Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Real Dr. King with Jonathan Eig

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with Jonathan Eig, the author of the new Martin Luther King Jr. biography, King: A Life. Eig spent six full years researching and writing about King’s life. He shares countless moments and pieces of King’s story that get left out of the general image we have of the I Have a Dream preacher. He also argues that, through honoring the Civil Rights activist with a holiday and through flashy quotes and merch like mugs and tees, we lose sight of the real King and his radicalism. Special thanks to our guest, Jonathan Eig, for joining us today. Find King: A Life here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Jonathan Eig Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad you're joining me today because I have just a phenomenal conversation to share with you. I'm chatting today with author Jonathan Eig, who has written an incredible biography of Martin Luther King called King, A Life. It's one of the first biographies of King out in many decades. It took him more than six years to research and write this book. And I learned so much about one of America's heroes. I think you are going to take a lot away from this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be joined by Jonathan Ige today. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. It's good to talk to you. Your new book, King, A Life, is one of the most sort of hotly anticipated nonfiction releases of 2023. Did you know that, John? I've noticed that it's been getting a lot of buzz. I'm very excited, but I didn't know that was going to happen. So I'm very glad to hear it. There has not been a new biography of Martin Luther King in a very long time. And there has not been somebody who has achieved this level of scholarship. And I think that there's a lot of excitement surrounding how this book will add to our understanding of Martin Luther King. So first of all, congrats on writing a very buzzy book. Okay, I have a million questions. Here's the first thing I want to understand is why? Why this subject? Why this man? And why now?

We've turned King into a monument and a national holiday, of course, which he richly deserves. But at the same time, we've turned him into a hallmark card and a two-dimensional figure sometimes. We've lost sight of what he was really about. And in the process of doing that, we've softened him. We've forgotten just how radical and how brave he was and how much he risked and how vicious the government's attack on him really was. So that's what motivated me to begin with. But then I also realized that there were people alive who still knew him, dozens of them, possibly hundreds.

And he would only be 93, 94 right now. And I was eager to try to talk to as many of those people as I could. And I just realized that was just an incredible opportunity to meet and ask people questions who knew Dr. King. Yeah. And time is short when it comes to being able to talk to people who worked with him or who were with him while he was alive. This is not a project and be like, well, in 20 years, I'll try to get to those people. Time is short. Time had to feel like it was of the essence when you began this project. Well, absolutely. And sadly, many of the people I interviewed have already passed away. I got to meet Juanita Abernathy, who was a dear friend of

King's. I got to meet Harry Belafonte, John Lewis, Dick Gregory. They didn't make it to see the book, but they certainly helped me. And I was honored to be able to record their voices one last time. book, but they certainly helped me. And I was honored to be able to record their voices one last time. I love Harry Belafonte. He is very fascinating to me. I've done a fair amount of work, research, et cetera, on him. I just find him like a very, very interesting character. But we'll come back to Harry Belafonte if we have time. Let's just talk about some of MLK's foundational influences, right? Because if there's somebody that we can look back on and be like, who was an American that really influenced the changing course of history? Who moved that river in a new direction? Many people would point to King, of course,

but how did he get to be the man that he was? This didn't come from nowhere. What were his influences that led him on the path that he was? This didn't come from nowhere. What were his influences that led him on the path that he eventually took? Yeah, it's always fascinating to ask, how did a great person become great? How did they reach this intersection where they were most needed at the right time? And how were they equipped for that? I think King belongs on Mount Rushmore. I think King should be considered a founding father. But it's especially interesting to ask this question when you think about a kid who comes from a Black family who's only two generations removed from slavery, whose father and mother were sharecroppers, who made this leap toward greatness so quickly. And to me, it's fascinating. I think his father

really is one of the most interesting characters in this book because his father is born into sharecropping. His father's father is an alcoholic who's been ground down by sharecropping and can't take it anymore. At age 12, Martin Luther King Sr. decides to leave the farm in Stockbridge, Georgia and walk to Atlanta and remake himself, gets a job, teaches himself to read and write, becomes a preacher, and begins preaching at a time when Black Americans are really beginning to stand up for themselves. And Martin Luther King is raised in that environment in the 1930s and 40s, where he sees his father and other Black men fighting for their rights and begins to think about what could be possible for the next generation. And of course, Martin Luther King Jr. gets the advantages that his father never had. He's

