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ALISA ROSENTHAL: Hi everyone, thanks for tuning into Chicago Humanities Tapes. We’re the audio version of all the best moments from the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. We’re bringing you a special episode today – Chicago’s own author Jonathan Eig has just won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in biography for his book King: A Life – and we were lucky enough to have him on his book tour in May of 2023. King is the first biography on Martin Luther King Jr. in three decades, and Eig was able to access MLK’s FBI files, illuminating never before heard stories and bringing deeper insight to the revolutionary man who changed America.

Jonathan Eig is an alum of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. An accomplished and celebrated biographer, his previous works include Ali: A Life about Muhammad Ali, Get Capone about Al Capone, Opening Day about Jackie Robinson, and The Luckiest Man about Lou Gehrig. You can catch actually catch him coming up live in Chicago on Tuesday, May 21st, interviewing fellow Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the ‘60s. You can catch that at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center at 7pm. Head to chicagohumanities.org for more information.

Today, Eig is joined by the Interview Show’s Mark Bazer at rock club the Chop Shop for a riveting chat that spans Martin Luther King Jr.’s radicalism, speeches, and complexities. And shout out to all the archivists – stick around til the end for Eig nerding out on tracking down documents, genuinely riveting stuff.

This is Jonathan Eig and Mark Bazer at the Chop Shop, recorded live at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival in 2023.

JONATHAN EIG: Ah.

MARK BAZER: How ya been?

JONATHAN EIG: I'm good.

MARK BAZER: It's been a little while.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah. What are all these people doing here? It's a book event.

MARK BAZER: The last time we talked, I think, was about your Capone book. And King is a better is a better guy.

JONATHAN EIG: You going out on a limb there?

MARK BAZER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I so I wanted to start and I'm going to actually get the quote up with King's with Martin Luther King's place in, the Black church and that and that obviously starts from the beginning, and particularly with something that a guy named Benjamin Mays said. And Mays was the, he was the president of Morehouse College when King was there. And he also was responsible for not just King, but many activists who went out into the world after studying under him. And he was asked why King became a minister, and his words were because he had to be. And that obviously means more than just that. His dad was one and his grandfather was one, and he grew up in the church. Mays was getting at something else. What was he getting at?

JONATHAN EIG: I think, King had to be because he a he was reared in the church. His, you know, his father, his grandfather, his mother and his grandmother were church choir masters, the music directors in the churches. But more than that, you know, so he grew up, he literally learned how to recite prayers before he could read. But even more than that, he grew up with this burning desire to do something about the conditions in which he was raised in the Deep South, and his father had done the same thing. His father literally walked barefoot out of sharecropping life in Stockbridge, Georgia to Atlanta, took a job and remade himself and taught himself to read, got a high school diploma, went to Morehouse, and then became the leader of a church and not just leader of a church, but using that church to fight Jim Crow, using it to fight racism. So King is raised in this environment where he's not only learning the Bible, he's learning that the purpose of of being a preacher is to lift up the society, to try to make our community align with what it actually says in the Bible, and that that requires social activism. So when King goes to Morehouse, he goes in thinking maybe law school, maybe medical school. He can still do something for society in those jobs. But he can't, he's pulled to the church. And I think it really was like a magnetic force. He he couldn't escape the pull of it.

MARK BAZER: But you point out something, and you pointed out on a few different occasions that he didn't want to become the type of minister or pastor that his father was. And at one point, you say that when he was at Morehouse, he learned that he could be that a pastor could be emotional, intellectual and political. And then at other times, you talk about how that the gospel could be both personal, which I think is what a lot of people were accustomed to and social.

JONATHAN EIG: Right. King was a little embarrassed by his father. No comment from the peanut gallery.

MARK BAZER: Everybody's embarrassed a little bit, by their father.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, I just embarrassed them. And. So his father was a country preacher who yelled, who, you know, pounded the podium and walked through the congregation screaming, spit flying from his mouth. And King did not like that emotional kind of preaching. He, especially after going to Morehouse, imagined something more intellectual. You know, he studied not just religion, but studied sociology, studied history. And he saw a role model in Benjamin Mays that he related to in some ways more than his father. He couldn't escape being like his father. More bad news.

MARK BAZER: But.

JONATHAN EIG: But he tried, and that's, I think, everything. Because in trying to be different from his father, he figured out sort of the secret blend of the ingredients that that would make him who he was.

MARK BAZER: Another ingredient. And you mentioned staying true to what the Bible actually says is, and I was surprised by King's adherence to nonviolence from a very early time in his life. It was almost in his genetic makeup that he was against violence. But that didn't just come from the church. I was surprised that it was pretty early on that he was he got into Gandhi and others. Talk about how he came to a philosophy of nonviolence and how much that was. And we're going to get into what he actually did. But how much was that moral and how much did it become practical, if that makes sense?

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah it's both. And you're right, you know, he goes to Morehouse and he's interested in studying these philosophers. I think if he hadn't been raised in the church, he might have pursued a philosophy degree. He really was drawn to the philosophy books that he read. And and it made a deep impact on him. But it wasn't really until he got to Montgomery and found himself leading a movement that he began to realize that, hey, it's a useful strategy, right? Because when he gets to Birmingham, he gets to Montgomery and and his house is being bombed and the KKK is threatening to take care of this boycott on their own. He gets a gun. He goes and gets a gun and the state actually won't give him a permit. He keeps the gun anyway. And it's not until Bayard Rustin comes, and, you know, an older activist who's more, experienced and has studied Gandhi and says, you know, if you really want to make this Gandhi thing work, you might want to lose the weapons. And King thinks about it for a while and says, yeah. And he and he actually tells the guys guarding the front of his house to, to, to do it without weapons as well and.

