- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a veteran journalist whose critically acclaimed biographies of Lou Gehrig, Muhammad Ali, and most recently Martin Luther King, Jr. have all been New York Times bestsellers.

He's Jonathan Eig.

This is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience applauding) He really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard".

(audience applauding) Jon, welcome.

Good to have you here.

- Good to see you, Evan.

- Thanks very much for being here.

Congratulations on the success of this book.

It is truly an accomplishment.

And I have to say, I commend you for making the choice to write this book because Martin Luther King is somebody who we think we know.

A lot's been written about him, a number of big books have been written about him, but beyond that, he lives in all of our minds, maybe detached from the reality of him.

So you took on something and someone as a subject we think we know, that is not always what journalists do.

- No, and there's some risk involved, but I think part of the problem was that he's occupied this place in our mind almost rent free.

Like we're not doing the work.

We're not paying to really appreciate him anymore because we've turned him into this monument, the national holiday, a thousand streets, 150 schools, and we've forgotten that he was a person.

So that's really where I got started on the idea.

- Well, in fact, you announced at the beginning of this book that your purpose is to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography.

We have mythologized this guy for so long that we almost have forgotten he was a man.

You say "He's a man, not a saint.

He's a man, not a symbol."

- Right.

- Right.

- It's really important to remember that he suffered, that he had doubts, that he had failures, and he had flaws too.

And that's sensitive because we've turned him into a saint.

And there's some people, I was worried, that some people might not wanna read about a man with flaws because we're so comfortable and so happy to have him as this heroic figure.

But I think that it's important to acknowledge that he had failures, that he made mistakes, that he wasn't perfect.

He acknowledged it himself, but we've glossed over that in telling his story over the years.

- Yeah, the decision to do this book came actually at a time when you were working on your last book, right?

You were working on a biography of Muhammad Ali, also a terrific book, and a great subject that in ways like King has also been mythologized over time.

And you were talking to the comedian and activist, Dick Gregory, in Washington DC.

Tell the story.

Because I think how these books come to be is often these accidents of the moment.

- It really was an accident because I'm talking to Dick Gregory, and I was talking to other people too.

I wanted to know about how Ali and King got along 'cause they met twice.

And of course Ali was opposed to the mainstream civil rights movement.

He thought integration was a waste of time.

But they did have their opposition of the Vietnam War in common.

So I just wanted to know how they got along, what happened when they met.

And Dick Gregory was telling me about it, and Gregory said they had something in common.

Both men were hated by most white people toward the end of their, well for King, near the end of his life and for Ali at the beginning of his career, and that we forget about that now.

We've turned them into these heroes and forgotten just how despised they were at the peak of their careers.

And the other thing Dick Gregory said to me is that, and first I thought it might be a joke because he was a comedian.

- He was a comedian.

- He said, what's the difference between Martin Luther King and Jesus?

And I just waited for an answer 'cause I wasn't- - It's like a set up.

- I'm not gonna take that bait.

And he said, the difference is that we have videotape of Martin Luther King.

(audience laughs) - He said to you, Jesus was hearsay, he said.

- Right, Jesus was hearsay.

- But Martin Luther King we have on film.

- Yeah, and then I thought, we have more than film.

We have people who knew him, who were friends with him, who hung out with him.

And we have eyewitnesses and we have FBI documents.

We have so much material that I think it might be possible to do a new book and to write a more intimate portrait.

- Right, so let's talk about the process and then let's get to the substance of this.

So you make the decision after the conversation with Dick Gregory, "Actually, you know what, Martin Luther King may be a book."

And again, you're not living in a negative space where there hasn't been stuff written.

You're thinking, "How do I go at this in a way that it's differentiated."

You immediately begin thinking about all the people you want to interview.

And this is 2015 that you had the conversation with Dick Gregory.

King is assassinated in 1968.

We're at a point now where every year we're losing more people who were there at the time.

So you think I've got to make a list, and I especially have to prioritize the people who are not gonna be with us for much longer.

- Yeah, actuarial tables is what you might call it.

- But you know what, that's a smart strategy.

- You have to, but not to be cynical about it.

I realized that this was like perhaps the greatest journalistic opportunity in my life.

