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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. On this Juneteenth, a day celebrating freedom, we are bringing you a special presentation about someone who continued the fight for rights a century after enslaved people were emancipated. We are discussing the first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in three decades. The book is called King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. Eig's bio is of Lou Gehrig, Al Capone, and his award-winning book, Ali. Armed with newly released FBI documents, discovered diaries, White House logs, and audio recordings, Eig has written a 500-plus-page book. It is full of detail about the civil rights movement, but at its heart, it's about a person.

As the Chicago Tribune said in its review, Eig gets to quote the man, not the myth. Born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15th, 1929, then Michael King, the future civil rights icon, was the second of three children. His maternal grandparents were church leaders at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both MLK Senior and Junior would land. His paternal grandparents were proud people and sharecroppers. Their son didn't want to stay in the country, and made his way to the city, became a powerful preacher, and started a family. We begin with Eig's process, and then we will hear about MLK's fierce Grandma, his ambitious and domineering father, and why MLK was called Little Mike when he was a child.

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Jonathan, what did you have access to that previous biographers did not?

Jonathan Eig: I had access, first of all, to a lot of new archival material, including a lot of FBI documents that had only been released within the last few years. Just in the last three years, there's been a huge dump of newly declassified FBI materials. Beyond that, I also had archival material from a lot of King's closest associates. His personal archivist, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, who worked for a dozen years keeping tabs of all of King's activities, traveling with him, going to meetings, his papers were recently donated to a library in Harlem. I found tapes that Coretta King made in a collection that belonged to her editor who worked with her on her memoir. So much stuff like that. I also found the autobiography of Daddy King, Martin Luther King's father, that had never been published, including the transcripts of the interviews he made while working on that. I could go on and on, but I was really shocked at just how much new material there was for King.

Alison Stewart: Who were you able to interview that could give you some first person recollections or remembrances?

Jonathan Eig: This journey began for me, really, because I was interviewing Dick Gregory for a book about Muhammad Ali. That's when I realized that Gregory and lots of other people who knew King were still around. I quickly began canvassing the country, trying to interview as many people as I could, and of course many people were gone, Coretta Scott King passed away before I had this epiphany, but there were still dozens of people, including close friends like John Lewis, and Harry Belafonte, Andrew Young, Reverend Bernard Lafayette, Reverend James Lawson, Jesse Jackson, Juanita Abernathy. Then some people who maybe listeners haven't heard of, like June Dobbs Butts, who grew up with King on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, or Nelson Malden, who was King's barber in Montgomery. Hearing from people who really knew him was just an amazing opportunity.

I also found that because time had gone by, because they were older, they were able to speak more openly than they might have in years earlier, especially I think since Coretta passed away, a lot of people were not inhibited about saying things that might have hurt Coretta's feelings. I felt like I was getting a level of honesty and openness that maybe would not have been possible a generation earlier.

Alison Stewart: MLK's estate has a reputation for exerting a lot of control over certain materials. What was your engagement with the estate?

Jonathan Eig: I had a very little interaction with them. I asked them if they would give me interviews, and the King children declined to be interviewed. Then I asked them for permission to use extended quotations from some of King's speeches and sermons, and they declined to give me permission again. Other than that, it really wasn't much of a problem, and I had plenty of support from other members of the King family, nieces and nephews, and as I mentioned, friends of King's, who were eager to support this book. I hope that the King family will read the book and appreciate it and see some value in it, but I did not have much interaction, and they didn't give me much of a hard time either. I should say that at the very least, they didn't try to obstruct anything that I was doing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Eig. The name of his biography is King: A Life. MLK's father, Michael King, and Michael is correct, we'll talk about that in a minute, was born in 1897, one of 10 children, and you opened the book with a story about MLK's grandparents, Delia and Jim King, about young Michael, MLK's father, being struck by a white mill owner for not doing what the white mill owner said. Delia goes and finds the guy and beats on him, and MLK's grandfather went looking for the mill owner with a gun, but by that time, word had spread, and a white mob went looking for him, so he had to hide out for months. Why start the book with the story?