MARK BAZER: Never really had that much guarded guard.

JONATHAN EIG: No, he did not like bodyguards. He always said, you know, people were were shocked, even late into his life after he'd been bombed, his house had been bombed. He'd been shot. He'd been stabbed in the chest. Reporters would come and say, there's no bars on your windows, there's no lights out in front. And King was always very, kind of casual about it. Like when they come for me, they they're going there, they're going to come for me. And, sadly, they did.

MARK BAZER: See you bring up Montgomery and he first he's in Boston. He goes to Boston to get a doctorate, and that's where he meets Coretta Scott King. Then just cause, they get married and he has a choice, he's actually offered jobs, really, wherever he wants. And one of the places that really wants him, of course, is Ebenzer in Atlanta, where his dad is. He wants to bring him back, bring him into the family business, which eventually he would do. It seems that Coretta would have been happy. She had been studying music up in Boston, that she would have been happy staying in the North. And yet he makes the choice and he makes the choice. And it's not a joint decision, it doesn't seem, to go to Montgomery. It's 1954. What's going on in Montgomery at the time? Obviously, the culture is changing in many ways across the country, but what's happening there? Does he have any inkling of what's to come and why does he choose, of all places, Montgomery, Alabama?

JONATHAN EIG: Well, he might have said later that God chose for him because it doesn't really make sense. And he had a lot of choices. When you think about some of the choices he made that could have changed the course of history, he was choosing between Boston University and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Right. How does that change history, if he goes to the other school? He falls in love with a white girl in seminary at Crosier and really wants to marry her. But everybody tells him he can't be a southern preacher if he marries a white girl.

MARK BAZER: And some say that was his great –

JONATHAN EIG: That was his – Harry Belafonte told me that was his great love and he never got over it. Yeah. So all the different ways that things could have turned out differently. But the reason he goes to Montgomery is really he doesn't want to go back to being with his dad. He's he's kind of scared of his dad and doesn't think working with him is going to be that much fun. He's it's offered another job in Chattanooga. Montgomery is a better church. It's a bigger church. It's kind of a silk stocking church. And his father actually warns him against it. Says those are a bunch of uppities, in Montgomery. You don't want to be there. Because.

MARK BAZER: And he grew up. He grew up part of the I mean, he grew up middle class for, he grew up in the in the higher end of the Black community in Atlanta.

JONATHAN EIG: As a preacher's son on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, he was pretty well-off. He grew up relatively comfortably for, you know, Black kid of that generation. But, Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was among was like the most elite church in Montgomery. So Daddy King was warning his son, you don't want to go there. There are a bunch of stuck up, you know, prigs. And you're not going to you're not going to. They're not our kind of people. But he went anyway. Maybe because he had an ego and it was the most prestigious job, and certainly because it had at least a, you know, an hour's drive or more away from Atlanta, some distance between him and his dad. But, it was also the church where Vernon Johns had been the pastor before. And Vernon Johns was a legend, not just as a preacher, but as an activist who really challenged his community. So I think King felt like if Vernon Johns could could succeed here, maybe I can too. And he really I think King was always incredibly ambitious. It's important to remember that, too. You know, he he's he's he really believes that that not that he's going to change the world, that he's going to lead the civil rights movement. But he believes that he's he's meant to do something important, and he just has a lot of confidence in himself.

MARK BAZER: So here and maybe everybody knew this, but here is what was crazy to me. It's about, what, a year later that Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat in Montgomery. King is he's settled into the into his job. He's got a new baby, right? He and Coretta have a baby. It's their first kid. And there's this there's people in Montgomery who are kind of in charge of what is a beginnings of a civil rights movement in the town who aren't with the church.

JONATHAN EIG: That's right.

MARK BAZER: And they are discussing who can lead this movement after to start a movement after Rosa Parks does not want to give up her seat, does not give up her seat. And it's not obvious that King is the choice. And they say, maybe we should get a preacher because that's the person who's not going to divide different factions that we have amongst us. And who could it be? And somebody says, well, we got this new guy. Maybe it could be him. And so there is nothing inevitable that it would be King or is there?

JONATHAN EIG: No. And King doesn't even want the job. I mean, just months earlier, he had turned down an invitation to be on the board of the local NAACP chapter because he was too busy. So he's not looking for any new roles. And I should point out that. Why King? Well, there were some women who were really qualified, who had already led a lot of the civil rights movement, such as it was at the time in Montgomery, Jo Ann Robinson, Rosa Parks. But women were obviously not going to be chosen to lead because we're living in a sexist society and even more sexist society back then, and among Baptist preachers, even more sexist. So, but they had no chance of being chosen. And King was picked in large part because he didn't hadn't made any enemies yet. He hadn't been around long enough. And because there was a vague awareness that he was a pretty good speaker.

