- [Presenter] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America, and also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(dramatic music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

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We are the ones who get to choose our future.

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It has to be defended, and it always has to be defended.

(dramatic music fades) (soft music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

Our guest, Jonathan Eig's acclaimed book, "King: A Life" is the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in nearly two generations, a book that he says seeks to recover King from the gray mists of hagiography.

As he writes, "King was a man, not a saint, not a symbol."

Tonight I talk to Jonathan Eig about the very great and the very human Martin Luther King Jr. Jonathan Eig, welcome and congratulations on "King: A Life".

- Thank you.

- In the introduction of your epic biography on Martin Luther King, you write, "The book seeks to recover the real man "from the gray mist of hagiography.

"In the process of canonizing King, "we've defamed him, replacing his complicated politics "and philosophy with catchphrases "that suit one ideology or another."

So who is the Martin Luther King that we generally see?

And who is the Martin Luther King that you came to see upon doing this book?

- Well, we generally see the monument, the dreamer, this very simplified idea of this man who believed in a better world for us all.

And he did believe in a better world for us all.

But we lose sight of the fact that he was also a radical.

We lose sight of just how deeply religious he was.

We lose sight of the fact that he was deeply unpopular in this country for the last three or four years of his life.

That, you know, two thirds of Americans, they disapproved of King in the late '60s.

And he suffered for that.

That's the other thing is that, you know, he failed sometimes, he felt frustrated.

He felt like a failure, and I wanted to show that he was human, that he had feelings too.

- What do you think the greatest misconception about Martin Luther King is?

- I think the greatest conception is that he was sort of this conservative middle of the road, safer alternative than Malcolm X, than Stokely Carmichael.

When in fact, I think King was just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, just as radical, and that's partly why he fell in popularity so much because he refused to just say and do the easy thing throughout his career.

He was always challenging us.

- So, what does his privileged upbringing in Atlanta say about Martin Luther King?

- You know, it's so interesting.

I interviewed hundreds of people who knew King.

He would only be 95, only 95, but he would still be, his friends and colleagues, you know, were in their 80s and 90s when I interviewed them, and they often said that King wasn't bruised by racism quite the way so many of them were, that he grew up in this relatively privileged middle class household with a preacher for a father, preacher for a grandfather, and that offered him a little bit of a bubble, so that even though they were, he was born in the middle of the Depression, he had a sense of privilege.

He was able to go to good schools and good colleges.

Of course, you know, Morehouse College in Atlanta.

And then as a result of that, expectations were super high for him.

But he also didn't feel the sting of southern racism quite as severely as some other people did.

- He had a complicated relationship with his formidable father.

Talk about that.

- Yeah, Daddy King, as everybody called him, Martin Luther King Senior, was a really interesting figure.

I mean, born into sharecropping at age 12, walks off the farm in Stockbridge, Georgia, with just his one pair of shoes slung over his shoulders so he doesn't wear them out and makes his way to Atlanta and really reinvents himself, learns to read and write, becomes a preacher, and makes it possible for his son to become who he does.

But he's also really domineering, strict, sometimes, you know, physically abusive father and King always struggles with his father, always struggles to stand up to him.

I think it's one reason that King struggles even to stand up to other authority figures like presidents and FBI directors and even other leaders of the Civil Rights movement.

He doesn't like confrontation.

He doesn't like conflict because he's afraid of his father as a kid.

- Hmm.

- And it's interesting to think about our, you know, our greatest protest leader being somebody who really doesn't like conflict.

I love that about him.

- But one of the things he does to get away from his father when he becomes an adult is he goes to Montgomery, where he ultimately ends up leading the Montgomery bus boycott at 26 years of age.

But you write that he's very reluctant to pick up the mantle of leadership.

So how does Martin Luther King come to lead the Montgomery bus boycott?

- It's really the moment that makes him who he is and really ends up shaping the entire history of our country.

Because as you said, he doesn't want to lead the Montgomery bus boycott.

