Jonathan Eig wrote ‘King: A Life’ about Martin Luther King Jr. — the man this time, instead of the myth

The air-conditioned tour bus with tinted windows stopped outside Bright Star Baptist Church in Bronzeville and out came several dozen congregants from the Anshe Emet Synagogue of Lakeview. They moved slowly up the sidewalk and concrete steps of the church. Before anyone reached the doors, welcomes erupted, like the clamor from a surprise party. “I assume you’re here for Jonathan Eig?” a Bright Star parishioner asked.

“That’s right, and all this,” a grinning elderly woman said, waving at the growing line queuing up behind her to get in, “is what you would call the Jonathan Eig Fan Club.”

They laughed.

You would also call this a decent part of the congregation at Eig’s synagogue. They came here the other day because the North Side resident and acclaimed biographer was about to publish “King: A Life,” the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in 40 years. Bright Star and Anshe Emet have had a kind of sister-congregation relationship for a decade. It also makes sense to honor a Baptist minister in a Baptist church. Plus, congregations coming together, one Black, one white, to discuss King is like a manifestation of King — America in harmony. The point is lost on nobody. But it’s another King, one with claws who posed a serious threat to white supremacy, that’s here.

The King who was a person, not a stamp, or statue, or national holiday.

That King is present.

The ceiling of the church was low, and rows of long banquet tables covered in blue tablecloths filled the room. Soon every chair was taken. Two members of the new cross-congregation book club offered thoughts on “King.” A Bright Star congregant noted King was depressed: “That stood out. I experienced depression.” An Anshe Emet congregant said one of Eig’s sentences resonated: King has become “so hallowed he’s hollow.” Then Rabbi Michael Siegel, soberly, pointed out that though Mayor Brandon Johnson was inaugurated that day, “Chicago is at a low ebb ... Yet in this church, I feel a lot of hope.” Then Pastor Chris Harris, jocular and warm, looked out on the crowd and said: “This is the brightest, and the lightest, my church has ever looked.” More laughter, and then attention swung to Eig, the trim, serious, Paul Shaffer-looking guy waiting between them.

Harris: “It took a lot of courage for you, as a white man, to write anything about a Black man that is less than positive.” The Black community, he said, has long grown used to white writers tearing down the image of King or “discrediting his greatness.” But that’s not this, Harris said. This is six years of reporting, interviewing and reframing greatness.

Eig nodded, staring downward.

“King” does not take that subtitle, “A Life,” lightly. It offers what many of Eig’s biographies have offered: An American mythology — Muhammad Ali, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Al Capone — stripped of its bloodless granite image, though not importance.

Yet history is often a mountain range, scalable yet unmovable.

Several years ago, Eig watched the 2013 Jackie Robinson docudrama “42″ and groaned as it repeated a folk tale: During a Robinson road trip to Cincinnati, Red fans booed until a white Brooklyn Dodger, Pee Wee Reese, left his position at shortstop and put an arm around Robinson, silencing the stadium. It’s an image chiseled into monuments, repeated in books and even a documentary from Ken Burns, Eig’s friend. “But I proved pretty conclusively it didn’t happen,” Eig said earlier that day, before the Bronzeville event. “In this job, some stories are embellished so long, they’re cemented.”

King required another level of rethinking. To publish a new biography in 2023 — a book being hailed as the best, most complete biography of the civil rights leader, and one already dug into The New York Times Bestseller list — meant “scraping decades of barnacles off the hull of King until you can say, ‘Let’s look at this again,’” Eig said. “The truth is, we haven’t seen him in a while. Not since we put up a 30-foot-tall monument in D.C. Not since we created a national holiday. It’s gotten hard to see him as a person. Some of the people I talked with felt this was intentional. The government needed to strip away what made King so radical until he became a safe figure, the kind we can all hold hands and sing about. People I interviewed who knew him were mad about this.

