![]() ![]() King’s important contributions and place in history.” It is a portrait of an activist who did not like confrontation, a guy who bit his nails, tried to kill himself (twice) as an adolescent and gave up a white girlfriend as a pragmatic necessity for a career in the Baptist church. “Eig accomplishes this without calling into question Dr. Baldwin, a King biographer and professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. The significance of the book is that it “takes us beyond hagiographical treatments of King to a serious consideration of the man’s frailties, doubts and vulnerabilities,” said Lewis V. Edgar Hoover got the phone call about King being shot, before King was even dead, Hoover said: ‘I hope the bastard doesn’t die, because then they’ll turn him into a martyr.’ In a way, a national holiday allows the government to control the image of what King actually stood for, softening it.”Īfter six years of digging and documenting, the result is a biography of King that removed the godliness for something more profound and meaningful. People I interviewed who knew him were mad about this. The government needed to strip away what made King so radical until he became a safe figure, the kind we can all hold hands and sing about. Some of the people I talked with felt this was intentional. ![]() Not since we put up a 30-foot-tall monument in D.C. “The truth is, we haven’t seen him in a while. To publish a new biography in 2023 - a book being hailed as the best, most complete biography of the civil rights leader, and one already dug into The New York Times Bestseller list - meant “scraping decades of barnacles off the hull of King until you can say, ‘Let’s look at this again,’” Eig said. King required another level of rethinking. This is six years of reporting, interviewing and reframing greatness. Harris: “It took a lot of courage for you, as a white man, to write anything about a Black man that is less than positive.” The Black community, he said, has long grown used to white writers tearing down the image of King or “discrediting his greatness.” But that’s not this, Harris said. Yet in this church, I feel a lot of hope.” Then Pastor Chris Harris, jocular and warm, looked out on the crowd and said: “This is the brightest, and the lightest, my church has ever looked.” More laughter, and then attention swung to Eig, the trim, serious, Paul Shaffer-looking guy waiting between them. ![]() I experienced depression.” An Anshe Emet congregant said one of Eig’s sentences resonated: King has become “so hallowed he’s hollow.” Then Rabbi Michael Siegel, soberly, pointed out that though Mayor Brandon Johnson was inaugurated that day, “Chicago is at a low ebb. Two members of the new cross-congregation book club offered thoughts on “King.” A Bright Star congregant noted King was depressed: “That stood out. The ceiling of the church was low, and rows of long banquet tables covered in blue tablecloths filled the room. ![]()
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