He doesn't even wanna go to the first meeting.

He says he'll think about it, and then they just ask him to speak.

Just give us a speech so we can motivate people to stay off the buses on Monday.

And he agrees to do that.

And in that moment, in that speech, he finds his voice, he finds this message that appeals not just to the people in Montgomery who are thinking about staying off the buses, but really resonates around the country.

And it's this moment that he's made for.

You know, he says that if we're wrong in demanding justice here in Montgomery, then the Constitution is wrong, the Supreme Court is wrong, the Holy Bible is wrong.

And he finds this message that combines religious faith and faith in democracy to say that we don't wanna tear down American society.

We wanna join it, we wanna make it better.

And the people who've been treated worse in this country may be the ones who actually help fulfill the promise of the Constitution.

- Where does that power of eloquence come from in Martin Luther King?

- Well, he's a preacher's son, and he's a preacher's grandson, and he's a kid who grew up practicing sermons in the mirror, baptizing pets, you know, performing eulogies for dead animals on the street, you know?

But also he goes to Morehouse, he goes to Crosier Seminary, he goes to Boston University.

So he's steeped in the religion, but also in the philosophy.

And he's a scholar so he's combining all these elements.

He's really finding this perfect voice for that moment in history.

- What does the success of the Montgomery bus boycott do to the trajectory of the quest for civil rights in this country?

- Well, it makes everybody think that we could duplicate this, that we could do it around the country.

That certainly activists who've been struggling for years to find some kind of momentum, say we need to take what King just did in Montgomery and spread it across the land.

That's why they formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

That's why the NAACP and all these other leaders are looking to see what's King gonna do next?

And, you know, he writes to one of his college professors, he's 27 years old, and he writes, "People are gonna be expecting me "to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.

"What do I do now?"

And that's the great question.

What do we do now as a country to maintain this momentum that has come from Montgomery?

- After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, King goes back to Atlanta and creates a larger movement.

How does that come about?

- Well, King is getting a lot of pressure from people all over the country to duplicate his success.

And people like Bayard Rustin are coming to Montgomery and saying we can help you make this go national.

And King isn't sure he wants to do that.

He's still a very young man.

But he starts this Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Ralph Abernathy and with Bayard Rustin and with the help of Coretta.

And they originally think that they're just gonna try to do more transportation protests, bus integration around the country, but it quickly becomes this bigger movement.

And the beautiful thing about King is that he doesn't really have a plan.

He's making it up as he goes along and several of his attempts fail.

You know, he goes to St. Augustine and he goes to Albany, Georgia.

They don't go very well.

But then he just keeps trying until, you know, really Birmingham is the next big one that really shakes up the world.

- King ends up taking the movement out of the south.

In fact, he moves to your hometown Chicago for a time to show what inner city housing looks like, the worst of urban housing.

What does that look like when King takes the movement from the south, from the deep south, where racism is ostensibly at its worst to the north?

- Well, King's advisors are saying don't go to the north.

You don't know what you're dealing with up there.

Like the south is where we're most effective.

The northern media loves it when they can drop in on Birmingham and write about that.

But when you go to Selma- I'm sorry, when you go to Chicago, you're in unknown turf and you don't know what you're up against.

You don't understand the fact that, you know, Mayor Daley in Chicago has a huge support network in the black community.

There are black churches, there are black, you know, city workers who are dedicated to him.

And King says, "I have to go."

You know, he really doesn't know what he's getting into, but he feels like he has to call out the northern racism because he's been saying it all along, but people haven't been paying attention.

Every time he goes north to raise money, he talks about the fact that northern segregation, northern racism is just as pernicious, it's just better hidden.

So now he wants to really lay it on the line and force the nation to confront what's going on in the north.

And it doesn't go that well.

You know, he struggles there.

- One of the rabbits he pulls out of his hat comes on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, where he gives his soaring "I Have a Dream" speech, Jon, which is how many of us remember Martin Luther King.

How does that speech come about?