“And with a lot of good reason. You know, when J. Edgar Hoover got the phone call about King being shot, before King was even dead, Hoover said: ‘I hope the bastard doesn’t die, because then they’ll turn him into a martyr.’ In a way, a national holiday allows the government to control the image of what King actually stood for, softening it.”

After six years of digging and documenting, the result is a biography of King that removed the godliness for something more profound and meaningful. The significance of the book is that it “takes us beyond hagiographical treatments of King to a serious consideration of the man’s frailties, doubts and vulnerabilities,” said Lewis V. Baldwin, a King biographer and professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. “Eig accomplishes this without calling into question Dr. King’s important contributions and place in history.” It is a portrait of an activist who did not like confrontation, a guy who bit his nails, tried to kill himself (twice) as an adolescent and gave up a white girlfriend as a pragmatic necessity for a career in the Baptist church. It’s also a profile of a man whose righteousness, calm and conservative style, as Hoover understood, made him palpable, and therefore a true threat to American leaders not eager to live up to American ideals.

“I feel like Jonathan was able to show this person was even more special than we know because he was not a god,” said Shannon Luder-Manuel, a sensitivity reader hired by Eig’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to study the manuscript and its treatment of Black history. “I’m mixed race, which factors into my viewpoint, but you walk away from the book understanding King had his faults and that didn’t negate everything he did.”

Indeed, last month, when Eig spoke to a history class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in Kenwood, the students asked what others have: Why was the FBI so obsessed with King? Was it hard as a white guy to research this?

“But then one student,” Eig recalled, “she asked point-blank: ‘How do we know you haven’t made all this stuff up?’ Which, fundamentally, may be the smartest question.”

Jonathan Eig works from a small thin office in the back of his apartment in Lakeview, which he shares with his wife, Jennifer Tescher, founder of the nonprofit Financial Health Network, and their three children (one of whom had been mentored by Eig in the Big Brother program and later became part of the family when his mother died). It was a laundry room until recently. There are framed black-and-white portraits of some of his subjects, but also Miles Davis, Bob Dylan. There are Mold-a-Rama busts of King on his desk and a stack of new thank-you cards and a pile of King stamps and a flood of paperwork. At one end of the room is a wall of books on whatever he happens to be writing about; when he moves on to the next subject, a new library of books is shuffled in. During the years of writing and researching “King,” books and papers spilled out of the shelves and were stacked in tall traffic cones around his chair, requiring navigation.

His papers, he said, caught the eye of the archivists at Northwestern University (he’s a graduate of its Medill journalism school), and since he’s always concerned about the chance of a burst pipe or something destroying research, he’s been eager to see it go.

For the first year he worked on “King,” he did nothing but travel the country and interview sources — King’s family, friends and colleagues who were alive, and getting old. He needed them now. This was pre-pandemic. He met with a who’s who of the civil rights ‘60s and beyond: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Juanita Abernathy, John Lewis, Louis Farrakhan, Mavis Staples. He tracked down King’s childhood friends and King’s barber. Among the first interviews was comedian Dick Gregory, who looked square at Eig and wondered, rhetorically: Did Eig even know King was real? That someone so pure of heart and dedicated passed through this world? “What makes King different from Jesus?” Gregory asked. “Jesus is hearsay. Don’t mean it didn’t happen, but there’s film of King. Can’t nobody change nothing.”

In time, Eig built what he calls “a community” of academics and firsthand witnesses to King; from many, he sought a kind of blessing and goodwill to even work on the book.

“I thought the idea for the book was solid, if only because there hadn’t been a major one in decades,” said Peniel Joseph, author of several books on King, Malcolm X and the history of the Black Power movement, as well as the founder of Centers for the Study of Race and Democracy at both University of Texas and Tufts University. “There had been so much fresh information on King since then — good and bad. Something more complex felt overdue because the King we knew was starting to feel a little dated.” But many of those Eig approached initially assumed he was there for the scandals and questionable characteristics — the King of plagiarism charges and womanizing, the King who spoke about “power” but, afraid of scaring off allies, avoiding saying “Black Power.”