Jonathan Eig: I wanted to show that Martin Luther King Jr. came from a family that really suffered from the incredible injustices of racist American democracy in the South growing up in Georgia, but I also wanted to show that they were not willing to take it. That they fought back when they could, and that they fought back as best they could. The fact that King's grandmother, Delia, who was a Bible-reading woman, a woman who really took care of her neighbors even when she didn't have much to give, that she would stand up to a white man, a white mill owner, and physically confront him. Shows incredible courage, but she also was wise enough to say don't tell your father about this because if he goes and does the same thing, he'll get killed for it.

In fact, she was right. The mob did come after, this white lynch mob, did come after Jim King. Jim King had to hide out in the woods. That's the moment, really, when Mike King decides that he's got to leave Stockbridge. He's going to move to Atlanta. At the age of 12 or 13, starts walking toward Atlanta with his shoes slung over his shoulder so he doesn't wear them out, and decides he's going to make a new life. That's the moment that really makes it possible for him to raise Martin Luther King Jr.

Alison Stewart: For Michael King, when did he feel a religious calling?

Jonathan Eig: Well, I think to grow up in the South and to grow up in a family that comes from slavery, that's working as sharecroppers, where the Black church is really the only institution that gives you a sense of power, a sense of faith, gives you something to believe in that the days ahead might be better, I think it was almost unavoidable that he would grow up with a strong sense of religious faith. Now, his father, that is to say Martin Luther King's grandfather, was eventually turned away from God because he became so bitter about the racist treatment that he had to endure. Mike King found that the society was unfair, but the Bible promised fairness, society was full of racial injustice, but the Bible promised justice. He found that even when the schools wouldn't educate him, he could learn to preach, he could learn to read the Bible, and he became a preacher, just a wandering preacher before he even really knew how to read properly. The Bible offered him a path out of this abject despair into which he was born.

Alison Stewart: You also described him at one point as he was burning with ambition. How did that manifest itself? What's an example of that?

Jonathan Eig: Well, Mike King, who again has terrible grammar, difficulty reading, moves to Atlanta and begins traveling as a preacher, and signs up for school. He wants to go to school to learn how to read and write, and even though he's now 19, 20 years old, is told that he's going to have to sit with the 3rd graders to learn to write, because that's what reading level he was at. He did that. He sat down in this classroom full of 3rd graders to learn how to read and write. Then one day he's walking along the streets of Atlanta and he sees a beautiful girl sitting on a porch, and decides that's the girl he's going to marry. He knows that she is also the daughter of one of the most prominent preachers in Atlanta. This is Alberta Williams. Alberta Williams is the daughter of A D Williams, the leader of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Young Mike King thinks, "Wow, I'm going to marry that girl, and I'm going to marry my way into this big proud Black church, and maybe someday I'll be the leader of Ebenezer Baptist Church." This is a kid who's just off the farm, really, who his friends tease him that he still smells like the farm, still smells of manure. He says, "Well, I may smell like manure, but I don't think like a farm boy, and I'm going to do something with my life."

Alison Stewart: The family, though, because he is going to, here's the phrase you hear a lot, marry up a little bit as they're a little skeptical, at least the mom is skeptical. What was there to be skeptical about Mike King for Alberta's family?

Jonathan Eig: Well, Alberto was an established young woman. She was educated, she was going to college. Here comes Mike King, fresh off the farm with one pair of shoes to his name, and he says he has intentions of marrying this woman. I think they were expecting a Morehouse grad, at the very least. They were expecting somebody with some kind of a more impressive resume, but Mike King was working on it. He enrolled himself at Morehouse. He had to talk his way in there because he couldn't pass the admissions exam, but he was full of ambition. I think that the Williams family recognized that this was an up and coming young man.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Eig, the name of the biography is King: A Life. Let's get to the question, which people are probably asking right now. Why do we keep saying Mike King and Michael King instead of Martin Luther King? When did Michael King, MLK's father, start going by Martin?

