"In hallowing him, we have hollowed him."

Jonathan Eig on his new King Biography, “King: A Life.”

This week, journalist and biographer, Jonathan Eig, joins Stephanie and Michael on Nonviolence Radio to talk about his new book, King: A Life. His new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. draws on sources that have only now been recovered (perhaps most notably, transcriptions of conversations recorded by the FBI). Jonathan speaks candidly about how important it is to remember King all his human complexity: his personal doubts and struggles, his admiration for figures he’s often remembered in contrast to (like Malcom X and Stokely Carmichael), and perhaps most importantly, for the depth and force of his moral vision, which, in some real sense, was revolutionary. 

When you listen to his most radical speeches, he’s quoting the Bible and the Constitution in support of his radicalism. So, that’s going to mess with some people’s heads. And that’s what made him great, and it’s also what made him frightening…We remember that he said, “I have a dream,” and we remember that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, but we forget that in the same speech he called for reparations and attacked police brutality.

We risk failing ourselves and King himself when we hold onto only a ‘hollow’ sense of who he was. With a fuller, richer, more nuanced understanding of him, we can stretch ourselves to embrace and perhaps manifest in our time now some of the powerful, challenging and deeply human values to which he was so steadfastly committed.

Music -
Hate is Too Heavy
Make Good Trouble
by Gary Nicholson

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence