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Martin Luther King Jr.

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from: Ted Widmer
to: Debra Dickerson

Out of the Olympian Realm

Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2002, at 12:46 PM ET

Welcome to a new twist in an ongoing Slate experiment. For a few years now, we've been doing our book reviews as epistolary correspondences between two critics—usually big shots in whatever field the book is about. Now Slate is switching to a cast of 12 reviewers, chosen not for their expertise in any one area but because they're curious, sensible, and witty general readers whose criteria for evaluating a book are probably a lot like yours. Each week, you'll hear two of the folks below discussing a new book or group of books. The other Clubbers may interrupt them with comments and questions. And we hope you will, too, by submitting postings to "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum.

Participants include:

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author An American Story. Her next book, The End of Blackness, will be published in October 2003.

James Fallows, the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

Jodi Kantor, the New York editor of Slate.

Sarah Lyall, a correspondent in the London bureau of the New York Times.

Nell Minow, the editor of the Corporate Library, which covers corporate governance and performance, and writer of Movie Mom, reviews of films and videos.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.

Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Erik Tarloff, the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book. (Click here to buy Face-Time and here to buy The Man Who Wrote the Book.)

Ted Widmer, the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City and the co-author of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Marjorie Williams, the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Who are these people?

This week's reading.

Buy the book.

Dear Debra,

I don't know about you, but I was approaching this assignment with some trepidation. I assumed, before reading Marshall Frady's new Penguin Life of Martin Luther King Jr., that we'd be dealing with a few problems. First, I'm uncomfortable with the hasty compression of large and challenging topics into Chicken McNuggets of knowledge for readers on the go. The pairings often seem weird, and I'm always half-expecting to go into a bookstore and find St. Francis of Assisi by Stephen Ambrose, or Werner Heisenberg by Kitty Kelley, or Geraldo Rivera by Geraldo Rivera.

Second, I think this format is especially wobbly with major political figures, particularly near-contemporaries—it works better with people that you haven't thought about for a while (I just read Peter Gay's Mozart in the same series and loved it). Third, I doubted Frady's ability to rise to anywhere near the level of what is already the definitive biography, even though we only have two of the projected three volumes—Taylor Branch's monumental work. And finally, I thought it would oversimplify King—now stereotyped as a saint rather than the complex figure he was.

All of these doubts were enlarged by the slipperiness of King's image at the moment. Almost no one doubts his significance (though we should remember how long the Republicans stonewalled before putting their stamp on the holiday, and how many GOP states simply refused). But every few years, another distressing report of his family's mismanagement of his legacy flickers across the evening news—nearly turning the King Center into a Disney-fied amusement park, slowing down plans for a King memorial in Washington, selling out to TV ads for cell phones and Internet companies. (The recent Alcatel ad removing King's audience from the "I Have a Dream" speech was especially chilling—but it was only one of several licenses the family has granted.) What's next—the MLK-2 Thighmaster?

So, for all these reasons, I crept up to this work with small enthusiasm. And I have to say, those doubts did not vanish right away. The author's photo—always a critical index to a book's worth—showed a middle-aged Caucasian gentleman wearing a white tie and suspenders. The first few pages indicated this was yet another entry in the "purge my sinful land" school of white liberals writing about the accursed South, using highly dramatic, Bible-flavored language. Didn't I swear never to fall for this trick again when I passed (barely) my high-school Faulkner class?

But then a strange thing happened. Frady won me over. I don't know if it was his semiapocalyptic language—which settled down into a nice rhythm—or the majesty of King's oratory, which colors the book and I think Frady's prose as well. Or just the stunning drama of the civil rights struggle from Montgomery to Memphis—a story that is mind-boggling for how much it achieved, and at what cost, and how recently this revolution happened. Somehow, something clicked, and by the end I could hardly put the book down.

One key to Frady's success, I think, is his personal connection with the story. He was an apprentice Newsweek reporter from the Atlanta bureau when he got the assignment to cover King in 1964. Some of the most riveting passages in the book come when Frady steps out of the role of historian and re-enters the world in which he first encountered King—seeing him standing alone and unnoticed on a porch in St. Augustine, stricken with horror as the marchers he inspired recoiled from a brutal police assault. Or finding him later that night, drinking a glass of water with a napkin stuck to the bottom. These human touches bring the story out of the Olympian realm and put it back on earth where it belongs.

True to this assignment, Frady renders the basic biographical details economically and efficiently. He wastes little time telling the story of "Little Mike" 's birth and arrival, his transition into "Tweed" (the name his friends called him at Morehouse), and his full-blown emergence into Martin Luther King Jr. The Montgomery story is vivid, and to his credit, Frady also articulates quite well the drift that set in after that great victory. I think that's one of the great strengths of this book—it gives us a good sense of how precarious each of these breakthroughs was, and how separate the stations of his life. Montgomery was followed by the stalemate at Albany, Ga.; Birmingham was followed by St. Augustine; and it seemed that King's doubters and self-doubts were nearly exactly as powerful as his immense inner strength. That calibrated tension is what lends the story such weight.