Jonathan Eig: Well, Mike King, fresh off the farm, was trying to impress people. As a lot of folks did in those days, they began changing their names, altering their names. For Black people in particular at the time, it was common to just go by middle initials, because if you called yourself ML or JR or JP, it made it harder for white people to reduce your name to something pejorative, to take James and make him Jimmy. Mike King started calling himself ML King. It's not even clear what the L stood for at that point. He had a brother named Lucius who had died as a child. Maybe he took the L for Lucius, but we don't really know, but we start to see that in the church programs, he's calling himself Reverend ML King.

Then he travels to Germany early in his career as the pastor at Ebenezer. He comes back from Germany having learned more about the great reformer, Martin Luther, and starts calling himself Martin L King. Then gradually begins adding the Luther, and he's Martin Luther King. His son, young Mike, little Mike, as they call him, finds out one day, "Hey, guess what? We're both changing our names." Mike King Jr. learns that he's going to now be introduced as Martin Luther King Jr.

Alison Stewart: Martin Luther King Jr. the King family, they settle on a street in Atlanta called Auburn Ave, sometimes called Sweet Auburn. It's a street where Black Americans thrived. How did Auburn Ave come to be, and how did growing up in this community shape MLK's sense of self?

Jonathan Eig: A lot of people thought that Auburn Avenue, Sweet Auburn, was the greatest Black street in America certainly outside of Harlem. Many people thought it was that. Mike King is really lucky to grow up there. Auburn Avenue develops because race riots in Atlanta forced Black people to seek comfort in community to build together. Auburn Avenue became where they coalesced, and where a lot of businesses started, and there was a feeling that if we can just build our own little community, we can have some measure of protection from the next riot that emerges. It really did become a very prosperous street. Lots of churches grew up around that street. You had insurance companies, you had hotels, you had photo galleries and all kinds of banks and insurance companies, all kinds of economic opportunities.

There was a sense growing up there that Black people could take care of themselves, that they didn't have to rely entirely on white people for economic support. As a result of that, the churches became very powerful, and the church leaders, who really couldn't be fired, became vocal activists in terms of really fighting, pushing city hall, pushing the government to create more opportunities for Black people, to open more schools, to end some of the discriminatory practices at places downtown.

I remember when one of the newspapers was using derogatory language, a great deal toward Black people, Daddy King and other preachers led a protest movement saying that they were going to encourage Black people in the community not to shop at any place that advertised in that newspaper until they stopped using those derogatory words. There was a great sense of power in that community.

Alison Stewart: MLK Jr. had a really fairly lovely childhood. Both parents were involved, his grandmother lived with them, the father was powerful, maybe exerted too much power or influence, we'll talk about that a little bit later on, but there was this one story about him being forced, MLK Jr. being forced to take part in a Gone With The Wind tribute. If you would share that story and explain why you included it.

Jonathan Eig: Well, this is one of the fascinating moments in American history when great forces come together. Gone With The Wind was probably the most anticipated movie of its time, maybe the most anticipated movie in movie history up to that point. It was based on this giant bestselling book. It starred Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It was going to premiere in Atlanta where-- The movie was set at this fictional plantation in Georgia. They thought the movie should premiere in Atlanta.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh flew in from Hollywood on chartered jets, and the entire city paved this huge welcome for the Hollywood stars. They planned this giant gala downtown where, of course, only white people would be invited to attend the movie Premier, but Black people were asked to serve as servants, as ushers. Also in one instance, they were asked to reenact some of these scenes from the time of slavery, and to dress as slaves, and to sing in choirs, Black choirs.

Martin Luther King Sr. agreed to have his church participate in this program, to dress as slaves and to perform for the white crowds coming to the movie premiere. Now, a lot of Black people in Atlanta were horrified by Daddy King's decision. They said that he was supporting this racist enterprise, supporting this racist movie, but Daddy King didn't care. He thought that it was exciting. He enjoyed the access to the celebrities, to the power, and he said that he thought that much of what was depicted in the movie was accurate. What you end up with is this choir from Ebenezer Baptist Church dressed in the garments of enslaved people singing for this white audience and sitting in the front row, singing along with some of these slaves hymns, is Martin Luther King, Jr. dressed as an enslaved boy.