“I would say to them, ‘You knew King, but we don’t know him anymore because we have turned into this saintly, passive figure,’” Eig recalled. “I would say that I wanted to write something that both restored his humanity and reminded people of how radical he really was. And everyone I said that to would reply, ‘If that’s what you’re doing, then I’ll help.’”

When Eig notes the strange absence of a new MLK biography in 40 years, he means a single, self-contained focus on a full life, from birth to death. David Garrow’s “Bearing the Cross,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography is centered on his civil rights years; Taylor Branch’s 2,900-page trilogy, “America in the King Years,” which won the 1989 Pulitzer for history, was the far more expansive story of the period itself.

“Biography,” Eig said, “is a weird medium. Lots of academics don’t really like it — they see it as artsy, ephemeral. And for a generalist like me, a book on someone like King sounds daunting. You’re interpreting a life. That needs analysis and psychology, so by definition, a biography is a failure. I can’t tell you what was going on in his head. I don’t know what his life really was. I have breadcrumbs left behind to assemble his portrait.”

Eig, 59, talks like he writes, in tidy, direct paragraphs that don’t veer much from his point. He grew up in the Hudson River Valley, outside New York City. On a wall in his office is a picture of his grandfather at work as the foreman of a New York City bra company. His father was a bookkeeper who worked at the kitchen table; his mother ran a parenting program in schools. Eig went to work initially for newspapers and magazines, angling upward: the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal. He came to Chicago when his wife took a job here. He began his first book, on Lou Gehrig, with the assumption that “if I wanted to stay in newspapers, which I did, there’d always be those jobs to go back to.”

He stayed in the land of biography.

The Gehrig book (now being developed by Lorne Michaels’ production company as an Apple+ series) led to Jackie Robinson; his book on Capone (shaped out of thousands of pages of investigative material found in Nebraska) led to Eig’s wife suggesting he try something less masculine, which became “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex.” For the most part, if there is a uniting theme here, he said, it’s that each is about rebels. “Even Gehrig, timid and insecure, when he got sick (with ALS, ending his life at 37), he had to step up at a time when people didn’t speak publicly of illness. The pill was created by a scientist at Harvard denied tenure, who worked out of his garage. I don’t know why I am drawn to this type of person. I’m the oldest child in my family, the most conformist guy, a rule follower attracted to people who shake things up.”

Until “King,” Eig’s best-known work was 2017′s sprawling “Ali: A Life,” the research for which inspired Ken Burns to make his own documentary on Ali, and established Eig as a confident, thorough master of the thoughtful, sensitive historical reevaluation. He says Ali’s family was hard to deal with, and navigating through the politics of the family and three of Ali’s wives (a fourth had already died), “became messy but also the most fun I have had working on a book.” With “Ali,” he learned to love interviews. The Gehrig book was written using around 30 interviews. “Ali” came partly out of 500 conversations.

“King,” which Eig gravitated to while researching Ali’s meetings with the civil rights leader, required around 200 interviews. Rabbi Siegel describes Eig as “classic mensch,” the sort who is “intensely conscious of how important another person’s ideas might be.” So as he wrote “King,” Eig turned to “War and Peace” for insight on power. He modeled his “I Have a Dream” chapter on the work of novelist Don DeLillo (who gave his blessing to Eig); he studied thrillers to quicken the pace during King’s murder. To capture King’s tone of spiritual reckoning, he adopted the cadence, repetition and drama of preachers.

But where “King” veers from mere biography to literary landmark is in the use of fresh materials, papers, letters, most seen here for the first time. Eig draws from an unpublished memoir by King’s father; tapes made by Coretta Scott King for a biography; unreleased FBI files; notes from collaborators who worked with King on his books; new telephone transcripts. He gained access to archives gathered by an official Southern Christian Leadership Conference historian who traveled with King; it had never been opened. Biographer David Garrow — who shared his own archive with Eig — said the big leap forward here is in the richness of Eig’s depiction of King’s early years. Some of the arguments about King that Eig’s book tackles — how much of a democratic socialist he actually was, how critical of Malcolm X he could be — have been debated for decades.

