Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
Jonathan Eig has written about historical greats before: Lou Gherig, Jackie Robinson, Muhammed Ali. But when approaching one of the most recognizable, radical and influential figures of the 20th century, he felt daunted.
“ ‘Responsibility’ is a nice way to put it,” Eig said, “but in truth, it was just fear.”
Martin Luther King Jr. is the subject of Eig’s exhaustively researched and Pulitzer Prize-winning biography King: A Life. From the pews of King’s father’s church in Atlanta to the buses of Montgomery and beyond, within the pages of King: A Life, a mythologized icon of the past transforms into a human being wracked with guilt, emboldened by faith and motivated by the fight for justice.
Eig will discuss King: A Life at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy as the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s selection for Week One.
Eig is the author of six books, four of which are New York Times bestsellers. He is a former reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.
This will be Eig’s sixth visit to Chautauqua and his first time taking to the podium as a CLSC author. In his last visit to Chautauqua in 2017, Eig led a workshop on memoir as a faculty member of the Writers’ Center.
King: A Life took at least 200 interviews and six years to complete. Eig said that he began the writing process by asking permission.
With the questions of whether he was “worthy of this subject and whether (he) could do honor to this subject,” Eig consulted King’s closest friends, colleagues and scholars to gauge the possibility and plausibility of capturing the essence of the historical icon.
“I knew I couldn’t do it alone,” said Eig. “It was too big and scary of a task to do it without really asking for support and building a network of community to help me get through it.”
The desire to write about King first emerged when Eig was interviewing for his 2017 biography on Muhammed Ali titled Ali: A Life. He discovered that several interviewees knew both Ali and King. As King would have turned 96 this year, Eig knew that he had a limited time to speak with his contemporaries. Eig said that he seized the opportunity.
The conversations that resulted struck him. The people who knew King best, Eig said, expressed emotions ranging from sadness to frustration, to anger due to the fact that “the man they knew as Martin had been turned into this sort of candy-covered, safe, watered-down monument.”
In a week themed “Transformation: The Forces Shaping Our Tomorrow,” Eig’s biography presents two metamorphoses: the evolution of Martin Luther King Jr. himself, and a shift in public perception of him.
The first transformation is the familiar yet compelling arc of a young man thrust into the spotlight.
King changes “from a regular guy — 26 years old, new dad — into an iconic, heroic leader of one of the greatest grassroots movements in human history,” Eig said.
The second transformation is a necessary reframing of King’s public perception.
“We had sort of gotten comfortable with him as this very safe figure, you know — Mr. ‘I Have a Dream,’ ” Eig said, “and I wanted to write a book that would remind people how radical he was … how disliked he was for much of his public career and how much that affected him.”
With access to newly declassified FBI files, Eig offers the most comprehensive biography of King in nearly 30 years. While the FBI wiretapped King’s private conversations in an effort to destroy him, what was captured on those tapes reveal something else entirely.
“One of the sad ironies of the whole book is that the FBI wiretaps allowed us to see a much more intimate and vulnerable version of King,” Eig said. “They humanized him.”
From a young age, King bore guilt from his upbringing and later due to his womanizing and affairs, Eig said. Navigating the world as a public figure, King’s conscience weighed on him heavily as he failed time and time again to live up to his own expectations of himself.
“It compounded his own senses of frustration, but it also gave the U.S. government an opening to attack him,” Eig said. “… If the Achilles’ heel is literally where the arrow strikes, that’s where the arrow struck him.”
However, while Eig acknowledged the importance of highlighting King’s flaws, he said the most damning information revealed by the wiretaps was not about King at all.
Eig said the wiretaps reveal the government’s “racism and their fear of change. And to me, that’s much more consequential than what it reveals about King’s personal life.”
King: A Life demystifies not just the man but also his legacy. Eig pushes back against those who try to sanitize King’s work in the context of modern protest movements.
“You’ll hear people saying, ‘Oh, well, King would never block a highway to make a point. King would never urge economic boycotts … and that’s just ridiculous. King absolutely would block highways and call for economic boycotts,” Eig said.
This message will reach all generations of readers during Week One, as Eig’s King: A Life (Young Adult Edition) was the first selection for the CLSC Young Readers Program. Eig said that he hopes young audiences resonate with King’s struggles as well as his radicalism.
“People tend to unfairly characterize King as passive,” Eig said. “They confuse nonviolence with passivity.”
In looking toward the future, the story of King offers a guide to how resistance movements worked in the past.
“King reminds us that you don’t always have to have the answers,” Eig said, “but you have to keep pushing, you have to keep moving, and you don’t know when you’re going to have a breakthrough.”