And the greatest human experience, to be able to travel the country and interview James Lawson, Bernard Lafayette, Andrew Young, Juanita Abernathy, and then all the people we've never heard of who I didn't know existed, like King's Barber from Montgomery, his childhood friend, June Dobbs Butts from Auburn Avenue.

What an opportunity to go out and record their stories.

Many of them had been interviewed before, but some of them hadn't.

And even the ones who'd been interviewed before, it's different when you go back and they're 80, 90 years old and they don't have to feel so inhibited about what they say.

They don't have to worry about what Coretta might think anymore.

- Well, right.

- So this was a golden opportunity.

And so even aside from just, "Oh, I can make a great book, I just realized this was a wealth of knowledge out there that could be tapped one more time."

- Yeah, so that was a strategy that probably any biographer would've benefited from at any point.

Which is to say the previous books about King, the previous biographers of King, they also had the same list, or a list similar to your list, and they're going down the list and they're checking people off.

You had access, from what I can tell, to three things, significant things for this book, that they would not have had access to.

One was a significant amount of material that came from the FBI.

- Yes.

- Right?

Surveillance transcripts, all sorts of other.

And I gather we have not gotten yet the full unexpurgated FBI stuff that's gonna come in '27?

- Yes.

- Is that right?

But you still had access to a whole bunch of FBI material related to King and their pursuit of King, Hoover's zealous pursuit of King that other biographers did not have access to.

- That's right.

- Right?

That was critical.

- That was huge.

- For this book.

- And there was new material being released as I was writing the book.

Donald Trump accidentally, I think, released thousands of pages of new documents from the FBI files on King.

He was trying to release the Kennedy stuff and the MLK got mixed in with it.

(audience laughing) - He got to the Ks and he went- - "Ah, just let it go.

Just let it go."

- Right.

Yeah.

Right.

(audience laughing) - It was my favorite act of the Trump administration- - Of the Trump administration was to give you access.

(audience laughing) So that actually ends up being pretty critical material.

The second thing is LD Reddick, who was the unofficial archivist for King, had all these documents, a trove of documents that, again, previous biographers did not have access to, but you ad access to.

- Yeah.

This is thousands of pages by the man who was the official historian for King's organization, the SCLC.

And I just decided, because he wrote the very first book on King, came out in 1957, so just after the Montgomery Bus boycotts.

- Yeah.

- And one of the things I always do is if there's an early book I go to see if the author left behind his notes, his tapes, anything.

So I looked up LD Reddick, and it turns out his papers had just been donated to the Schomburg Library.

The Schaumburg hadn't even opened the boxes yet.

- Amazing.

- And that was a gold mine.

- Fortuitous timing.

And then the third thing was you had the Coretta Scott King audio tapes recorded by her for a memoir.

- That's right.

- Right?

Talk about that.

Because again, she's passed.

You don't get to talk to her.

But this essentially gives you access to her in a way that you couldn't have hoped for.

- Yeah, and I still wish I could have talked to her, obviously.

But when Martin Luther King died, she went to work on her memoir, "My Life with Martin Luther King Jr.".

And her editor came down to Atlanta to sit with her and just record tens of hours of interviews on audio tape.

And then she took those audio tapes and wrote the first draft of Coretta's autobiography, showed it to Coretta, and they worked on it together.

But those tapes had never been heard.

Some of the transcripts of the tapes had been found before by other writers, but nobody before me had heard the tapes.

- Yeah.

- And they're really interesting because, of course, a lot of the things she discusses don't make it into the book.

For example, she talks about the fact that when they were still just engaged, she caught him cheating, that they were home in Atlanta, and he was out with one of his old girlfriends and didn't admit it until later.

And she said on the tapes that he always confessed.

He was a guilt ridden man, and that he was not perfect.

And she had to make the decision, even then when they were not yet married, that she could live with this.

- Yeah.

It's amazing.

Look, the imperfection, let me stay with that for a second, because you said earlier, he was flawed, he failed, he was not a saint.

The imperfections of Martin Luther King Jr. are something that we kind of know, like we've thought about this, heard about it, read about it, but you lay it all out here.

You are really not writing a portrait of him that is about only the positive parts of this.

