The REAL Life & Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with Jonathan Eig

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47One of the most crucial figures in American history is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King's life is well documented in our textbooks, but my guest today, Jonathan Ige, shows a wholly different side to him in his new book, King, A Life. It's a brilliant piece of work and one that will become essential reading for all of us in years to come.

1:14so joining us now on open book is jonathan eige he's an award-winning journalist and biographer his new book al king is a bestseller king a life i also enjoyed the audio version of it i thought you had a great narrator on the audible.com i read portions of it there um but what i was saying to jonathan before we started the podcast my introduction to you sir was with opening day the story of Jackie Robinson in 1947, who's one of my heroes. Before we get into King, was 42 based on that book? No, it was not. They followed a lot of the same pattern in my book. I suspect they read it, but it was not based on my book.

1:54Okay. Yeah. I just thought I'd throw that out there. So I'll embarrass myself to you. I met with Rachel Robinson and we made a pitch to her, Ed Pressman, who had done Conan the Barbarian and the two Wall Street movies. Him and I had teamed up on the Paterno movie that starred Al Pacino for HBO. We went to Mrs. Robinson, Rachel Robinson. Right after your book came out, it inspired me. I asked her to consider us to produce this story, but she didn't bite. She had a certain vision for what was going to happen. And so it was quite a successful movie, but your book was tremendous. And so I applaud you for that.

2:29Thank you. I also read your book on Ali, which was incredible. I think you can see behind me the Ali picture. Yeah, I love that. Unfortunately, that is a very young version of me that's about 20 years ago. That's me and the champ. I used to work on his charity, the Parkinson's charity. Oh, that's great. But you told an amazing story. And I do think, sir, that this is your opus. And I don't think that those lives are disconnected. I think Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King Jr., And in some ways, Barack Obama are all connected. Am I right about that, sir? Oh, no question about it. They're all fighting for dignity, for pride, for equal rights.

3:06They're all making really big advances in civil rights in their own way. Different, of course. But yeah, there's a thread. Certainly, there's a direct line between all four of those. Well, your book was phenomenal. I want to start with why you call Dr. King a founding father. I thought that was a very interesting take. And I agree with you. And you say that the moment he became one was the 5th of December, 1955. Tell us why. Well, I think, first of all, the Constitution is a living document. And the founding fathers include those who began the country, who got us started. But it's also those who helped fulfill the words of that declaration, which were empty for many people at the time.

3:46They did not include black Americans who were counted as only three-fifths of a person. So on December 5th, 1955, Martin Luther King, only 26 years old, stood in front of a crowd of thousands at a church in Montgomery, Alabama, and said that it was time for black people to show that the American democracy could be fulfilled, the promise of American democracy could be fulfilled, that we could live up to the words in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. We could treat everyone equally. We could guarantee life, liberty, and justice for all, and that black people were going to have to show Americans the way to make that happen.

4:17And that's the moment where I think he really found his voice and his vision. So, you know, it's interesting, you know, he's born Mike King or little Mike. This is stuff about him, frankly, I did not know. And he didn't choose to be called Martin Luther King Jr. So tell us a little bit about this origination story. By the way, you did a beautiful job in your first, in your book about Ali too, about how he got started in boxing. But tell us about this origination story with Dr. King. Yeah, both men, Ali and King, had different names at birth. Ali was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. And, you know, choosing a name is part of choosing an identity, right?

4:50Immigrants do it all the time. They change their names. But in the case of Martin Luther King Jr., he was born Mike King. His father was Mike King also. No middle name for either of them when they were born. But Martin Luther King Sr. discovered the German theologian and protester on a trip to Europe, actually, in the late 30s. And when he came back, he decided to start calling himself, first he started calling himself M.L. King. And then he added Martin L. King and then eventually Martin Luther. And he informed his son one day, guess what, Mike, little Mike, you've got a new name too. So Martin Luther King didn't have to embrace it, but eventually he did.

5:26And I think they liked the name A because it was more dignified. But it also spoke to their values, their values as religious men, but also as people who saw religion as a force that had a requirement to change the world, not just to change lives and change souls. So, you know, I find that fascinating. I just want to test this on you. I think names do matter. And I think that the name and tracing it back to the Reformation, and here is a family that's trying to reform the country. Do you think the name had a big impact on his life? I think it definitely did. And everything his father did really told him that great things were expected of him.

6:00But when you assign a kid this kind of a name, it is assigned to, you know, the reform movement. And when you tell him that, you know, it's not just enough to preach the gospel. We have a different kind of gospel. The black social gospel is about remaking society, not just saving yourself, not just being a good person. That sets high standards for a kid. And I think to his credit, young ML embraced that. You know, his brother didn't. His brother couldn't handle that pressure. But ML did. He stepped up. But I'm going to, again, test more theories on you, but it was a reluctant embrace, right? I mean, you're writing about his early years.