MARK BAZER: And the speech he gives you write about he had, what, 20 minutes to prepare? It becomes one of the most, this is in Montgomery, it becomes one of the most important speeches that he will say that he'll ever give. And he talks about, if I'm remembering this correctly, that he was trying to figure out whether he could balance the militant and the moderate. And that's something that you write, he would try to figure out throughout his life and career.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah. He had 20 minutes to write that speech. He usually took 8 to 10 hours to prepare each sermon that he gave each week. And, he had a panic attack, actually, in, in sitting down in his office to try to come up with something to say in those 20 minutes. And he'd lost ten minutes to a panic attack. Those were his own words. And finally, after ten minutes, he just said, I gotta go. So jotted some notes and went out the door. And I think this is King's superpower in a way that that desire to balance the militant and the moderate, to make everyone hear and listen, even as he moved them to incredibly bold action because it's easy to just shout, let's go! Let's burn it down, and get people temporarily fired up. But to sustain that and to make other people listen, to make not just your core audience, but the people who are not sure they want to join you listen and make your opponents listen because you're actually being reasonable. That was King's great gift, and he got in trouble for it all the time, because he could never be radical enough for some people, and he wasn't conservative enough for others. But he knew that there was great power in that, in finding that balance.

MARK BAZER: So what does he and he's not alone, but what does he do in Montgomery that sets, if it does, a blueprint for what's to come in other locations and what begins what begins it it was the cradle of the civil rights movement. And as they go, we can't go into every stop that he makes. But as he goes from a different place, a different place is he enacting what he learned in Montgomery?

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, in a way. But he's improvising all the way. You know, Montgomery, they think it's just going to last a few days, and they're really not demanding that much. They're not even asking for the integration of the busses. They're just saying, let us sit in the back. You guys sitting in the front. And when we meet in the middle, you know, we'll just whoever gets there first. So they're not even asking for real integration. But as the city refuses to to commit or to compromise even that much, they dig in their heels. The both sides dig in their heels. And it's not just King. It's the entire community. It's every African-American person who has to walk to work or carpool, or who gives up their car for a carpool. So King is the voice, and that's why he becomes so important. Because as the news media around the country and as northern whites discover this, they find this, this brilliant young man who's, you know, telegenic, who's who's educated, who can argue with, you know, the most and the most intelligent, you know, northern professors. And he becomes a star and that kind of attention that he helps to bring, focusing the attention of the nation on Montgomery really becomes the key. And that's what he duplicates over and over again. He makes himself the lightning rod. So he goes to, you know, Albany, Georgia, he goes to Saint Augustine, goes to Birmingham, and he never really has a plan. He's always trying to sort of duplicate that magic that, that he, that he generated in Montgomery doesn't always work. And the key really is whether he can be the lightning rod, whether he can summon enough care, enough compassion, enough

MARK BAZER: Well, let's talk about Birmingham. That's one that stands out. It's also, I think you mentioned that he's kind of at the height of his powers during that time. And two things that. I don't know if he learns it then, but come out of that one. Is that when he's in jail, that's kind of a I don't know if it's a strategic move, but it works for the movement. It works. And he obviously writes his famous letter from the Birmingham Jail. The other thing is that was very much based on the image. He understood the power of what we would now call a viral moment. There's and you can talk about it. There's a harrowing image that's that's captured on film of of dogs attacking basically a child. And that engenders sympathy where there might not have been before.

JONATHAN EIG: Well, it certainly changes the moral equation. It's very hard for northerners, at least, to look at this and not feel some sympathy. And King said often that unearned suffering is redemptive, that by suffering we prove how much love we have, how much love we have for this country. If we're willing to suffer for it. We're not asking America to we're not asking to overthrow America. We're asking to join this American democracy. That's how much we're willing to suffer just for the right to join this, this country that doesn't seem to want to give us equal, equal status. And there was a lot of power in that. But he also recognized that when he was in jail, the attention was focused more. And he often would tell his advisers, don't be in any hurry to get me out, go to work, get out.

MARK BAZER: Sometimes it was the other way. Sometimes people would pay his bail that weren't on his side.

JONATHAN EIG: That's right. Yeah. The sheriff in in Saint Augustine. The sheriff in Albany would pay his bail and say, well, we don't know who paid for you. They wanted him out because they knew that if he stayed in jail, more reporters would arrive from the north to cover this.

MARK BAZER: Is, and here's something I also found I found a lot fascinating. But what I also found fascinating, and you mentioned this before, it was pretty early on in his career and in his career post Montgomery, that there was a backlash from people ostensibly on his side who felt that his ideas, his methods had already become passé. And we're talking about 2 or 3 years after almost Montgomery.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah. Yeah. You start to see, I think I can't remember when it was when I mentioned the first time, the New York Times used the term, you know, white backlash that white people began to say, we've done enough for you, haven't we? Why are you pushing for more? Look at all this great stuff you've accomplished. Just relax. Take your time. And and that infuriated King. As you can imagine, that's what the letter from Birmingham Jail is all about. Because it was it was written in response to these white ministers who wrote an article in the newspaper saying just that, be patient. You know, we're all on your side. Meanwhile, King's in jail, and, you're telling us to be patient. You know, the dogs are attacking us, the water hoses are driving us, and you're telling us to be patient. So you know, nothing infuriated, I mean, King had a lot to get angry about. I think nothing made him angrier than the the ministers and people of faith who, who told them to wait.