well-educated. He goes to college. He goes to seminary. He pursues a doctorate at Boston University. So he's like all of us, like most of us, trying to outdo his father. And I think that sense of ambition, that sense of competition with his old man was always a driving force for him. But he also had a wonderful, brilliant, warm, loving mother who was equally well-educated as his father was. And she's a big force in his life too. Was there always a sense that he was marked from the start? Did his parents have this idea of like, there is something special about our boy?

idea of like, there is something special about our boy? Or did he just come riding in from out of left field and take his family by surprise? Yeah. Don't all our parents think that we're something special, but very few live up to those expectations. You get to about 12 or 13 and then you go, nah, this kid's nothing. But with King, he skipped grades in school. He was obviously super smart and ambitious. He wasn't the tall, he's actually quite short. He's 5'7", handsome, but not incredibly handsome, but he had this enormous charisma. People were really drawn to him, men and women, maybe especially women. And it was clear that he had that spark and that he wanted to do something big with his life. And the amazing thing is that he did.

So many people have that ambition and then they have to channel it. They have to compromise. They find that life knocks them down a couple of times. King just kept getting up every time life knocked him down. And his drive, his ambition, I think ambition is an important word. And we sometimes treat ambition as if it's a bad thing. King had enormous ambition. He wanted to be a leader. He wanted to change the world. So he was ambitious. He was charismatic.

He was intelligent. He was in the right place at the right time. Where did he get his speaking skills from? Because he's a tremendous speaker. I mean, he is in the upper echelons of potentially greatest orators of all time. How does one learn to do that? Today, you hire like a speaking coach and they tell you how to like, start with the story. And you know what I mean? Like people who are speakers today, they put a lot of work into it, but that you have to get somebody to coach you on how to do that. Where did that speaking ability come from? Well, King practiced for sure. He would practice in his room in front of the mirror as a kid, but it came before that from going to church. He would go to different churches all around

Atlanta to compare the different styles of preachers. He didn't really like his father's style. He thought it was too country, too emotional. King Jr. wanted something more intellectual. So he would go and hear other speakers like William Holmes Borders, who he admired. And he would listen to preachers back then. There were lots of preachers from all over the country on the radio. And he would copy them. He would steal from them sometimes, which was common in the church.

But even in college, like I remember, I talked to one of his classmates who said he used to hear him in his dorm practicing these lines, I think he loved being in front of an audience, even when he was at his peak of fame and when he was the most stressed and when he had so many demands on him, so much pressure, getting in front of an audience, standing in front of a podium or in a pulpit just brought him a lot of pleasure. That's so interesting. Yeah. You mean like when we hear these speeches and we read the text of the speeches and you know you hear there are some recordings of him etc you hear what a phenomenal speaker he was but you don't ever think about what it took for him to get there and it actually is really amusing to think about him standing in front of a mirror alone in the dorm room being like i have a dream you know like that's right uh of course you would practice that of course you would like how else would you get

really really good at doing something? You would have to practice it. That's funny to think about him as a baby speaker. Yeah. And I like to remind people that, you know, he gave that I have a dream speech several times before the March on Washington. So he'd practiced it. And when he got to that point that afternoon where he was thinking about what to do next,

he finished reading the printed part of his speech. He just decided, I'm going to do the dream thing because that always goes over well. His time was up, but he said, I'm Martin Luther King. My time's up when I say it's up. And he added on the second part of the speech, which became arguably one of the greatest and most famous speeches in American history. That's so interesting that he just sort of extemporaneously was like, I got all these people here and there. And he could tell they were eating up what he was saying and that they weren't ready to go. He wasn't ready to leave this stage.

