote locale produced no substantive gains.

In the meantime King had attracted the malevolent attentions of the reigning FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, whose grotesque character Frady evokes in a remarkable thumbnail sketch. "By the Fifties", Frady writes, Hoover "had become for much of the country... a kind of totem figure of law and uprightness." Yet his brand of law included domestic surveillance in the service of political blackmail. Impelled by racism and anticommunist paranoia, Hoover initiated a bugging and wiretap campaign against King.

Hoover's wiretaps revealed little in the way of communist plots, but they did evidence the serial adultery that seems to have begun in this period. Amazingly, King's dalliances never became public knowledge during his lifetime, even though Hoover deliberately made taped materials available to members of the press. Contrast this restraint with today's media behavior: as Frady acknowledges, "King could very likely never have survived now as the figure he was then."

The conflict between flesh and spirit was a constant theme in King's life. On the one hand, here was a man who eschewed public ostentation and sought to emulate Mahatma Gandhi; on the other, a womanizer and, it would appear, a plagiarist. But King's expression of the spiritual took other, powerful forms. He was frequently jailed in the course of his work for the movement and was no stranger to physical assault. By the fatal day in Memphis, King had already been punched, kicked, and stabbed by racist antagonists; all of which assaults he suffered with amazing forbearance. On one remarkable occasion of being repeatedly punched in the face, and the assailant having been wrestled to the ground by his entourage, King urged them: "Don't hurt him, we have to pray for him." As Frady suggests, the product of this frisson was a monumental oratorical power in communicating the message of nonviolence - a power that for America came to its fullest and most significant expression on the Washington Mall with the ringing proclamation: "I have a dream today!"

Section three, "Apotheosis", narrates the battle to integrate Birmingham, the symbolic pinnacle of the March on Washington, and the watershed of American conscience at Selma - culminating in the crowning achievement of King's life and struggle: the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

In Albany the movement had been "deprived... of those convulsive clashes that would have dramatized for the rest of the country the underlying barbarity of its segregationist order." In Birmingham the police were more obliging. After a slow start, King and his followers decided to mobilize schoolchildren in a bid to overwhelm the jail system and force a resolution. The controversial strategy worked; images of young people in their Sunday best pummeled by fire hoses sickened the nation. Under pressure from all sides, the municipal authorities were forced to concede.

And then came that speech in Washington. Time and distance can threaten to make a cliché of most anything, but Frady's retelling feels fresh in its evocation: "It had suddenly become a pentecostal moment. A huge shiver of exhilaration moved through the expanses of the throng..."

At Selma, the "underlying barbarity" was revealed for all to see, courtesy of the state police and national television. The spectacle of violence against innocent citizenry spurred the White House to action. Addressing the nation to announce the Voting Rights Act, (in a moment to make one feel keen regret at a legacy tarnished by Vietnam) President Johnson intoned: "... and we _shall_ overcome!"

In the book's final section, "The Far Country", we have the rest of the story - the Nobel Peace Prize, the Movement post-Selma, and the sudden end in Memphis. If King found himself "in the wilderness" after Albany, perhaps he was even more so after Selma. The movement's key objectives achieved, King set his sights on perhaps a more impossible dream: the reorganization of American life on egalitarian, socialist, grounds. Given the sweeping ambitions of the frustrated Chicago Movement and the grandiosity of the Poor People's Campaign, there is something poignant in the fact that what brought King to Memphis in April 1968 was no vast plan of social reorganization but mobilization in support of striking garbage workers.

If Frady's book is at times slightly overwritten ("the rhetoric of the human spirit immensely and elaborately gathering itself for slow and terrific struggle" [p. 35] feels like a blind stab at the Faulkneresque), it is also an effective, and at times even powerful, homage to one of our greatest Americans.

I really enjoyed this book because he provided the right amount of information, it never belabored things and I learned a ton. The author seemed to have a lot of personal experience with events but used that to tell the story and not press too strong of an argument. I got what I wanted: background, context, the right details, both the good and the bad, to help me draw my own conclusions on King's successes and greatness in spite of his vulnerability, failures, insecurity, and weaknesses. The whole story is really a lot more complicated than we remember today, at the time his ultimate impact was unclear. In my mind that enhances King's legacy as a human rather than diminishes it. But the author did not try to decide that for me.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of those Americans like Ben Franklin, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and FDR, who, to me, were far too perfect to be interesting. When we learn about these people in grade school, we are taught about how awesome and nice they were to the point they become rather dull. When I got older and I started to read more about these people, I discovered their true greatness. King was probably the greatest American never to hold public office, yet, had had an effect on this country similar to that of Franklin Roosevelt or John Marshall. Unfortunately, like many great leaders of our past, King's legacy now clouds the image of who the man was. When I read King's Autobiography, I felt I had come to a greater understanding of him as a person and his perspective on himself. Reading Marshall Frady's Martin Luther King: A Life has given me more of a clear image of who the man was and times that he lived. Frady's King is a man who, like all men, is flawed human being. Here he is presented as Oliver Cromwell once said 'with warts in all'. But even the 'sins' of Martin Luther King are very minor when compared to other American icons, and King clearly paid for them more then he should have in his war with J. Eager Hoover. The United States of America today is a very different place then it has been because King was a major player in his era.