6:34The grandfather's burnt by racism. He turns to drink. Martin Luther King Sr., he leaves home early. But the young man, Martin Luther King Jr., doesn't really start out wanting to be a leader. And then something happens to him during the Montgomery bus boycott years at Turnham Around. Tell us what you think was the turning point for him, the epiphany where he decides, OK, I have to do this with my life. This is my calling. I think like a lot of people, he was torn. You know, he wanted to fight for justice, but he also had ambitions professionally. He thought he would be a great college professor or even a college president.

7:07And maybe he would preach for a while and then start teaching. So he wanted to fight Jim Crow. He wanted to fight discrimination, but he also had ambitions, you know, professionally and personally. And it wasn't until Montgomery, as you suggested, that he felt like he had no choice but to follow this calling. And he really thought of it as a calling. He thought he heard the voice of God speaking to him one night after his home had been bombed, after members of the KKK were doing everything they could to try to get him out of business, to try to knock him out of this position of leadership. He hadn't sought.

7:37You know, he had it thrust upon them. The people of Montgomery asked him to lead, in part because he was new in town and he hadn't made any enemies yet. So King wasn't sure this was what he wanted. At first, he said no when they asked him if he would lead the Montgomery Improvement Association. But he felt, especially after he heard God speaking to him in his kitchen one night after he couldn't sleep, and God said, this is what you've been chosen to do. And he followed that and really believed that this was a holy calling. But a complex figure. I think one of the great jobs that you do as a author and a biographer is that you present the person.

8:10And what do we both know about people, ourselves included? We're frail. We have our shortcomings. We have our strengths and weaknesses. And you're presenting Dr. King as a way more complex figure than we learned about in school, certainly. He has these very ordinary flaws. He smoked. He slept poorly. He attempted suicide. I think it was twice, if I read it correctly in the book. And he has this faith that you're talking about. It keeps him going. But he also was an adulterer. Yeah, he was. And he suffered anxiety, suffered depression. He was hospitalized numerous times for what, you know, the doctors at this time called exhaustion.

8:44So I thought it was very important to make King more human and to create a more intimate portrait because we've unfortunately, in the course of celebrating him and the course of making him a national holiday and a monument on the mall in Washington, we've turned him into sort of this two-dimensional, almost mythological figure. So I wanted to write a book that would remind people that he was human because, you know, if you have to be perfect to step up and to try to lead, no one's ever going to do it. One of the more poignant points of this story is his relationship with other activists, his relationship with Malcolm X, who thought, you know, it's interesting, the whites, the Bull Connors of the era thought he was this radical.

9:22Malcolm X thought he was, you know, a sympathizer to the white. I mean, it was just an interesting situation that Dr. King found himself in. He's trying to strike this balance. He knows he can't get the reform done without gravitating many members of the white population, frankly, to his movement. But if he's overly radical, he's going to turn them off. I mean, how did he manage all of that? It was incredibly stressful, you can imagine. And it's true for so many leaders in any walk of life, but certainly in politics or in a grassroots movement. As you become more successful and more powerful as your following grows, it's hard to please everybody, right?

9:59You can't be radical enough for some people and you can't be conservative enough for others. Everybody's taking shots at you. So King is getting attacked from the left and the right all the time. And yet he's trying to, you know, he recognizes that staying somewhat in the middle gives him his power. He can reach the most people. He also has access to the levers of power. He can talk to the president. He can talk to members of Congress. He can fight for legislation in a way that Malcolm X cannot. Malcolm X has really very limited impact on public policy, on legislation. So King has to, you know, walk this middle ground.

10:30And frankly, he takes it personally. He doesn't like being attacked, but he's willing to listen. And he doesn't ever really respond angrily when Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael comes after him. No, it's phenomenal. He's showing all this restraint, yet inside he's tumultuous. He's got all this anxiety as a result of this. He's trying to make sure he's striking the right balance to advance the movement. I mean, you have such vivid detail in the book. I can still remember the serving of the ham sandwiches by President Kennedy when King shows up at the White House. Tell us about the relationship with Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Dr.

11:07King. It's a really complicated relationship. King was deeply frustrated with the Kennedys, and that was even before he knew that RFK had authorized wiretaps on his phones. You know, he was disappointed that the Kennedys weren't moving fast enough to do anything on civil rights, that they really owed, Kennedy owed his election to black voters. And yet he was waffling when it came to introducing civil rights legislation because he was afraid of losing white votes in the South. So King felt like he had to constantly keep the pressure on Kennedy. And if it hadn't been for the protests in Birmingham and the police dogs and Bull Connor and his water cannons, it's possible that Kennedy never would have acted.