- Well, it's the most famous speech in King's life.

It's the one that we teach kids in kindergarten.

And we forget that, once again, Americans disapproved of the march on Washington.

70% of Americans said they didn't wanna see it happen because they were afraid it was going to end in violence.

And King insisted on organizing that march and even moving it up because he wanted to keep the pressure on the Kennedy administration to bring forth civil rights legislation and to push it through Congress.

And he felt like we needed a show of strength to keep the pressure on for that legislation.

And as you noted, it's the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It's a lot about economics.

And if you read the part of the speech that King actually composed the night before, the part that he read, it's all about economic reparations.

It's about economic inequality, it talks about police brutality, things that we forget are in that speech.

Because the second half, the "I Have a Dream" part was such soaring, beautiful rhetoric that it kind of overwhelmed the first half of the speech.

- We remember the freedom.

We don't remember the jobs so much.

But a lot of he speech comes spur of the moment, right?

- Yeah.

- [Mark] How does that happen?

- Well, King is a preacher and I think his happiest place is behind the pulpit, giving a sermon, not reading from notes, but just calling on his experience in the church.

And he gets to the end of his printed remarks and just decides, and his time is up, but he decides I'm not done yet.

It's time to take this crowd to church with me.

And he'd given the "I Have a Dream" speech just a few weeks earlier in Detroit, and knew that it had gone over incredibly well in what at that time had been the largest public gathering, public demonstration of black people in America.

And he just decided I'm gonna do it again here.

So spontaneously, he just launches in at the end of his written remarks to this "I Have a Dream" speech and puts down his notes and just, that's when he really connects with the crowd.

- What does that speech do for his reputation?

- Well, it's so moving and it's on national television.

And for a lot of people, even for John F. Kennedy, it was the first time hearing King give a sermon, give a speech.

And it just, I think, really shook people and made them think that yes, this dream could be true.

It's a moment in American history where we see ordinary people, even like the mainstream press, saying we might be turning a corner.

We might finally be able to put the sin of slavery behind us and move on and be a more just society.

And you see, as a result of this speech, really like concrete changes.

People start coming to work the next day and talking about whether they should integrate their factory floors.

I wrote about a married man who was, a white man who was married to a black woman who would never wear a wedding ring and never put a picture of his wife on his desk 'cause he didn't want his coworkers to know that he was married to a black woman.

But the day after that speech, he put on his ring and put a picture.

So we start to see this concrete change, really, as a result of King's inspirational words.

And, of course, there's a flip side to that in that his inspirational words also send a shudder of fear through certain people who don't wanna see this kind of integrated society and don't wanna see this balance of power change, and that includes the FBI.

- And when he made that speech, we still had legal apartheid in America.

The Civil Rights Act had been proposed by John F. Kennedy, but not much weight had been put behind it.

Lyndon Johnson would sign it into law the following year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But what does- How do you describe the relationship between Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson?

In so many ways, Jon, those relationships manifest how social movements can move political agendas.

Talk about that.

- No question about that, and Bernard Lafayette, one of King's friends and colleagues said to me that he always saw King as a crowbar.

That was his job was to pry.

And I think that's how King saw his role with the presidents, with Kennedy and with Johnson, was to pry, to keep pushing.

And he knew that they were politicians.

He knew that they were balancing interests that were not of concern to him.

He didn't care about how these pieces of legislation affected voting or how it affected the next election, or how it affected the balance of power.

He just wanted to do the right thing.

So he felt like his job was to pry at those presidents and to push them until they did the right thing, and that's why he led the March on Washington.

That's why he led the campaign in Birmingham.

That's why he led the march from Selma to Montgomery.

It's to pry and to keep the pressure on those presidents.

And he knew that the presidents needed that pressure to get the job done, that they might not do it without him.

- What were his impressions of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson?

- It's really complicated.