Like when you're in front of a live audience, you can tell when they're bored or, you know, like when you need to move it along. But he obviously sensed that like, there's more to be said here. Let's talk a little bit about the birth of the civil rights movement in the United States. People have been working for civil rights since this country's inception, but the modern civil rights movement that really got going in the 1950s, you can point to Thurgood Marshall as one of the founders of that. And you certainly can point to some of MLK's associates. But King is, man, he is right up there as one of the founders of the modern civil rights movement. How much planning went into it in advance? How much of

it was mapped out? How much of it was like, first, we got to take on transportation, then we need to do X. What was the organizational structure? There wasn't much organizational structure. You had the NAACP with a very careful plan that they were going to attack legally everywhere they could. They were going to use lawyers to sue for rights. But in terms of marching, praying, boycotting, that was not organized at all. And King's role was not organized at all. He did not plan any of it. And he did not plan to become the leader.

It really began spontaneously. And as we all know, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, a boycott emerges. And at first, they think this boycott might just be for one day. And they're actually looking to compromise. They're not even asking for desegregation. They're just saying, let us have enough seats in the back of the bus, white people can have the seats in the front of the bus, and we'll just work it out when we get to the middle. That would have been enough of a compromise for them. But when the white political leaders in

Montgomery refused to even think about compromising, the bus boycott went on. And Martin Luther King emerged as the leader very unexpectedly. He was young, he was new in town. Most people in Montgomery didn't know him yet, but he gave a speech on the first day of the boycott and it riveted the audience and people felt like this was the voice that they wanted to follow. And it had a lot to do with that speaking ability. It had a lot to do with his vision that a protest movement should be nonviolent, but that it should also call on the institutions that we all agreed on. This was a very, in some ways, a mainstream protest. He wasn't saying to white America, we want to overthrow your system. He was saying, we want to join it. And that had enormous appeal. And it had a lot of appeal in the North too, among white

supporters. So King emerges because he's so well-prepared and because his voice is so strong and his message is so powerful. He emerges as the leader, but he's making it up as he goes along. And after a year of boycotting in Montgomery, when they finally win and the NAACP wins the desegregation of the buses, what to do next? How can we take this nationwide? No idea, right? We're just going to have to figure it out as we go. Right. But he knows he wants to try. And at first, instead of, they end up forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but at first they want to call it the Transportation

Conference. They want to focus on just going after bus desegregation, but even then they are improvising. Did he call it the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to appeal to white Christians? Was that one of the motivations for putting Christian in the name so that white people would begin to view these values as like, these are our shared Christian values? Or was there another reason for choosing that name? I think that's a big reason. You have to remember that in the late 1950s, something like three-fourths of all Americans belongs to a church. And on any given Sunday, half of all Americans were sitting in church. This was a very Christian nation with a lot of

actively observant people. And King knew that he could appeal to their consciences. So putting Christian in the title of his organization was very important. It gave him a level of moral authority that would go a long way. One of the criticisms of King, and I know that there are some, and you mentioned at the top, this is an actual human being. Everybody has faults or everybody wishes they could look back and redo some aspect of their life. You want to acknowledge the full weight of his contributions, but also he is a human being. There are things that perhaps he could be criticized on. And one of them was the lack of women in positions of leadership within the SCLC. And King certainly had plenty of women in his orbit,

plenty of women in his orbit in a variety of ways, which we'll get to in a moment. But there were women who were doing almost all of the legwork while he's getting all the face time. That was just not how it was in the 50s? Was there some more broader misogyny at work? Like why weren't women given a seat at the table in the same way that men were? I think it's certainly a function of the times. It's also a function of the religious community in which King is raised. The Southern Baptist community is particularly sexist, I think, and reluctant to give women positions of leadership. So I think that had a huge impact. And King was criticized for it deservedly. He had Ella Baker,

who was uniquely qualified and could have run the entire organization and did step in and serve temporarily as executive director of the SCLC. And King never really found a very strong executive director for the organization, in part because he didn't really see that Ella Baker could have taken the job permanently. And that's just a blind spot. We all have our blind spots. And some of it, as I said, was a result of the times in which he was living, but also the way he was raised. That's a good point. He did give short shrift to Ella Baker. And that's like one of the things that I think a lot of people were like, but why? They feel a little bit like he, at the very least, he overlooked her capabilities. And perhaps even more than that, he did her a little bit wrong. Absolutely. And the same could be said even more pointedly about Coretta Scott

King, who had enormous leadership potential, who had been an activist in college, who was more of an activist than Martin Luther King was when they met. And King absolutely admired and respected her abilities, but still felt like her job was to stay home and raise the kids and said so in some fairly harsh terms at times. What gave him the courage to continue when his house is being firebombed and he's being arrested for nothing, seemingly nothing? Because I feel like so many people today would be like, I don't know if this is worth it. Number one, nothing's changing.