To judge what he was up against, you only have to check out Page 186, which lists the denunciations that flowed freely from newspapers that disapproved of him—not just people in pointy white hats, but the New York Times and the Washington Post. Admittedly, this was after King took the great leap of criticizing the Vietnam War and turning his righteous crusade from segregation to poverty. The boldness of this thinking at this late juncture has not diminished with the passage of three and a half decades, and the words fairly jump off the page.

And even when we know the general contours of the FBI's persecution of King, it is sobering to read the details. Needless to say, the details of his philandering are distressing to relearn in the midst of this stirring narrative, and there is no one to blame but King himself. But the knowledge that J. Edgar Hoover was devoting so much of his time and demoniac energy to this campaign of hatred is horrifying. It forces any responsible citizen to wonder: How could our elaborate government of checks and balances create an all-powerful organization with no clear supervision for most of its existence?

Still, with enemies dogging his every step, King managed to achieve exactly what he set out to do, and he achieved almost all of it within 10 years of beginning his first ministry. Not only did he smash segregation, he also effected a permanent political revolution in this country. In 1956, the black vote went 3-2 Republican; in 1960 (after JFK placed a phone call to Coretta King), the vote switched to 7-3 Democratic. Republicans noticed, and they adopted a "Southern strategy" that is still working for them (and that echoed throughout the contest over the 2000 election, with African-American voter access in Florida a crucial unresolved issue for the few people still paying attention to that debate).

Frady's book is not flawless, of course. I would have enjoyed a bit more on King's adversity to the Vietnam War or his relationship with LBJ and RFK. But, hey, it is what it is. If you want rich detail and the full story of the passage from Egypt to Canaan, then you've still got Taylor Branch—whom Frady acknowledges nicely. But for a compact version of that story—probably the greatest story most living Americans are ever likely to experience—then this book is a good place to start.

Best,
Ted

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Ted Widmer
to: Debra Dickerson

Out of the Olympian Realm

Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2002, at 12:46 PM ET

DISCUSS

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Debra Dickerson is the author of The End of Blackness and An American Story. Ted Widmer is the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Slate home page by Flip Schulkel/Corbis.

To the 500-plus Slate readers who entered "The Book Club" contest: We're reading as fast as we can. Results soon, we promise, and thanks for being patient.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Fenbeast had this to say: "Debra Dickerson, the eloquence of your last six or seven lines took my breath away. I'm going to print it up and paste it on my wall." Locdog's and BML's comments, both below, provoked good threads.

Kassandra starts a great thread here, inspired by Ted Widmer, featuring more unlikely biographers and victims. We particularly like Princess Diana by Noam Chomsky, and Johann Sebastian Bach by the Spice Girls. Add your idea to the thread…

Reader Comments From The Fray:

MLK advocated civil rights because he believed that God was on his side. He understood that it wasn't blind chance that made all men equal, that he needn't rely on coincidence, or depend on men to ignore overwhelming probabilities to the contrary, to assert equality. He knew that God had created men equal. That, whatever biological process He'd used, man's nature was all the same: a reflection of God's own.

How could an existentialist make such a claim?

--locdog

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

I wondered for a long time why portraits of Martin Luther King joking, laughing, or even smiling seemed in such short supply--a man who attempts suicide twice isn't likely to have the most positive demeanor.

The sexist attitude of the civil rights movement was also found on college campuses--Mario Savio relegated (or tried to relegate) female protestors at Berkley into secretarial work. It's a funny thing about the 60s--you study an admirable movement and there's always something under the rock that will disabuse you slightly, whether it's the outdated data used in The Other America or the homophobic passages of The Feminine Mystique.

That, I would argue, is an advantage--someone totally prescient, someone whose step marches in time with a distant future, is useless in their own time and more useless after their death. William Lloyd Garrison believed in women's rights, Indian rights, civil rights, etc., but seems quite odd and was remembered--unfairly--as a self-righteous man determined to have his way. Frederick Douglass, if not for his driving and at times hyperactive ambition, would be statuary. They saw clearly into the future, but seem cold and haughty, like a Platonic form come to Earth. Lincoln was probably a moderate white supremacist, but we know his attitudes changed through interacting with men like Douglass.

We'd all wish that King would tell women to roar, but I can still like the guy for his outdated views on domesticity--the people he needed to convince shared them and could relate to him. Had he stood up for independent women and waited for history's justification, it's doubtful anyone would have listened to him at all.

--BML

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

You've neglected how well he delivered his speeches. "I Have A Dream" can never be delivered any better than he delivered it. In general, the public experienced Dr. King through the media and not through his documents. The media allowed all of us to hear Dr. King and to hear all the passion and compassion he evinced, all the power behind the wonderful words and priceless insights.

Perhaps the unanswerable question is this: Would Dr. King be so much loved/hated if he had been the unseen speechwriter, the philosophizer, the planner and organizer who accomplished all the same things and had let someone else play the public role?

--Code Wizard

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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