“By the early 1990s, partly because of (the landmark PBS series) ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ so many historians and journalists turned to civil rights history that people like John Lewis would have more people angling to interview them than they could count,” Garrow recalled.

But at least on the question of Malcolm X, Eig has broken ground.

For generations, there’s been a broad teaching among historians and students that King and Malcolm X stood at polar ends of the civil rights movement — King the nonviolent mollifier, Malcolm the provocateur who demanded equality by “any means necessary.”

Much of the evidence for this came from a 1965 interview King gave Alex Haley for Playboy: King accuses Malcolm of “fiery, demagogic oratory.” (Malcolm X, for his part, portrayed King as “a modern Uncle Tom.”) Going through transcripts of the interview in Haley’s papers at Duke University, Eig figured out that Haley — who was working then on Malcolm X’s autobiography, and has since been accused often of fudging facts — shifted around quotations. King’s use of “fiery, demagogic oratory” was a more general response to extremists. Haley assigned this phrase (and others) to King’s quotation about Malcolm X, significantly downplaying just how open King actually was about Malcolm X, admitting that he didn’t want to come off as if “I think I have the only truth, the only way.”

Eig, uncertain what he had, called scholars.

“I had been pushing — as had others — against that conventional narrative of the King-Malcolm relationship for a long time,” Peniel Joseph said. “But here’s concrete evidence that led to a constrained vision of history. I think it’ll open the way they are taught. King and Malcolm were dual sides of the same coin, not diametrically opposed. It may take time for the public to understand, but because of Jonathan, that process is underway.”

That night in Bronzeville, Eig smiled and cringed and burst a few bubbles. Heads shook, sometimes out of frustration at what had long been assumed, sometimes out of simple amazement. Pastor Chris Harris leaned over to Eig: Is it true, he asked, that during the “I Have a Dream” speech, Mahalia Jackson felt King losing the crowd and urged King to “Tell them about the dream!” The story is a cornerstone in Black mythology.

“Sadly,” Eig said, “it’s not true.”

Groans throughout the church.

Eig, while researching the speech, got ahold of a recording that Motown was making from the stage; the order of her words and his words don’t jibe. But the speech itself, Eig pointed out, that hard to argue nugget of American history, rewind it back five minutes and King, in the same speech, urges reparations and calls out police brutality.

“The people who were running the cameras and editing that footage probably believed they were sending a message of harmony,” Eig said, “but as a result, they skewed our understanding.” And about King’s time in Chicago, when he marched against segregation in housing and education, and was met with some of the ugliest racist episodes of the decade, North or South: The understanding is King’s time in Chicago was a bust. “And it didn’t go well,” Eig told me earlier. “Advisors advised him against going. He was up against forces he hadn’t dealt with. Chicago was not open to change.

“But he didn’t come here and just get defeated. He offered Chicago concrete solutions that might have made a difference to how this city operates. They were rejected. He did not have a good relationship with Mayor Daley. You can hear recordings. Daley would call President Johnson: He wasn’t open to King, he viewed King as a threat to LBJ.”

At the end of the Bright Star evening, Pastor Harris urged togetherness, then added: It wasn’t enough. An event like this, about King: “Let me be honest. This is safe.” He said the assembled “continue to take credit for what folks did five decades ago.” He asked them, instead, to “keep the old frames and put new pictures of us marching in it.”

Then Harris turned in his seat:

How would Eig challenge them now?

The author looked uncomfortable. He noted that he wasn’t just inaugurated mayor of Chicago. Much laughter. Instead, he would tell a short story: King, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and other civil rights leaders were meeting at the White House, talking to John F. Kennedy, who thought the upcoming March on Washington was “a mistake.” The president asked them why “you people” can’t encourage Black parents to bring up their children better — why can’t “you people” be like other ethnic minorities? Finally, Wilkins turned to Kennedy and replied: “Mr. President, we are doing our part. You do yours.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com