MARK BAZER: What about the flip side? The flip side? People who were saying, you're not going far enough. You're you're making compromises that we don't want to make. You're hanging out with presidents. Yeah. I mean, that seemed to have happened too, throughout throughout his rise.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, that's what I was referring to earlier. King's getting it from both sides because he's got Malcolm X barking all the time that King's an Uncle Tom that he's you know, he's he's friends of JFK. He's friends with, the white man's never going to give you anything for real, anything of value. You can't trust them. King's a sellout. So he had to he had to hear it from both sides all the time. The interesting thing about King, though, is that I don't think he ever really got turned off by that. He was open to talking to these people who were challenging him. You know, he really liked Stokely Carmichael, even though Carmichael was giving him hell.

MARK BAZER: But it also seemed like Carmichael liked him.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, I think so.

MARK BAZER: Great section in the book about Carmichael talking about how he thought he was maybe not convincing King, but but breaking through in some ways.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah and Carmichael at one point says to him, you know, Dr. King, I'm kind of using you to get my message across by making you look like the weak one. And I'm the strong one. And King says I've been used before. I mean, that's unbelievable. And even with Malcolm X, I think the same thing. I think, you know, King was, was really open to talking to Malcolm X, and, you know, Malcolm X got a lot of political gain out of bashing King, but King never bashed back.

MARK BAZER: So we got to talk about an article that was in the post the other day, Washington Post, in which you argue and it's in the book as well, that that King was not as down on Malcolm X as the historical record would have us believe. And how did you how did you come to to discover that?

JONATHAN EIG: Well, my journalism friends in the audience will know how much fun this is. You know, like, one of the things I love about this is I have six years to work on a story, and, I can pursue everything that crosses my mind. There's no limit on time. It may get really, like, annoying to hear about it sometimes. Like when I'm in month six of telling you about this pursuit of, you know, one piece of paper that I'm looking for. But one of the things I've learned to do over the years is that if you find a great interview that somebody did with your subject, try to track down the notes from the interview, see if you can find the tapes. And usually there's nothing there. But sometimes you'll find that the reporter left things out of the story. So Alex Haley did the the longest interview King ever did ran in Playboy magazine. And.

MARK BAZER: What year is this?

JONATHAN EIG: 1965.

MARK BAZER: Okay.

JONATHAN EIG: And, I found Haley's papers at Duke, the Rubenstein Library, and I asked them to send them to me. It was Covid, so I couldn't go down there. Anyway, if I can get them, digitize it, send it to me. I saves me a lot of time. So they sent me all of the transcripts from the interview. You know, Haley taped the recording. They didn't have the tapes, but they had the transcripts. So you have three different versions. You have the the original transcript of what you got off the tape. You have the version that he submitted to his editors, and then you have the version that was published. All of them are in the archives, and the published version has this quote from King, and it's the most famous quote from King about Malcolm X. It's in history books, it's taught in history classes, has been for generations. And it says that, King says, I have no use for for Malcolm's calls for violence. I think he's just creating more problems than he's solving. And, the fiery, demagogic oratory can bring nothing but grief. And King never said that. The transcripts show that King was asked, what do you think of the Nation of Islam? And he says their fiery, demagogic oratory can bring nothing but grief. And Alex Haley flipped it, change the question to read about Malcolm, and then also added a whole bunch of stuff that King never said at all. So the most famous quote that we've been teaching for 50 years was completely fabricated.

MARK BAZER: Wow.

JONATHAN EIG: By Alex Haley and his editors for Playboy Magazine. And, I get as you can tell, I get really excited about that kind of digging. I could go on and on about like.

MARK BAZER: But what do you think it also reveals.

JONATHAN EIG: Well what it reveals is that King was open minded because he says in the interview, we've only met once, we've only spoken for a few minutes, and, but I don't think I have all the answers. This is King saying, you know, I regret that he speaks so much of violence, but I'm not so arrogant as to think that I have all the answers. And I know that we share a lot of similar goals, you know? And to me, that just says something extraordinary about King, that this guy who was like Stokely Carmichael, basically using him to augment his position to to make his voice seem bigger and bolder. King's not condemning him. In fact, he's he's expressing interest in what he has to say.

MARK BAZER: I want to talk a little bit about what King accomplished, and I think he battled he he wrestled with that. And what did I accomplish? And we look back and obviously he was a, I think a big part in getting the Civil Rights Act into law and then the Voting Rights Act. And yet it seemed like he wrestled with this idea that there's a difference between getting laws passed as important as they are and as much change as they can bring, and what he came to, maybe a little bit later realized was changing society, changing the way people just felt that had nothing to do with what the law was. Did did King question whether he had and accomplished as much as we now look back and say, yeah, of course he did?

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, I think he was frustrated and depressed in the later years of his life. And some people would say, look at what you've accomplished, obviously, two of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed in this country, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. But, he decides obviously not to back down from that. And some people are saying, just stick to the voting rights, like, just keep working in the South, get more people registered to vote, keep focused there. You know, that's where we're most effective, will change the balance of power in Washington, we'll change the balance of power in every state house in the South. But King won't do it. He says the Bible is what he's got, being guided by, not by his political consultants and the and it's clear to him that the racism in the North, the segregation in the North is just as bad as it is in the South. And he tries to make a point of it right here in Chicago, 1966. He comes here and says, look at your schools, look at your housing. You've got nothing to brag about. You know, I've seen better conditions in Birmingham and Selma, and it doesn't go well. It doesn't go well anywhere in the North, really. And it doesn't go well when he starts speaking out against the the Vietnam War because it's, it's it's a lot easier for northern white liberals to write a check and to say, go, go, go get them in Birmingham, Dr. King, than it is to say to look around and look at your own neighborhood and look at your own segregated schools that you're sending your kids to.