Number two, I'm not trying to get my kids killed. Whatever it is, I feel like the vast majority of people would not be willing to put it all on the line the way that he did. That was, I think, part of what makes him so unique. He's willing to put it all on the line. Where did that courage come from? In a word, it comes from God. I've seldom come across anybody who put their beliefs into action so strongly as King. When his house is bombed for the first time in Montgomery, he says that God speaks to him, that he's up all night, he can't sleep, he doesn't know what to do. He's afraid that he's putting his families in jeopardy, that he's going to get them all killed. And he hears God's voice say to him,

literally hears the voice of God say to him, do what you believe is right. And he feels like this is a calling. And all of his life from that moment on, when he's confronted with challenges, when he's afraid, when he fears that his life may be in jeopardy, when he knows it would be easier to cut back, to step back, to let someone else lead, he can't do it. He believes that he's been not just instructed by God, but taught all his life that the words in the Bible mean something. And the words in the Bible say that we should live as brothers, that we should love our enemies, that we should fight for justice, that we have to work with God to make a better world here on earth. And he's putting his money where his mouth is. He's literally stepping into the breach over and over again. Even when the

FBI is out to get him, when they're clearly trying to destroy him, destroy his marriage, encourage him to kill himself, he still won't back down. It's incredible bravery. Did he wrestle with that? Was there ever any evidence where he was like, why God? Why me? Why do I need to do this? Yeah. He wrote to one of his friends not long after the Montgomery bus boycott that now people are going to be expecting miracles from me for the rest of my life. And I just don't know how I'm going to do it. And at the same time, while he never wavered from that commitment, he did suffer. He was hospitalized numerous times for exhaustion and what Coretta sometimes referred to as

depression. When he got the Nobel Peace Prize, he was in the hospital when he got the news. He was in the hospital for exhaustion. And when you think about the pressure he was under and the fact that he just kept going without ever having a break, he didn't take a sabbatical. He didn't have time to go to the ballgame with his kids. He was on all the time and under this incredible stress and literally with his life on the line threatened all the time. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.

And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! It's my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. J. Edgar Hoover is another historic subject of interest of mine, in addition to King and Harry Belafonte. Why did Hoover target him? Because when you look at some of Hoover's early actions, there were times where he tried to board off the KKK,

for example, in certain places in the South. He sends his federal agents in. What about King was so particularly threatening to both Hoover and the broader federal government at large? Well, great question. In the largest scope, I think it's safe to say that J. Edgar Hoover was a white Christian nationalist who was determined to preserve the power structure as it was at that time. And he was threatened by anything that might disrupt that. He was certainly threatened by communism, and he was threatened by black radicals or anyone who might disrupt the status quo. He had a particular problem with King. He had a particular problem with black people in general, but he had a particular problem with King because King criticized the FBI, and Hoover was very sensitive to criticism. King said completely accurately that there

weren't enough Black agents in the South, and that the white FBI agents in the South were in bed with the police, basically, that they weren't doing much to protect the interests of civil rights protesters. Absolutely true. But when Hoover heard it, he went ballistic. How dare this guy? How dare this black guy in particular? And he didn't call him a black guy. He called him a much harsher word. How dare he criticize the FBI? And that really helped put a target on King's back, perhaps literally. And then as King becomes more popular, as he wins the Nobel Prize, as he leads this march on Washington, then Hoover sees him as an even greater threat, because he seems to have the power to potentially unite Black Americans in their demands for justice. Yeah, and to upset the balance of power, to upset the status quo that Hoover was intent on maintaining. This is another question that