I think he was disappointed with Kennedy that he wasn't moving fast enough, that he wasn't doing the right thing.

he knew the Kennedys, both Robert and John, believed that civil Rights legislation was the right thing to do, and he was constantly frustrated that it wasn't more of a priority for them.

And I think part of that is just that he's a preacher and not a politician.

He doesn't really understand the way they think.

And then when Johnson takes office, I think there's a really strong connection between the two.

I think they get along nicely in the beginning.

King is one of the first people LBJ calls when he takes office and says, you know, I'm gonna need your help.

And King is saying, I'm there for you, whatever you need.

And when the uprising begins in Los Angeles later, King goes out there and calls LBJ right away and says I'm here, here's what I'm seeing, here's what we're gonna need.

They seem to have a really strong partnership, but at the same time, as we know, that partnership gets complicated, especially when King starts speaking out on the Vietnam War.

- So there are high points in the early part of that relationship and the early part of Johnson's presidency with the fruition of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

I wonder, what do you think Martin Luther King would've considered his greatest triumph, Jon?

- Wow, that's a great question.

You know, certainly getting those two bills passed and, you know, he goes to the White House and takes a pen from President Johnson.

I think there's a great sense of pride around that.

This is a kid who, growing up, you know, when he came north for the first time, had to go back to the back of the train when he was riding in the southern part of the United States and then he was allowed in the front of the train.

So for him to see and to play a role in changing the law so that that kind of overt discrimination and segregation no longer existed, certainly a source of great pride for him.

But I never felt like King got to enjoy a victory lap.

I think he was always frustrated that more needed to be done.

And once those pieces of legislation were passed, he became concerned with things like housing, with economics, with income inequality.

And he began really speaking out more forcefully on that, and at the same time, feeling like he had to speak out on militarism, which put him in more conflict with President Johnson.

So I feel like King was always looking to the next thing that he- I don't think that he got to feel like, like he'd accomplished some great victory and he could now like congratulate himself.

- In the book, you write about the unimaginably dark times of Martin Luther King, where he suffers from depression and has premonitions of his own death, his premature death of an assassin's bullet.

What sustains him during those dark times?

- God, I think, clearly.

I think we forget how deep his faith ran in him, and that it really motivated everything he did.

So as I mentioned that first speech in Montgomery, he's saying that God says that we're equal.

God says that he would, that God would never create distinctions based on race, based on nationality and he believes that.

And that motivates him and he believes God has called him to do this work.

At times when his, you know, home is bombed, he's stabbed in the chest, he's shot at, he's getting death threats, the FBI is surveilling him and threatening to expose his sexual affairs.

He goes on, he continues because he believes that God has called him to do this work and that he has no choice.

- You talked about the wiretapping and the merciless treatment by the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover.

Why was Hoover so obsessed with Martin Luther King?

- I think a lot of it is rooted in racism.

And then, you know, he begins with this concern that King might be under the influence of Communist party members.

Once it becomes clear that he's not, by then they've heard him on the phone with women other than Coretta, and that becomes an obsession.

I think it becomes an obsession almost in a voyeuristic way that he and others within the FBI and President Johnson seemed to enjoy gossiping about King's personal life.

And, of course, recognizing that that information gave them leverage, gave them power that they could use to try to damage him.

And they saw, Hoover in particular saw the Civil Rights movement as a threat to the status quo, as a threat to the balance of power and his job.

I think he saw his job as being one of preserving that power structure as it existed.

So, you know, it's hard to imagine how King kept going through all of that.

But I think faith is the only thing that can explain it.

- What role does Coretta Scott King play in the success of Martin Luther King as a leader?

- She's often overlooked and she deserves so much more credit than she receives.

The reason Martin Luther King fell in love with her is because she was an activist when they met in college.

And she had been to Antioch and been involved in all these student protests before he had done anything.

And she continued to be that guide.

You know, when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, it was Coretta who said we not you.

We have a greater responsibility than ever now to speak out on issues beyond civil rights, to talk about hunger, to talk about poverty, to talk about war.

And Coretta was always a guide for him.

