It was White People Shut Up Day yesterday, and one of the absolutely great things about the fact that I’m no longer on Twitter is that I made it through the entire day without unwillingly encountering any idiot Republicans’ takes on Martin Luther King. I say this every year: the fastest way to find out how someone would have felt about Martin Luther King is to ask them how they feel about Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton, or, hell, Barack Obama, or if you’re feeling adventurous, Jeremiah Wright, if the person you’re talking to even knows who Jeremiah Wright is. Fully 62% of Americans held a negative view of King when he was killed, and that number had been increasing steadily for years as he moved away from civil rights and began talking more about poverty and the Vietnam war. White people hated Martin Luther King, and most of them would still hate him today if he were still around. 

And, well, I don’t necessarily need to do a lot of talking up of a new biography about King to help you decide if you’re going to read it, do I? Probably not. I probably know more about the Civil Rights era than any other time in American history, and there hasn’t been a new major biography of King in ages, so there was little to no chance I wasn’t going to pick this up, and I know enough about the man’s life already that a bullshit take on him isn’t going to get past me easily.

(almost starts another paragraph with “and, well”)

Here’s the thing: for better or for worse, Jonathan Eig’s take on King is the most human I’ve ever seen him. At this point, fifty-five years and some change after his death, we’re bordering on historical Jesus level of mythologizing cruft around this man, and at certain points by treating King like a person Eig almost feels disrespectful. Like, if you aren’t already aware of some of his failures as a pastor and a person– chief among them that he was a massive horndog, cheating on his wife every chance that he got– this book is going to be shocking. I was aware that there were allegations that he’d plagiarized parts of his dissertation but I wasn’t aware just how comfortable he seemed to be with lifting other people’s work more or less whenever he felt the need to. And, perhaps most striking to me personally, he had enormous struggles with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome; Eig never comes out and says it directly but it’s hard to not form the opinion that part of the reason for all of the adultery was 1) a massive self-destructive streak and 2) sex, drinking and smoking being one of the few ways the man allowed himself to blow off steam. 

I’m not justifying anything, mind you, but I’m also not especially interested in dwelling on his failures that much, particularly when it’s made clear that Coretta knew exactly what was going on and turned a blind eye. 

The broad historical strokes of the man’s life are already well-known, and I suspect most Americans who have read even a single book about the Civil Rights movement or Black history in America specifically could do a half-decent job of tracing the major events. It’s as a psychological analysis that this book is interesting, and it’s also what makes this book depressing. Because thinking of MLK as a … person … really and genuinely does come off as kind of rude. It just feels funny. It’s well-written, and well-sourced, with a couple hundred pages of footnotes at the end, and I’m absolutely glad that I read it, but … damn. Y’know? Maybe you don’t. I dunno.

Look at how tired he looks on the cover. That’s absolutely not an accident.

At any rate, read the book.