And I just wonder how you balance this.

How did you approach the parts of his story that might have actually taken him down a peg or two in the eyes of some of the people reading it?

- I felt like I needed to be honest.

I needed to lay it all out there, but I didn't need to overdo it.

I didn't need to wallow in it.

- It's about calibrating it.

- I wanted you to understand.

- Right?

Yeah.

- Yes.

It's so important to be honest.

And it's important for a couple reasons.

One, women like Dorothy Cotton, who was his mistress, was more than a mistress.

It was a deeply important relationship to him.

And Andrew Young and others have told me that he relied on some of these women and he was not faithful to his wife, but that this is part of who he was.

And it's important to be honest about that so that we know that you can trust me when I tell you good things about King.

It's also important to acknowledge that the FBI used king's womanizing as a weapon to try to destroy him - Right, back to back to Hoover.

This was an obsession of Hoover's.

- Absolutely, so I had this discussion with Jesse Jackson.

He said, I didn't think you needed to put the sexual affairs in the book.

And I said- - Jesse said this to you- - Jesse said that to me- - After the book was out - After the book came out, after he read it.

And I said, "Respectfully, Reverend, I disagree.

I think people can relate to him better when they see that he's flawed.

But more importantly, we can't fully understand the way the FBI set out to destroy this man, to break up the Civil Rights movement, literally urging him to commit suicide as the only way out.

We can't understand the motivation.

We can't understand why and how the FBI did that if we don't acknowledge what they were using against him."

- Unless we understand the tactics that they chose use.

- Exactly.

- So this is a very high level question, we don't have nearly enough time sitting here together for you to answer it fully, but who was this guy really?

What did you discover about who this guy was, whether it was something that confirmed or affirmed something you knew, or something that completely challenged your thinking.

- What a great question.

He was a very sensitive guy.

Our greatest protest leader hated conflict, hated confrontation, and it goes back to his dad.

So much of his personality goes back to his dad.

- Talk about his dad.

- Martin Luther King senior, they were both born Mike King, by the way.

Mike King, as a sharecropper, Mike King grew up in Stockbridge, Georgia, walked off the farm at age 12, illiterate, with his only pair of shoes tied over his shoulders, made his way to Atlanta, put himself in school, became a preacher, raised this family that made it possible for Martin Luther King Jr. to be who he was.

But he was a very difficult, very demanding, sometimes violent man.

And Martin Luther King Jr. could never confront his dad.

And I think that's partly why he has a hard time confronting J. Edgar Hoover and LBJ and even Roy Wilkins.

King never likes to get into an argument.

Our greatest protest leader hates arguing.

And it's fascinating to see him wrestling with that.

He's deeply sensitive.

He attempts suicide twice as a teenager.

- Twice, right.

- And he talks about it, he never denied it.

He was hospitalized numerous times for what he called exhaustion.

That's what he told the reporters, but it was clearly depression.

And Coretta referred to it as depression.

- I read in your telling of this, of his story at different points that he had doubts, he had doubts about himself, his ability to lead.

He had doubts about the likelihood that he would succeed in this.

And I don't know that I was fully aware of how, of that aspect of the story told before.

- It's one of the- - Like it was a big shock for me to really read that.

- Me too.

It's one of the great ironies of the FBI surveillance.

That this effort that was made by the federal government to destroy him actually ends up humanizing him now when we look back on it because we can read his phone calls, we can read exactly what he was saying.

And what he's saying to his closest friends is, nobody's listening to me anymore.

- Yeah.

- Why do they all hate me?

Why is the news out to get me?

What happened to the New York Times?

What happened to the Washington Post?.

Why have they turned on me?

I don't know if anyone's gonna show up for this next protest.

He's full of these doubts.

And yet he goes on, and this is what made me love him even more than I did before I began the book.

What's he doing in the space?

And remember the Gallup polls all say America has lost interest in him, lost faith in him.

65% of Americans disapprove.

And what's he doing in the last years of his life?

He's defending the sanitation workers in Memphis.

He's planning the poor people's campaign, which is doubling down on all of his deepest principles.

He's not going to do what's convenient.

He's not going to take the off ramp and go write a book or take a sabbatical.