people sent me because they have a difficult time knowing what King was doing behind the scenes, particularly with women. They have a hard time reckoning with this idea that he's this man of God who has a vision for America that is really unlike any vision that had been cast before, right? That he has this tremendous power to wield in many ways over both black and white Americans. They have a hard time reconciling that vision with this man who behind the scenes is meeting different women in different cities and things of that nature. First of all, do you have any sense of how he rationalized that in his own mind? Well, I should say, first of all, that so many of our great heroes have enormous flaws and King is certainly not the first to have this particular flaw where he cheated on women. And I think it's important that we can confront it and talk about it. We should not expect our heroes and our leaders to be perfect. We should ask them to be the best they can be. And King wrestled with this. He felt enormous guilt. as a kid, as a teenager, that he knew his father was a womanizer and that he was determined not to

be that way. And yet he was that way almost his entire life. But I think the important thing about King is to recognize that he did great things and he made mistakes and he was flawed. And in his sermons, he talked about it a lot, about living with that guilt and knowing that we're not perfect and trying to be better people. And then, of course, as you mentioned, the FBI began to exploit that weakness. Of course, if you are trying to take somebody down, you're looking for any weakness they have. You're looking for the missing scale in the underbelly of the dragon. Where can I get my arrow in to cause this person some damage? And one of the ways that they wanted to take him down,

because they couldn't take him down by being like, boo, he's terrible. Don't pay attention to him. That wasn't going to work. They were trying to get him to self-destruct almost of like, there seems to be this almost element of torture of like you were mentioning, like, element of torture of like you were mentioning, like, is today the day that everybody finds out the truth about me? And it almost seems like that game that they were playing was intentional. How did the FBI begin to, first of all, how did they find out about this weakness of his? And to what lengths did they go to exploit that weakness? of his. And to what lengths did they go to exploit that weakness? Well, the FBI began wiretapping his associates because they thought that he might be connected to communists or former communists. So they tapped the phones of some of those people who they thought might have communist ties,

and they listened to their conversations. And they heard nothing to suggest that King was interested in communism, but they did hear him talking to women. He was staying at one of his associates' houses and using the phone there, not knowing that that phone was tapped and talking to a couple of his girlfriends. And the FBI, when they realized that, changed their focus. They lost interest in the communist part and took up interest in his personal life. And I think it's in part because J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed the salaciousness of it. I think found some entertainment value, some gossip value in listening to King's personal life and talking about him and sharing that with congressmen, with reporters. It was like a yuck yuck thing for them, which is horribly offensive and

disappointing when you realize that LBJ's greatest accomplishments were done in partnership with Martin Luther King, that passing the Civil Rights Act and passing the Voting Rights Act was an accomplishment that they could look at as a partnership, something that they had worked on and brought about together that they were both enormously proud of. And yet here's LBJ really encouraging J. Edgar Hoover to continue this spying operation, to continue this gossip, to, to continue this gossip, to continue feeding him this gossip. It's really disappointing that their relationship was a false one in that way. Did LBJ want to get rid of him in the same way that Hoover did?

No, I don't think LBJ wanted to get rid of him. I think LBJ was just enjoying the gossip, liked having power over people, liked having inside information on people. But once King started speaking out on the Vietnam War, LBJ was furious, took that personally, and the friendship, any friendship that might have remained at that point was gone. Mm. Do you think King became more radical as time went on? Did he start in point A and progress to point B, or did white Americans just fail to see how radical he was from the very beginning? I think he was always a radical, a Christian radical, a radical who believed that the teachings of Jesus were what we're actually supposed to follow, not just talk about, not just pray about in church. And as he went along in his career,

he spoke out more openly about those radical beliefs. Once he showed that he could fight segregation in the South and he could desegregate buses and other institutions, he began talking about income inequality. He began talking about segregation in the North. He began talking about the war in Vietnam. And he said, this is what I've been preaching all along. But now that I've got a bigger platform, now that I've got a bigger audience, I'm going to talk about everything. I'm not going to limit myself to where you expect me to speak. And his advisors sometimes said, you're watering down your power, you're damaging your influence by talking about so many different things. Just stick to what you're good at, stick to the South,

stick to voting rights. But King refused because he said, that's not what the Bible tells us to do. Bible says we have to fight all of these injustices. He famously railed against white moderates, particularly he's famous for it in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he was like, I am done with your lukewarm receptions. I would rather have you oppose me outright than this kind of treatment that I'm getting from white moderates. What effect did that have, if any? Even today, all of these years later, it feels like a little bit of a knife in the gut of would he have opposed me and my beliefs? I'm curious about your thoughts about that. have opposed me and my beliefs. I'm curious about your thoughts about that.