11:40In fact, Kennedy made a joke that day when King showed up at the White House after his speech at the March on Washington. Kennedy said, well, don't forget, you owe all of this to Bull Connor. Like, you know, another someone else might have responded angrily to that. Like, no, we've been suffering for hundreds of years, Mr. President. We fought for this. Bull Connor didn't do us any favors. But that's what King was up against. It's fascinating. Of course, there's the famous call from candidate Senator John Kennedy to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the jail during the campaign. I just want to ask you this as a historian and a biographer.

12:15This is a general observation. When a political figure is jailed. In some ways, it makes them more powerful, right? We have examples, Dr. King, Nelson Mandela. We have bad examples, of course, that would be Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, jailed in the 1920s after the Munich Beer Putsch. What do you think it is about jail and political figures that exacerbates their power, or at least for their supporters, they become more ardent? Well, it shows their willingness to suffer, clearly. And King was really clear about it. Every time he was jailed, he would send messages out saying, we have to take advantage of this time.

12:49Everybody pays attention when I'm in jail. They may not pay attention to me once I get out. And that's why his letter from the Birmingham jail was so effective, because he's clearly suffering for what he believes and he's proving it. And I should point out, you know, for a black man in the South to allow himself to be jailed, it's a different story than, you know, a white man might experience. He really had to fear for his life every time he was put behind bars because people could, you know, and did routinely kill black prisoners, you know, without worrying about oversight, without worrying about anybody catching them.

13:16So King, you know, was legitimately scared every time he had to get into the back of a police wagon or spend a night in solitary. It's truly an amazing story. You know, I, years ago, I read Taylor Branch's works on the civil rights movement. I was coming out of college or I think law school at the time. This is like the late eighties. This book is chock full of additional new information. So can you describe some of the sourcing, how you've got all of this? I mean, it's 30 years since those books were written. How'd you get all this new information, sir? Where did you, where did you obtain it?

13:48Well, time definitely helped. You know, over time, a lot more documents have accrued and the FBI has released a lot more material. But also folks have donated their papers to archives. And some of it was just a matter of following leads. So, for example, you know, King had a biographer back in 1957, L.D. Reddick. The first biography of King came out while the Montgomery bus boycotts were still going on. And I just looked up L.D. Reddick's archives to see where they were. And they had just been donated to the Schaumburg Library in Harlem. And there were thousands and thousands of pages because L.D.

14:16Reddick stayed on as King's official archivist, basically. He was keeping track of everything King and the SCLC did for a decade and keeping really detailed notes. So that kind of stuff was available to me and wasn't available to Taylor Branch and David Garrow when they did their books. Other things like, you know, Coretta Scott King's archives, her tapes that she made when she was working on her memoir. I found an autobiography that Martin Luther King Sr. wrote that was never published. So just a lot of digging and it helped that, you know, it had been a long time since the last King biography.

14:45Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, you have great insight into what actually happened opposed to the hagiographic version of what happened. You know, when I finished reading the book, I was taking some notes to myself about some of the issues of our time. I'd like you to respond to some of the issues of our time. How do you think Dr. King would have felt about wokeness and the whole cancel culture and the wokeness position that we're facing today? King said over and over again that we needed to stay awake to change. So if that's how you define wokeness, wokeness to me is a term that's been loaded and politicized, you know, at its origins, staying awake is a good thing and staying alert to change is a good thing.

15:25So I think King would like, I hate to ever predict what King would say because unfortunately he left us a long time ago and it's hard to know how he would respond to some of these, you know, attempts to misuse his language. But I think what he was saying was that we need to be open-minded and we needed to stay alert to change and we need to challenge ourselves to think differently and not get stuck in old orthodoxies. Okay. So that's a really interesting thing because King is used often by the left and the right. They invoke Dr. King's words. So the right says that Dr. King would not want reparations and the left says that Dr.

15:59King would want reparations. Where does Jonathan I feel that Dr. King would stand on that? Once again, you don't have to ask me. All you have do is open one of King's books and we don't read his books. You know, we don't read his own writing, but in his own books, he talks about reparations. He doesn't call it reparations, but he says, there's no reason that black people can't be financially compensated for their contributions to the American economy. And anybody who says that you can't put a dollar figure on it is missing the point that you do. You take your best shot at putting a dollar figure on it in a point, in an attempt to do the morally right thing, which is to atone for your sins and to pay for the sins of the past.

16:35And it can be done just as we do every time someone files a civil suit for being wrong. So King spoke to that directly. Same thing with affirmative action. People like to say that King would be opposed to affirmative action because he said we should be judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin. But in fact, he celebrated the kind of affirmative action he saw taking place in India to try to erase the caste systems there. So, you know, So unfortunately, there's a quote that everybody can find ways to use King for whatever their purposes are. I mean, you enlightened me on that.

