In King: A Life, author Jonathan Eig focuses on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of faith-based radicalism. During his Feb. 11 lecture at Colgate, Beyond The Dream: Embracing a More Complicated Martin Luther King, Eig said he believes King would be horrified at how his activism and writings have been overshadowed by a modern, more palatable version of the civil rights leader.
“I wanted to write a book to help remind us that King was human, and I wanted to remind folks that he had fears, he had failures, had flaws,” Eig said of his 2023 biography of King, which received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. “In celebrating King, we have watered him down to the point he wouldn’t recognize himself.”
Eig began his lecture by noting King’s initial reluctance to get involved when asked to address the growing crowd on Dec. 5, 1955, having a panic attack before delivering his Montgomery Bus Boycott speech — which launched King into the spotlight as he led the fight for civil rights. Through his extensive research and interviews, Eig notes how King’s commitment to activism and radicalism became a constant choice throughout his life, even as he faced relentless harassment in the wake of the boycott, including having his home bombed, his windows shot out, and other incessant attempts at intimidation.
Eig says King struggled in subsequent years with the relentless demands of being an activist protest leader, failing to “recreate the magic” of his Montgomery speech until his next big success with his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail after his arrest in 1963 — marking a turning point in the war to end segregation. Eig points to King’s persistence and willingness to risk failure and press on as he insists on moving forward with the March on Washington.
Eig says King continued to push back against injustice and the status quo even as, years later, his advisers urged him to step back and be less aggressive. They believed King was asking for too much, too soon, Eig says. Instead of being satisfied with the progress of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, King focused on expanding his mission from civil rights to human rights, income inequality, and guaranteed jobs and income. He called for a fundamental restructuring of America’s capitalistic society. He also began speaking out more aggressively against the Vietnam War, and as this happened, his popularity sank, Eig says.
The FBI began an all-out campaign to destroy him, but King refused to back down, Eig says, only speaking out more aggressively and radically, planning the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967 to bring thousands of people to Washington, D.C., to disrupt the city and the government.
Eig said the “watering down” of King’s radical message is intentional, noting that King’s close friend Harry Belafonte believed the national holiday was designed to destroy King’s power — the holiday was designed to “defang” his message and deemphasize his radicalism.
For proof, Eig cites King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The way King is taught today, Eig notes, the emphasis is always on the second half of the speech, focused on judging people on the content of their character not the color of their skin, but not on the first half, which was, Eig said, “a radical speech about income inequality, police brutality, subtly suggesting that reparations were going to be needed before America could move on from the sin of slavery.”
Addressing the daunting task of writing about King’s life, Eig credits significant support from experts, interviews with those closest to King, and troves of archival materials — some recently declassified. Eig worked closely with Dan Cattau ’72, his friend and editor for the book, and he reviewed Professor Coleman Brown’s 1979 dissertation, which reinforced the idea of a “radical King.”
Eig says a national holiday and streets named after King are appropriate, but “not if it forces us to forget what Coleman Brown wrote in his dissertation: that King’s greatness was rooted in radicalism and that radicalism is rooted in his Christian faith. That’s essential to understanding King. If we deprive him of that, we deprive him of everything he fought for.”
The lecture was sponsored by the Department of History, ALST, the ALANA Cultural Center, and the Department of Religion.
Jonathan Eig is the author of six books, four of them New York Times best sellers. King: A Life was awarded a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the New-York Historical’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is presented annually for the nation's best work of history or biography. King was also nominated for the National Book Award.