I think it hurt King because when he was attacking the Southern segregationists, when he was going after Bull Connor, when he was going after the police or the discrimination in Selma, it was easy for white moderates to say, yeah, you go, Dr. King, and send a check for $10 to support his cause. And then when he came north and said, you know, Chicago's housing is more segregated than Selma's. Chicago's schools are just as segregated as Birmingham's. Suddenly the people didn't want to hear it. And suddenly those checks stopped coming in. So King, he suffered for that. He was speaking the truth. He was speaking the truth to the people who were not so eager to hear it. And at great personal cost, it really damaged his movement, damaged his fundraising abilities. And his popularity fell off dramatically.

In 64, 65, he's one of the most popular figures in America. And by 66, 67, he's not even on the list anymore. And is that directly related to his sort of attack on the white moderate, in your view? Absolutely. People think he's stepping out of his lane, that it's almost like the shut up and dribble that we say to the basketball players. No, Dr. King, you keep fighting those racists in the South. You keep fighting those sheriffs down there in Alabama, but don't pretend that you know what's going on in Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New York and Chicago. And people were offended that

he was sticking his nose into their business. Here's a question that a lot of people in my community wanted me to ask you, which is, if he had lived, if he had not been killed, what do you think he would have done? Of course, I'm asking you to speculate here, but it's an educated speculation because you spent a lot of years writing a book and really getting to know him. Maybe there's nobody else who knows him inside and out like you do at this point, John. What would he have done with his life? I think he would have gone into the musical theater. No, I'm just kidding. I have no idea. But I do know that his commitment to the cause of racial justice, to fighting poverty, to ending war, to the messages that he learned from the Bible were never going to fade for him.

And I think just like someone like Harry Belafonte, who managed to stay radical his whole life, I'm not sure King would have remained as effective. I'm not sure he would have remained as popular. I don't see him running for president, but I know that he would have remained as radical as ever. And what he did with that, whether he kept writing, whether he kept speaking, whether he was 65, 70 years old and speaking on college campuses and rallying people to rethink their priorities, I think he would have been out there. How did America go from sort of reviling him at the end of his life where people were like, I don't know, he's not what he once was.

Or like you said, shut up and dribble, stay in your lane. How did he go from that to where he is today? Where he is now, as you mentioned, he's like a holiday. There's merch. We have our Martin Luther King mugs. And we take a day off of work. To us now, his teachings, many of his teachings, they seem like scratching a puppy's ears. Of course we shouldn't segregate schools.

How do we go from the FBI is trying to convince him to kill himself to he should be on Mount Rushmore. I think, you know, you could argue that the federal holiday, which was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, I think you could argue that it did some damage. It may have done more harm than good to our true picture of King, to understanding the real man. Because what we do is we teach starting in kindergarten, I have a dream. What we do is we teach starting in kindergarten, I have a dream, and we never really get much more nuanced than that as our kids go through school and even into college. At most, we might teach them to read Letter from Birmingham Jail, but we're not reading his books. We're not reading his most radical messages. We're not even really reading the first half of the I have a dream speech where he talks about reparations and police brutality.

So as a result, in part of that holiday, we have softened his image to the point where he might not even recognize himself. He's been reduced to a few platitudes and we don't see the full sweep of who he was as a human being, flawed and radical. I would love to hear a little bit more before we wrap up. What did it take to write this book? What did it take to research a story of this magnitude? Because he was everywhere. He was all the places. There are so many sources. There's so many articles. There's so many people. I mean, you could just pick a few and be like, yeah, I got it. But

my impression of this book is not that you just like talk to five people and we're like, yeah, he was pretty radical type, type, type. The amount of material that there is on him had to make this even more of a daunting task. It was intimidating. It was six years of full-time work. I don't do anything else. And hundreds of interviews, thousands and thousands of pages of archival materials. And I had a blast.