For me, the highlight of this book is the struggle between King and Hoover. One of things America has learned since the sixties and seventies have become more history then memory for an entire generation of people, was the war between the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and Director of the FBI.

J. Edger Hoover was a legend in the United States in the area of crime fighting. In 1924, Hoover was appointed Director of the Bureau of Investigation, which was the predecessor of the FBI, and he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935. He would still be the Director when he died in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover's efforts had put a huge dent into organized crime operations during his tenure. If he had stuck to actual criminals, his legacy would be untouchable as some of his legendary G-Men were. However, convinced through very little evidence-and much more racism and paranoia-that Civil Rights organizations were communist plots against the government and he would have to stop them. He would go out of his way to wage an irrational campaign against them.

"While King still had no inkling of it, there had in fact commenced what was to become a prolonged shadow war between him and Hoover. Though it would take place mostly out of the public eye, the two of them were to be looked into an elemental conflict as figures reflecting--more, virtually embodying--two poles of the American character: that ethic lasting Plymouth's starch-collared society of probity, discipline, righteousness as a matter of a ruthless cleanliness of behavior, this rectitudinousness in schizophrenic tension with an unrulier urge lasting from the frontier, a restlessness with authority and convention, a readiness for adventure in exploring the farther, windy moral opens of life. Since assuming power as director of the FBI in 1924, Hoover had not appreciably changed his notion of what should be the character of the nation--sedate, sober, orderly, and properly segregated, like his FBI--and he had ever since applied all the energies of the institution he had created to keeping it that way, to preserve the plainer America of his nostalgias against alien contamination and the subversions of more diverse cultural weathers. By the fifties, he had become for much of the country--this stubby, pluggish, stern little pug-bull of a man with a cauliflower pallor and flat, blunt face--a kind of totem figure of law and uprightness. In the process, he had consolidated the FBI into perhaps Washington's greatest private preserve of official power ever, his intelligence files holding even many in the halls of government in fear." p.81-2

The book also discuss the famous March on Washington in 1963. It discusses the event, the organizers, its purpose, and even some of the people who did not want it to proceed, including President Kennedy. Kennedy sometimes gets criticized for this but that is with hindsight being twenty/twenty. It is a great testament to those marched that day that not one act of violence occurred. Had there been a riot, it might have been a huge set-back for the movement. Fortunately the march was completely peaceful.

"The mass pilgrimage into Washington had been entrepreneured by movement patriarch A. Philip Randolph, in concert with other leaders like King, and despite his crankiness about the SCLC's ascendancy after Birmingham, Roy Wilkins, to demonstrate the expanse and spirit of the movement with a colossal rally to appeal to Congress for passage of the public accommodations bill presented by Kennedy. The president himself, however, was more than a little edgy about it all, trying to dissuade the march's organizers with warnings, in a conversation with them beforehand, that thousands of demonstrators converging into the capital could be seen by Congress as an attempt at mob intimidation, resulting in their all losing the legislation he'd introduced, many on the Hill already looking for a pretext anyway to avoid supporting it. King offered the observation he had put to Birmingham's ministers: 'Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.' To which the president rejoined, with a small smile, 'Including the Attorney General.'" p.121-2

There is a focus on King and his main competitor of ideas in the African-American community, Malcolm X. Frady discusses how King and Malcolm came from two very different walks of life.

"They were, King and Malcolm, really projections of two entirely different cultures. King's was a ministry congenial to his mostly churchly, respectably middle-class black constituency, eager to join in a coalition of purpose with the nation's white liberal establishment. But Malcolm was a prophet of another America, having arisen out of a childhood of cold miser that could not have been more unlike King's snugly privileged upbringing, and the vicious and gaudy hustler society of the black underclass in those mammoth ghettos of the North's 'great cities of destruction,' in E. Franklin Frazer's phrase. Such inner exiles lived without any sense of connection to the rest of the country, bereft of that sense of their individual worth without which 'they cannot live,' as James Baldwin wrote during the time, and 'they will do anything whatever to regain it. That is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.'" p.129

As time went on a new battles emerged, King would go on and face new challenges as younger and more militant generation were rejecting his message of love for a Black Nationalist ideology that he was completely repulsed by.

"Yet King was to cast himself against all this anyway. He may have arrived with Birmingham and Selma at his apotheosis as the Mosaic figure leading his people out of the old Egypt of their bondage in the South, but with this grander aspiration 'to confront the power structure massively' on a national scale, he was entering full into his tragic arch."p.169

There is also discussion of his last uncompleted mission in which he was going to challenge the great economic forces of our nation, a mission that he would be slain before he could truly begin.

"Thus, in the summer of 1967, King announced what would be the most expansively radical adventure of his life: a national movement called the Poor People's Campaign. It would mobilize into one wide popular front not only blacks but all the country's disregarded and outcast--poor whites, Hispanics, Native Americans--in a great Gandhian crusade that would challenge the nation's entire custodial complex, not just its corporate citadels but its central institutions of government, to free the destitute of America from their generational ghettos of hopelessness." p.194

I highly recommend this work it is a great and fascinating look into one of the greatest leaders of any age. This book captures the highs, lows, battles one and battles lost in a career that challenged and changed a nation, the American Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.