MARK BAZER: Yeah. Let's dig a little bit more into Chicago. We're obviously here, and many of the places that you talk about, we can we can go see we can go visit. And he one thing that he was told by people who might have been on his side, too, was you don't understand Chicago. You don't understand the machine. You don't understand that many of the pastors that you might want to hook up with are actually part of the machine. But it also seemed that in many ways, King very much understood Chicago, and he very much understood, and this was when he was making more of a turn and correct me if I'm wrong, to thinking about income inequality in a way that perhaps he hadn't been as focused on in his earlier days.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah, I think King was equally interested in these issues throughout his career. I think he was always a radical. He even in college he was talking about social democracy, capitalism versus communism. Income inequality. He was always interested in those things. But he kind of had his hands full in the South for a while. But then when he gets the Nobel Prize and he passes this legislation and these begins to think about what he really believes in, and he becomes committed to really fighting for everything he believes in, regardless of how practical it is. You know, he gets his butt handed to him a few times, and it doesn't go well in Chicago. And, you know, a lot of people in Chicago told him, you don't understand that you know, a lot of the Black people in Chicago are going to be loyal to Mayor Daley because their jobs depend on it. And he didn't care, you know. He understood it. Absolutely. But he felt like he could still get it done. And it was always this sense with him that if I just go there and show up and I and I do the right thing, that people will come around. And it didn't always work out that way, but that that kind of courage to throw himself into those situations when, you know, even his closest advisers were telling him not to. I mean, that's that's what really gets me, because by the time he's, you know, in his mid 30s and he's he's tired, he's he's frustrated. He could have cut back. He could have, you know, taken a university job and been a president of university or, you know, started a foundation and let someone else take over. But instead he just doubles down over and over and he says, you know, this is what I believe in. How can you tell me not to? And his closest advisers, some of his best friends, when he gave that speech in, in New York, at Riverside Church against the Beyond Vietnam speech when he said America's the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, the American government is the greatest purveyor of violence. His best, one of his best friends and closest advisers called him the next day and said that was a mistake. It didn't sound like you. You're just going to lose a lot of support for this, and, you know, you're never going to be able to get any work done with LBJ again. This is one of his best friends. And King is we have the wiretaps of this. We have the transcripts because the FBI is bugging his phones, which is really sad, but also, you know, beautiful. Because we can we can we can't hear his voice. We don't have the tapes yet, but we have the transcripts. And King is just saying, don't you know me? Haven't you been listening to anything I've been saying all these years? This comes from the Bible. This is not about practicality. This is what I'm what I've devoted my whole life to. And his best friend, one of his best friends, doesn't get that. And I've just. Your heart goes out to him.

MARK BAZER: Well, well, let's talk about his relationship with LBJ. But first, let's go back to his relationship with Kennedy. And then Robert Kennedy. And Kennedy didn't invite or his people didn't invite MLK to his inauguration. Kennedy wanted to make sure that he still had southern white Democratic support. You talk about how Martin Luther King said, well, I've been used I've been used before. Who was using who in that relationship? Obviously, the president has far more power than Martin Luther King does. It seemed like Martin Luther King, though at times knew what he was doing and knew knew what he was getting into with with the Kennedys. At the same time, I again, reading this book again, felt very frustrated with the Kennedys. Not only was John F. Kennedy didn't consider civil rights to be part of his agenda at the beginning, but then RFK is the one who okays the wiretaps that Hoover wants to do. So who were they? What was their relationship to King. Did they believe in in King's message?

JONATHAN EIG: They were politicians.

MARK BAZER: Right?

JONATHAN EIG: And King was not.

MARK BAZER: Right.

JONATHAN EIG: And sometimes that that hurt King because he couldn't think like a politician. I sometimes get the feeling that he's like, why aren't they doing the right thing? I don't understand why they're not doing the right thing. And it's almost as if he can't comprehend thinking about, well, doing the right thing, might cost me votes because he would never think that way. And, the Kennedys are ruthless in that way. Yeah, but it's Bobby Kennedy who claims to be, you know, a friend to King and is going to bat for him at times, it's Bobby Kennedy who authorizes the FBI to wiretap King's home and his and his office. And and the Kennedys are really reluctant to to really take a stand for civil rights until King puts the pressure on them by going to Birmingham. And in Reverend Bernard Lafayette, who I interviewed for the book, said that he thought King was the greatest crowbar America ever made. And that's how King saw his job. His job is to pry, and he's got to find a way to pry JFK out of this position where he doesn't want to do anything because he doesn't want to take the risk. He's got to pry LBJ into doing something into really fighting for this legislation. And that means, you know, a crowbar is not comfortable.

MARK BAZER: No, I, LBJ does do stuff, and I've read some of Robert Caro's books, and LBJ always seemed like he had a ulterior motive. Like it wasn't even the ulterior motive. It was the motive for. Yeah. But yet LBJ and King, for a while, at least until Vietnam did seem to have a relationship that got things done. Why?