- You alluded to the womanizing that marked his life.

He saw his father as a womanizer, and he was determined not to be a womanizer himself.

And yet he has extramarital affairs unapologetically when he's married to Coretta.

How do you explain that contradiction in his character?

- He's human, like all of us.

You know, one of King's closest friends said to me that he was tormented by his father's infidelities and swore from an early age that he would never be that way and struggled his whole life.

It was never monogamous according to this friend.

And that, I think it's just a sign of his own humanity, his weakness, his failures, his flaws that we all have.

And if you read his sermons, he talks about it.

He talks about the Jekyll Hyde, he talks about the fact that we all live with guilt for our failings.

And, you know, Coretta said over and over again that he was a deeply guilt-ridden man, and that he was incapable of really hiding his guilt, that he would, you know, confess his failures.

And, you know, I think it's hard for us because we wanna see him as this great figure, this great hero, but I don't think our heroes have to be perfect.

If we expect that kind of perfection, we can't really have any heroes.

- Toward the end of his life, he has a favorability rating among the American people of about one third, and almost half of Americans view him highly unfavorably.

How do you explain the antipathy that most Americans had toward Martin Luther King?

- There was a sense among white Americans that he was pushing too much, too hard- And this notion that like you've come so far, back off, like give us some time.

And the fact that he was only doubling down, that he was saying, okay, we got our legislation, now we need economic reform, now we need to talk about the war in Vietnam, which was still popular at that time.

There was a sense that he was ungrateful or something, kind of like we, you know, we hear today when we see, you know, black celebrities being told to, you know, shut up and dribble, shut up and act, right?

Like, stop pushing us so much.

And that was deeply frustrating to King.

'Cause he said, you know, you can't expect us to suffer the way we've suffered and not speak out.

Also, it's worth remembering that the FBI was damaging his reputation by leaking the details of his infidelities to members of the media, to members of Congress, to the president.

And that takes a toll.

I think it affects his coverage.

And when he begins speaking out on the Vietnam War, everybody says stay in your lane.

Stick to civil rights.

You know, this is not your business.

And even members of Congress are saying who is he to tell us what to do in international affairs?

So there's a lot of a backlash, a lot of backlash to King's work.

- What is his frame of mind when he's in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 before his assassination on April 4th?

- I think he's deeply unhappy.

I think that the campaigns are not going well.

He's struggling to raise money for his organization.

He's trying to mount this final, what would've been a final campaign, his biggest campaign, the March on Washington- I'm sorry, the Poor People's Campaign, where he really wants to address everything, economic inequality, the war in Vietnam.

And he's looking for really concrete, overarching reforms in the American capitalism.

And it's not going well.

He's having a hard time recruiting for it.

And his friends are saying, you know, don't go to Memphis.

You know, you've got enough problems to deal with right here.

And he insists on going, because these sanitation workers are being treated so badly, and King says I have to go.

These are the people I'm talking about.

These are the people I've been working for my whole career.

And it's not about whether it's politically pragmatic, it's about doing the right thing.

So once again, like he's just relying on morality, on his faith to guide him.

But I think his frame of mind is that it's getting tough.

It's not clear.

A lot of his friends are urging him to take a sabbatical, to take some time off even to, you know, maybe think about recalibrating his whole approach to the movement because it's a tough time for King.

- What does the life of Martin Luther King say about our country?

- Wow.

I think it says that we need moral leadership.

And it's hard to be a moral leader in a political world.

And increasingly, our world seems to be more political and more divided.

And I'm often asked, you know, can we have a moral leader like him again today?

Would he, could he exist today?

And that's a real challenge.

It's a provocative question, but I think what he says to us is that we definitely still need moral leadership and we need for people to figure out how they can be moral leaders and get things done and I don't think it's gotten any easier since King's life.

- The book is, "King: A Life".

Our guest has been Jonathan Eig.

Jonathan, thanks so much for being here.

- Thank you.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music fades) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America.

And also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

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