Alison Stewart: We will continue our conversation with Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life by discussing King's time at the HBCU Morehouse, and what professors and theologians had the biggest impact on him. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart with our special presentation, a conversation with award-winning journalist, Jonathan Eig, about his Martin Luther King, Jr. Bio titled King: A Life. We've arrived at King's College years. At first, he was determined not to follow in his father's footsteps as a preacher. He did, however, follow his father's lead and attend the HBCU Morehouse.

There, MLK would rethink his approach to religion, thanks to some influential teachers and preachers. Morehouse is where MLK began to realize, as Eig writes, "The central importance of the church in Black life, understood the power of the preacher, and glimpsed a future in which his talents might serve God and humanity." Here's more of my conversation with Jonathan Eig.

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Jonathan, was there ever any doubt that MLK Jr. would attend Morehouse?

Jonathan Eig: He was pretty well-destined for Morehouse. It was a place of enormous pride, not just in his family, but in all of Atlanta. It was a place where young Black men went to get educated, but also to get indoctrinated into the idea, into this community that was motivated to really fight racism, to destroy Jim Crow, to elevate the status of Black people in America. Martin Luther King Jr. is really bound for Morehouse, whether he likes it or not. His father went there, his grandfather went there, and he grows up as a kid seeing Morehouse professors in the community everywhere.

He skips a couple of grades in school, so he's ready for Morehouse by the age of 16. He may not have been quite as well prepared academically, but emotionally and philosophically, he was ready, and he took a lot of inspiration from Morehouse.

Alison Stewart: You note that his nickname was Runt because not only was he young, he was short as well. Was he able to be social and make friends considering how young he was?

Jonathan Eig: King is really small. Even at his full height later as an adult, he's barely 5, 7, maybe 5, 6.5. He's two, three years younger than his classmates. He's shorter than almost all of them. He's trying on this new mustache to see if it makes him look a little more mature, and he's dressing in a very professorial manner. Sometimes kids call him Runt. Sometimes they call him Tweed because he loves this tweed jacket, never takes it off, but it doesn't really seem to matter because he's incredibly charismatic.

People adore him. Even with women two or three years older, he's charming. He has no trouble fitting in. At one point at Morehouse, he starts a fight with an older student, somebody who had actually been an army veteran, and King actually takes to the street. They're rolling around on the sidewalk wrestling each other, and they become best friends afterwards. King was really just an irresistible personality.

Alison Stewart: He had several advisors and teachers who made an impression on him at Morehouse. He had one advisor, Walter Chivers, who was a sociology teacher. What were the seeds that he planted with MLK, because he did keep in touch with him throughout his life?

Jonathan Eig: There were a lot of inspiring professors, and certainly the president of Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, was a huge inspiration too, but Professor Chivers really talked to King about economic inequality, and tried to help him understand what it was like for poorer working-class Black people to try to get a foothold in society. King grew up pretty well protected. He certainly wasn't wealthy by any stretch, but he lived in a comfortable home. He had a pet. He had a dog. He had really no worries about money, for the most part. It was an eye-opening experience for him.

This professor actually motivated King to seek summer jobs where he would work among working-class people. He took a job at a box company, and at a mattress company. King said he did it because this professor really inspired him to think about the impacts on society for the underclass, for working-class people, and just how difficult it was to be, in particular a Black man in white America trying to make an honest living when your education was inferior, when you faced discrimination in the workplace and in the housing market, and so many other things. Even though King might have grown up in a little bit of a bubble, he was trying to learn what went on outside that bubble.

Alison Stewart: What did he take away from George D. Kelsey who taught religion and philosophy?

Jonathan Eig: King really began to see the possibilities for religion as a social force. He saw it a little bit in his own church where his father preached, but his father was mostly concerned with bringing up the community, helping the congregation at Ebenezer to improve themselves, and to think about how, as a group, they could help one another by patronizing one another's businesses. King begins to study philosophy and theology, and begins to think about how a more intellectual approach, and a more political approach might really come to bear. He's embarrassed by the way his father preaches, by the emotional way that he pounds the pulpit and shouts and sings, and King thinks that there might be another way that maybe there's a way to combine religion and philosophy in a way that inspires people to really think about improving not just their own lives, but improving society.