I got to interview people who knew Dr. King. I got to go visit with John Lewis and Harry Belafonte in their homes, James Lawson out in Los Angeles, King's friends from high school. I mean, I would have paid for the honor of doing that. And I love digging into archives. I love asking questions and rethinking things. Did Mahalia Jackson really inspire King to say, I have a dream to change the plan and his speech to pivot? I want to know. I'm going to dive into that. I'm going to look for everything. I turn over every stone. So after six years, I was done. I had to finish the book at some point, but I could have easily gone for another couple of years and not lost interest, not lost my passion for this project.

Are you somebody who carefully organizes and digitizes all your notes so that you can research them later? So you can be like, where was that thing about the blue tie in Atlanta? Or do you keep things on paper? What's your organization system for this amount of research? It's really hard to keep organized when you're gathering material for six years and you don't know three or four years later where you put something. So I just try to leave myself as many breadcrumbs as I can, tag everything, save it in several different places, print out the really important stuff so that there's no way I could lose it. It's a mess, but it's my mess. I get that. When you're writing, do you have a methodology where you're like,

I write two pages a day, or I write for four hours? Or like, what is do you have any parameters that you force yourself to abide by? No, it's a it's a mess again, because I'm researching the phones ringing, I'm answering emails that come in from sources, I'm trying to set up interviews, it's constant juggling. The only thing I try to do is cut myself some slack for like an hour, hour and a half every day to exercise in the middle of the day. Because I think that keeps me keeps me sane. And I my head is clearest when I'm doing that. So other than that, and try to at least pay a little attention to my wife and kids. It is interesting to realize that there is no formula. Literally every author has their own methodology. Some people have these little tricks

where they're like, and then I end for the day in the middle of a sentence so that when I come back the next day, it's easy to see where I need to pick up. What would you say are some things that the average American whose understanding of King is, I have a dream, we have a holiday, he fought for civil rights. That's their understanding of King. What would you say people might be surprised to know about him? You should know that he was a real person with real feelings. He chewed his fingernails when he was nervous. He smoked cigarettes. He drank a little bit when he was exhausted to help him fall asleep. You should also know that he absolutely adored his wife,

even as he cheated on her. He's a complicated man. And he was trying to be the best man he could, just like all of us are. And he had to reckon with his flaws. And he had to do it on a public stage, which made it even harder in a way that I can't imagine. But I guess that my big takeaway is I hope when people read this book that they feel like they know him and they can relate to him. Because if we can't relate to our heroes, we can't even hope to try to do anything on our own to emulate them, right? If you think that you have to be a saint, if you think that our heroes have to be superhuman, then what chance do we have of actually helping to make the world a better place? That's right. What chance do the rest of us mere mortals who got a C-minus in chemistry?

Yeah, he got a B in public speaking, by the way. Martin Luther King. Yeah, he got a B in public speaking, by the way. Martin Luther King. That's funny. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, that's a great example of your grades don't necessarily carry over into the rest of your life. Right. And he's also just such a phenomenal example of one person can make a difference.

And in some ways, he is such a behemoth in our minds that we all feel like, well, I'm no Martin Luther King, so I could never do that. But there is something to be said about this idea of like, he was literally just putting one foot in front of the other, the same way all of us are. He was like, I guess I'll go where I'm needed. I guess I'll do the next right thing. He did not receive the stone tablets on the top of mount sinai directing him to on his next steps and i like to think in this age when it seems so rare that hey maybe it's not that hard to do the right thing maybe it's actually like let's maybe we should try it let's give it a whirl and see what happens all right i'm with you john let's do's do that. Let's do it. Thank you so much for being here today. I loved this conversation. Me too. Thanks. You can check out King, A Life by Jonathan Eig. It's E-I-G. Wherever you prefer to buy your books, you can also learn more about the book at

John's website, jonatheneig.com. Thanks for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Thanks for being here today. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon. Hey, Torontonians. Recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility. By recycling properly, you help conserve resources, reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and protect the environment.

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