JONATHAN EIG: No question about it. I mean LBJ was was sincerely committed to fighting poverty and to fighting segregation. And and King was a was a hugely important ally and he recognized it. And when when LBJ takes office, King is one of the first people he calls. And in those phone calls, he calls him Martin. And they have these wonderful conversations.

MARK BAZER: Doesn't he change that after a while?

JONATHAN EIG: He starts calling him Dr. King, and then he starts calling him Reverend. And it's clearly, happening concurrently with the pile of FBI documents that are coming into his office. And one of the other really fun discoveries, not fun, sad discoveries, but fun for me as a journalist. Was David Garrow, who wrote Bearing the Cross and who was a great coach to me in writing this book, said, have you ever thought about checking LBJ's secretaries files? And, I had never heard of Mildred Stegall, who was, who was not only King, not only LBJ's secretary, but was also his liaison to the FBI. Turned out that she was keeping a lot of the papers in her own personal files, that that Hoover was sending directly to LBJ. LBJ had certain stuff he didn't want going into the into the main files. So he kept them with the secretary who kept them in a safe, including his, his his, personal financial documents, including the tapes he was making of his own phone calls and all of the FBI stuff about King. It was all in Mildred Stegall's collection, and I was the first person to see most of it, including that includes Robert Caro, who still has some work to do. If he wants to, get through the Stegall papers because there's, like, I think 300 cubic feet of them.

MARK BAZER: And you don't own them, though. You can't sell them to Caro, right?

JONATHAN EIG: I can, I can, I'd be happy to share them. No charge.

MARK BAZER: Well, let's talk about how you approached the personal story of King. And because in some ways, it's irrelevant, in some ways, what he accomplished. Does it matter that he was moody? Does it matter what his infidelities were? On the other hand, the way it seems you approach it and again, correct me if I'm wrong, the personal for him is often also very much tied to the political, and that could include everything from the fact that King always lived a modest lifestyle. His house was was was small by the but what he could have had, and he was very cognizant of that, and he did not want to have any kinds of appearances that he was taking advantage, which nowadays, like, you know, people would have mansions in that situation.

JONATHAN EIG: Right. And Coretta was not happy about that, by the way.

MARK BAZER: On the other hand, sometimes it's the personal is Martin Luther King, we all know, had his infidelities. And those are what Hoover because Hoover and I don't even quite know what Hoover's motivations were. He certainly did think that King was a communist, but he thought he could get at him through these tapes that reveal these infidelities. So every time you come into his personal life are not every time, but often, it's also very much connected to what that meant, away from the personal, if that makes sense. Is that how you approach dealing with the man and not just what he did?

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I felt like I had to be honest, and this is the first book that has access to a lot of that FBI information, and the first book that acknowledges that that, Dorothy Cotton was a long time mistress, lover. She –

MARK BAZER: Who worked with him.

JONATHAN EIG: Who worked with him at the SCLC, the highest ranking woman in the SCLC and who often who told her friends that she considered herself a sister wife to Coretta. So, I had to deal with that. I felt like it would be dishonest not to. But I also wanted to make sure I did not wallow in it, and I wanted to put it in context. Why is it important? The most, the reason it's most important is to understand that he's a flawed human, like all of us, and that it was weaponized by the FBI. And I think that's, the most important part of the story, in a way, because it has these dire consequences. It he suffers as a result of the FBI's attacks on him. The FBI becomes interested in King, in part in the beginning, mostly because they're worried that he's associated with communists and former communists. When it becomes clear that the communists really have no influence on him, the wiretaps are already in place, and they begin to pick up his contact, his communications with these other women. And then that becomes an obsession for J. Edgar Hoover, really, for pruriant reasons. I think he's just he thinks it's kind of fun gossip, and he enjoys sharing it with LBJ and with members of Congress and with other people in the FBI and with reporters. And then he becomes determined to use it to hurt King, in part because he's a racist, and in part because I think he's threatened by anyone - and this is true for J. Edgar Hoover's entire career - anyone who upsets the status quo, the the white Christian nationalist view of of his, his view of who should be in charge and who should be running this country. King is a huge threat to that, and he becomes determined to try to use this sexual information to take King out, to take him down and disrupt his organization and ruin his marriage. And even, you know, try to compel them to suicide. In one letter that the FBI sent to King.

MARK BAZER: But it never really takes hold. Or does it or does can you mention King suffers for it?

JONATHAN EIG: It takes hold in as much that King knows it's out there. He knows that every day could be the day he wakes up and opens the newspaper and finds that one, one of these reporters has taken the bait and has published the story that J. Edgar Hoover has been trying to get a reporter to publish. So it never makes it into the mainstream media, in part because reporters back then protected people's privacy.

MARK BAZER: There was no Twitter.

JONATHAN EIG: Right. But it's also important to note that none of those reporters wrote the more important story, which is that the FBI was conducting surveillance on a private citizen.

MARK BAZER: That's what's crazy. It's not that they I mean, it's it's honorable that they didn't put it out there, but they had another story sitting there.

JONATHAN EIG: Yeah. And they were afraid of of attacking Hoover.

MARK BAZER: Let's talk a little bit about, Coretta. She obviously is is plays a significant part of the book, but also obviously of King's life. And yet and yet I can't still quite make sense of the relationship, as you said Belafonte, who you got to talk to. He he talked about how King had another person who was the great love of his life and that he even, I think I forget the words, but that Coretta was not his soulmate. He does credit her with introducing King to an aspect of social justice that he hadn't been introduced to. And they have, obviously they have, they're they're married until until King is killed. But King is gone all the time. And when he does die, she immediately takes over some of the efforts, she organizes a rally. She's she she continues to work for the rest of her life. How did you how do you make sense of their relationship? Was it a partnership or was it something, something less?