Alison Stewart: He is also influenced by Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, who is a Baptist minister, who had a ministry in our listening area, in Montclair, New Jersey for a long time, and became a pastor at Riverside Church here in New York City. What attracted King to Fosdick and his methodology?

Jonathan Eig: We should say, first of all, that Fosdick was white, and he was probably the most popular minister in the country at the time, because his sermons were broadcast nationally on the radio. Fosdick was a real progressive. He preached a very engaging style of religion that really made you think about your own life, that it wasn't just a pie in the sky, that it wasn't just worshiping God, and it wasn't just following the rules of the Bible, it was using religion as a tool to change society, to think of yourself as a partner with God in the improvement of the universe.

His speeches, his sermons were really entertaining, really engaging. They personalized it and asked you to really think about your own life, and not just to think about the afterlife or these philosophical concepts. King would really absorb Fosdick sermons. He memorized them without even knowing he was memorizing them, and would use them throughout the rest of his life. You'll hear a lot of Fosdick in all of King's most famous sermons. King might not even have realized just how deeply influenced by Fosdick he was.

Alison Stewart: You address head-on this issue of Martin Luther King Jr. borrowing heavily from other people's work. It happened in graduate school, it happened with other minister sermons, as you mentioned. One, what was the perhaps most egregious example, and two, after studying his life, why would he do this? Why would this happen?

Jonathan Eig: King did plagiarize a lot. There's no way to get around it. The most famous example is that he plagiarized massive chunks, and most probably the majority of his doctoral dissertation at Boston University, but it began much earlier. Even in high school, he finished third in a statewide speaking contest. First of all, let's point out that Martin Luther King Jr. only came in third place, but it turns out he plagiarized almost the entire speech that he entered the contest with. I think some of it comes from having skipped a couple of grades in school. Some of his fundamentals as a writer were lacking. His fundamentals in math were lacking as well. I think that undercut his confidence as a writer. Then at the same time, he came from a tradition in the Baptist Church where it was common to hear other people's sermons and make them your own, to reinterpret them to take some material from here and some material from there.

Some of King's greatest sermons, I Have a Dream, is deeply rooted in the poetry of Langston Hughes. King was not even really embarrassed about it. I think that he just saw that that was the way to be a preacher. He wasn't looking to be a writer. He wasn't concerned with originality of his text, he was concerned with moving audiences, and he did that very well.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Eig. The name of the biography is King: A Life. Martin Luther King Jr. decides to go to Crozer Theological Seminary to do his graduate work. This is a break from his father's wishes and thoughts, a father who was-- Is domineering a fair word?

Jonathan Eig: Yes, domineering is a very fair word.

Alison Stewart: When and how did the break between these two men, and the way they saw the church, and the way they saw the role of a pastor or a reverend, when did that begin?

Jonathan Eig: I think it began really early. There are moments where King Jr. is actually challenging his father on whether Baptists should be allowed to dance. He says, "As long as your heart is pure while you're dancing, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to dance, even with a girl." That's a challenge. Then he's speaking off to parties in college. He's even having some parties at the house when his father is not around. There's always this push-pull. Daddy King was aggressive in terms of punishing the kids. He spanked them, paddled them, sometimes on the front lawn so that the neighbors could see. Even then, young ML Jr. was resisting. He would refuse to react when his father spanked him. He would refuse to shout out in pain.

Sometimes Daddy King would tell one child to spank another child, they're siblings, and Martin Luther King would refuse to paddle his sister. There was always this struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to be different, wanted to be better than his father, even though he certainly respected and admired him. Daddy King did not want his son to go to seminary. He didn't think it was necessary. You don't need a fancy degree to be a preacher, but he didn't appreciate that Martin Luther King was interested in the philosophy and the theology that he wanted to be a different kind of preacher.

Alison Stewart: After the break, the woman who would be King's Life partner and partner in the Civil Rights Movement, a cause she championed long before she met him. We'll learn more about Coretta Scott after the break. This is All Of It from WNYC.

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