17:06I mean, it's very clear from your book that Dr. King was for reparations. I've tried to enlighten some of my conservative friends on that. And I've cited your book now. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the women in Dr. King's life. Dorothy Cotton, obviously Coretta Scott King. I mean, he was surrounded by strong figures. Most of these people were women, frankly. I mean, yes, there was Ralph Abernathy. of course. But tell us about this relationship with women, because at one side, he has enormous respect in many ways. They're mentoring and guiding him. And there's another side of him where he's womanizing, right?

17:39So there's a little bit of a dichotomy there, right? Tell us about that. There is a dichotomy. King clearly falls in love with Curtis Scott King because she's brilliant, because she's a committed activist. When they meet, she has more experience as an activist than he does. And I think that's really what attracts him in the first place. There's where the mentoring comes in, you know, absolutely. She's telling him what books he should be reading and she's pushing him to get more involved on issues beyond race all throughout their marriage, really. And the same thing with Dorothy Cotton, who becomes a, you know, his lifelong, well, not lifelong, but, you know, a longtime lover and confidant.

18:13And again, she's not just a beautiful, intelligent woman. She's an activist. She's working for the SCLC is probably the highest ranking woman in the organization. So King is not perfect. He's flawed. He's not faithful to his wife. He picks smart women to be surrounded by, but he also fails to recognize their potential as leaders. He never really embraces equality for women in the same way he does the equality for the races. And he over and over again misses opportunities to promote women into positions of power within his organization because he's in part, you know, biased. He's got this blind spot.

18:47Some of it is cultural. Some of it is a product of the times in which he's raised, but it doesn't always excuse it. You know, he was he was not perfect. Discover cool nights with a new mattress from Ashley. We've got the best mattress brands under one roof like Sealy, Serta, Purple, Beautyrest, Tempur-Pedic and Ashley Sleep. Plus, get up to 60 months special financing on select in-store purchases made with your Ashley Advantage Synchrony Credit Card with tons of styles and options to choose from. We've got you and your sleep covered. Cool nights start at Ashley. North Charleston and Mount Pleasant.

19:18Subject to credit approval. Minimum monthly payments required. Minimum purchase required. See store for details. It's fascinating because you're giving us a three-dimensional version of him and not, as you said, the two-dimensional version. Richard Nixon was once asked about FDR. It was the centennial of Franklin Roosevelt's birth. It was 1982. Roosevelt, of course, was born in January of 1882. And they said, well, give us your rendition of Roosevelt. And Nixon said, well, he was a great man in the right moment. There was a moment of time of crisis, the depression and the war. He made good decisions.

19:55But you could also be in a time of peace and prosperity and you'd be in the presidency and even be the same person. But you don't have that greatness because you didn't hit the world in that way. And so was Dr. King the man in the moment, sir, like Franklin Roosevelt? And then I guess the second question, after you asked that one, how would he fit into today's society? I think King was absolutely the right man at the time, and he was exactly what we needed at that moment. If you think about it, when he emerges in the late 50s, religious figures in particular have enormous respect in this country.

20:29So a lot of white people in the North hear this beautifully brilliant orator coming out of the South, talking about racial discrimination, talking about segregation. He's been educated in the finest schools in the Northeast, and he's able to speak to the whole nation because he brings the morality of his religion combined with the patriotism of the Constitution. He's not asking his followers to fight to break down the American society. He's asking the American society to welcome this group that wants to join. So it's this very positive patriotic message that comes along at just the right time in the late 50s and into the early 60s.

21:06Had he come along in the late 60s by the time things are getting wilder and black power movement, the Black Panthers are making so much noise, it's not clear King would have attracted as big a following. So who knows? Had he lived longer and run for office in the 70s when we started electing a lot of black figures in particular to municipal offices, would King have made it? Would he have been cut down by the controversies or the scandals around his love life? Who knows? I do think that regardless of when he lived or how long he lived, were he around today, he would be 96 now. Yeah. He would be, I like to think he would have the same moral clarity that he would continue to fight for the things he believed in, which were rooted in his religious beliefs.

21:51What do you think we are now? Are we a less racist nation? Are we the same nation? Have we hidden our racism? Have we made things really better? You know, it's hard for me to say I'm a white man who has not been exposed to this kind of racism that is still endemic and systemic in this country. But I do think we've made enormous progress and we still have enormous problems. We see it every day in the newspaper. We see that there's still enormous race-based police brutality. There's still enormous disparity in incarceration rates. There's still this anger, this hostility around things like affirmative action.