JONATHAN EIG: It's complicated, like most marriages are. But, this one, you know, lived on a public stage. Belafonte told me that he thought of it as almost like a business partnership. Belafonte was not fond of Coretta, so I should preface that. He also said he could not stand to be in the room when she sang like it was it was that bad, in his opinion. But. And she sued him, so there might have been some, you know, some some personal.

MARK BAZER: What did you say to him about?

JONATHAN EIG: He tried to sell some of his King memorabilia, and she claimed that it was that she had the right to it. Anyway, what's interesting to me is that Coretta is is a powerful, formidable, really intelligent woman. King dated a lot of women, and when he met Coretta, he was dating a lot of women. And, why was why was it why was she the one that he fell for? She was beautiful, of course, but I think it was mostly the fact that, she had experience as an activist, that she had this burning passion. She wanted to be a concert singer, but, you know, she'd gone to Antioch College, which was integrated, and she had been in all of these protests already. She'd been to the Progressive Party's national convention. I think King was really turned on by that and saw, you know, a soulmate in that way. And I think that throughout their marriage, obviously, you know, he strayed, in many ways, but I don't think he ever strayed from her intellectually. And I think he felt like, a reporter asked him really late in life in this wonderful TV interview, that again, I found, like all of the outtakes from the TV interview and he said, was your wife always interested in in activism or did you, you know, bring her into the fold? And he said, no, in many ways, she brought me into the fold.

MARK BAZER: Let's talk about let's get into the process a little before we we have to wrap up. And that is. What you know what did you have access to that others didn't have access to? Where did you find stuff you've already alluded to to a couple of things that going in, you had no idea they existed? And if somebody said to me, okay, your job right now is to write a book about one of the most important people of the 20th century, I'd be like, all right, I'm going to go that way. Where do you where do you start? How did you start?

JONATHAN EIG: I started by interviewing old people. Because that was obvious to me that like, the the clock was ticking and that there were dozens of scores of people who knew Martin Luther King. And that's what really got me excited. Like, I can spend the next five, six years of my life interviewing people who knew Martin Luther King. Like, how crazy is that? Because, you know, if you ask younger people, they'll tell you, you know, he's he lived 200 years ago and it seems like it sometimes we forget that his older sister is still alive.

MARK BAZER: He would have been, what, 94?

JONATHAN EIG: Right? Yeah. So that was my my first mission. Just as fast as possible. Get out there. And luckily I got to most of them before Covid. And then by the time Covid hit, they loved when I called. Like, it's hard to get interviews with them at first because they're busy and they're important. And I, they don't know who I am. But once I got to know them and I'd been to their homes and then Covid hit and they were stuck inside, I called, I called Reverend Jim James Lawson, like, every day for a month. And –

MARK BAZER: Could they operate Zoom?

JONATHAN EIG: I didn't – no I these are – I'm not teaching anybody new technology at that age. But like June Dobbs Butts who, was King's childhood friend, I visited her three times in this nursing home. And when Covid hit, I was on the phone with her every day. She told me this. She she she she told me a joke about Martin Luther King that she's. And she told it to me every time I called, the same joke, which I'm not going to repeat.

MARK BAZER: What?

JONATHAN EIG: Maybe in private later over drinks. No. But anyway.

MARK BAZER: Do we can we just. She's not alive anymore or she's.

JONATHAN EIG: She's not alive anymore, sadly.

MARK BAZER: So you can't call her? Was it funny? Was it a funny joke?

JONATHAN EIG: No. It was pretty good, pretty good. But then I began looking for archival stuff, and, you know, I found probably my favorite find was the, the SCLC had an official Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King's organization, had an official historian, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, who was he was with them in Montgomery. He traveled, it was just him, Martin Luther King, and Coretta went to India together. The three of them. He went everywhere King went for his entire career and took notes. Terrible handwriting, but he took notes. He kept receipts. He wrote down what songs were being sung at every mass meeting, and his papers were donated to the Schomburg Library a few years ago, and the boxes had never been opened.

MARK BAZER: The what library?

JONATHAN EIG: The Schomburg Library in Harlem.

MARK BAZER: Okay.

JONATHAN EIG: And I asked him if I could go through them. They said they haven't been cataloged yet. I said, I'll go through them and catalog them for you, like, just let me at them. And they did. I had help from a friend in New York who went in there every day and brought cookies to the archivists there, and we got through that, those boxes before anybody else and stuff like that. But that's the other thing, is that, like it had been 30, 40 years since the last King biography, so nobody had gone looking for this kind of stuff in a long time. I found, Martin Luther King Sr.'s unpublished autobiography that the King Center didn't even know they had. So I get I just I love that kind of stuff.

MARK BAZER: I want to ask you, and this could be a longer discussion, but just in the time we have, which is, today, and the book is not about how we view King today, but today King, there's two things that come to mind. One is that some of the ways, some of the things that he spoke about, and you talked about it before, he would talk about, well, the Constitution says this. We should be a part of what the Constitution says. All men are created equal. And yet for many people who or at one point even says, like, you know, if the Supreme if we're wrong, if the Supreme Court is wrong, we're wrong. Well, now everybody thinks the Supreme Court is wrong, like we've lost both sides have lost so much faith in institutions. His his inherent part of his strength was that he, he, he spoke up against how, about American ideals. But how does King matter at a time when so many people doubt those ideals? More than ever, it seems.

JONATHAN EIG: I think he matters for a whole lot of reasons. One, because he wasn't afraid to be a radical. And one of the reasons I really wanted to write this book is that we've softened his image in turning him into a national holiday and a postage stamp and a monument. We've made him into this two dimensional, very safe figure. And Harry Belafonte talked about that a lot. He said we're afraid of radicals in this country. We don't teach radicals, which is why we don't teach most of King's writing. We teach "I Have a Dream," but we really only teach the second half of the speech when he talks about judging people by the content of their character, which is the kind of stuff like, you know, Republicans are using to attack affirmative action today. But we forget that in the first half of the speech, he called for reparations. In the first half of the speech, he attacked police brutality. In the first half of the speech, he talked about income inequality, and he talked about guaranteed national income and guaranteed jobs, the things that we're still talking about today. So –

MARK BAZER: Which Nixon also agreed?

JONATHAN EIG: Nixon, actually yeah supported, that's right. So I think what impresses me most about King is that after all of the attacks, after having his own government literally try to kill him after being stabbed in the chest and bombed he, and if anybody could be cynical about the state of America, King had a right to be. And yet he never lost hope. He continued to believe that we could do this like we could be better. And if I if he could go through that and believe it, you know, I'd like to think we could too.

MARK BAZER: Last question. When when King is called to Memphis, it's at a time that he is dealing with fatigue, as he did for many years. And fatigue can also be another word for depression. He he's checked into certain hospitals at different times for that. He is not as popular, whatever that means as he as he once was. And yet the people of Memphis clearly need him. And and he feels that need. And even though he's aware and it's not just Memphis, he'd been aware for years that that his death could be imminent. He goes there and at least you end the book feeling that he did feel a sense of renewed purpose. But but my question is, did he and I don't I don't know how much this matters, but I think it I'm curious. Did he, when he, when his life was over at the end of his life, was he did he feel like he had done something? Did he feel that he had accomplished something, or was he had at a very low point?

JONATHAN EIG: You know, the speech he was supposed to give the following Sunday was called America May Burn in Hell. That's how he felt. He was at the end of his rope. A lot of his friends thought that he was depressed, that he had been defeated. But he was in bed that night in Memphis. He'd come down and again, his friends and his advisers had said, don't go. He's planning this march in Washington, the Poor People's Campaign, which is really meant to be the culmination of everything he believes in. He's not just going to attack racism, he's going to attack poverty. He's going to attack the war. He's going to bring people, poor people from all around the country to camp out in Washington, D.C. they're saying it's not going well. We're having trouble recruiting. You need to stay and work on that. But the sanitation workers in in Memphis are calling him and asking him for their help. And he he can't resist. He he feels like he has to help. He has to stand up for for people who are being mistreated. And he gets down there and he's he's sick. He's lying in bed in his pajamas and doesn't feel like getting out of his room. And Ralph Abernathy, Abernathy goes down to make the speech for him and gets there and sees thousands of people who come out in a torrential rain storm to hear Dr. King speak. And Abernathy goes to a payphone and calls the Lorraine Motel and says, you got to come down here. They're not going to be happy listening to me. And King gets dressed and goes down there and gives this speech that's almost as if he's in a hypnotic state. It's even Abernathy said he'd never heard King and Abernathy had heard thousands making speeches. Best friend. And usually the guy who spoke before Dr. King warmed up the crowd. King was in this almost, you know, hypnotic state. And you can listen to it. You can watch the YouTube videos where by the end he says, I've, I've seen the Promised Land. I've been to the mountaintop. I may not get to the Promised Land with you. And then he just turns and walks off the stage. It almost looks like he's going to collapse, and Abernathy grabs him and helps him to his chair and, to see something like that. I don't even remember what your question was now, but, but oh my God. I mean, the man could not give up if he tried. I think that's where I'm trying to go.

MARK BAZER: Well, thank you. Thank you for this. And thank you for writing this book. Jonathan Eig everyone.

JONATHAN EIG: Thanks. Thank you.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: That was Jonathan Eig with Mark Bazer, live at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival in May 2023.

To learn more about Jonathan Eig and for a link to the book King: A Life, scroll down to the show notes or head to chicagohumanities.org/explore/podcast for all that good stuff and more, plus our full calendar of live events.

Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with assistance from the hardworking team over at Chicago Humanities who are programming and producing these events and making them sound fantastic. We’ll be back in two weeks with another Mini Tape for you, a bite-sized, shortened episode, with a big tasty idea. Next week, Mathematician Eugenia Cheng, the scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, on the empathetic nature of math.

EUGENIA CHENG: And I feel that as a mathematician, oddly enough, I can see very clearly where the misunderstanding is coming from, because I can see what each person is using as their form of justification. And because I can separate out, I try to separate out what the definition is, what the steps are that someone has taken, and separate out that from the feelings that we might have about it. That's a discipline where you separate the logic from the feelings, and it means that I can understand a lot. I feel like I'm very good at understanding why people think things, even if I profoundly and very vehemently disagree with what they're thinking.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.

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