He's just, he has to stay committed to his beliefs.

- It makes me think about something else you said in this book, or that you've said in talking about this book, which is how important it is for every generation to have a book like this about him.

Because the moment this book is written is a very different moment from the last significant biography of him, which I believe is like almost 40 years ago at this point.

Right?

In the 80s.

- Yeah, the 80s and 90s there were some really terrific books, but yeah, we're living in a different world.

- We're living in a very different, we're living in post George Floyd America.

We're living at a time where there's been a surge in white supremacy.

The context for understanding King's story today, it changes as the years change and as the news changes and as circumstances change.

And so understanding who he was better, the complexity of him and of his work is really critical based on the moment that we're in right now.

Because people constantly look back to him and project onto him their own view of things.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- Absolutely, and we're living in an age now where King is used to cover for people who would propose policies that he would hate.

People will say, "Oh, king said we should be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin, so obviously he would be opposed to affirmative action."

Well, no, he was in favor of affirmative action.

- I mean, that has become a conservative trope in this country at this moment that when policies based on race are overturned by the courts or are proposed with some fury or furor in the states, the elimination of DEI offices on university campuses around the country comes to mind.

People say, "Well, you know, King would've been for this."

Well, how come?

"Because he talked about it should be the content of our character and not the color of our skin."

And I'm thinking he must be spinning in his grave.

- Yes, it's a gross misuse and abuse of King's word.

- Right.

They claim him, and that's ridiculous.

- It's often used as cover for racism.

And we often forget that the same speech, the I Have a Dream speech, which is where the content of our character line comes from, that part was improvised, the I have a dream part.

The part he wrote out is a radical document.

And we need to teach our kids the first half of that speech as well as the second half.

It's fine to talk to them about peace and brotherhood and holding hands.

- But you need to hear this other part.

- But the first part of the speech talks about police brutality and reparations and the fact that America has not yet fulfilled the promise of its founding documents because those documents were not true for a significant portion of the country, for black citizens.

- Yeah, so another thing in this moment, in this moment that I thought a lot about reading this book was this idea that somehow non-violence as a form of protest is not sufficient, right?

You point out in the book, non-violence is not passivity.

And it was a strategy and a tactic that was very successful for him at moments, but we now make an assumption that you're not actually doing everything you need to do if you resort to non-violence.

- Yeah, and King faced this in his own lifetime.

He's found critics from Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and others.

- Malcolm X, obviously, is a great example of someone who did not see this the same way.

- Yeah, they called him Reverend Dr. Chicken Wing, and they called him Uncle Tom because they thought he was taking the easy way out.

And he said, of course, "Non-violence requires greater courage, greater strength, greater discipline than than responding with violence."

And his point, and it was a practical one, he got into these, he would have these debates with the members of the gangs in Chicago.

He moved to Chicago in 1966, lived in North Lawndale.

And these gang members would come by his apartment and they would debate until late in the night.

And King would say, "It's actually stronger and you're never gonna outgun the Chicago Police Department.

You're never gonna outgun the National Guard.

But if you show greater moral strength, you weaken them and you gain a position of moral superiority, which is greater strength."

It comes from Howard Thurman and these other philosophers that he'd studied all his life 'cause he saw himself as a preacher.

And this activism was an extension of his religious work.

But I love the fact that he's actually trying to argue this with the Vice Lords and with Stokely Carmichael, and even with Malcolm X, with whom he began to engage more in the last years of their lives.

- So on other thing that I wanted to mention that jumped out at me in this book was a line toward the end in which you said, "In Halloween King, we hollowed him."

The elevation of Martin Luther King, this gets back to the idea of King, you say "King is not a symbol, he's a man," but the reality is he is a symbol.

And his name is plastered on, as you say, elementary schools, streets and communities all over this country, of course we have the holiday, which really becomes a mattress sale in the end, right?

(audience chuckles) We've really reduced him in a lot of respects.

You point out that on a lot of the streets and in a lot of the neighborhoods where Martin Luther King is featured prominently, poverty and segregation are as bad as ever, right?

Like, how far we've come and how far we have not come is a persistent theme in this book.

- No question about it.

And not only are those streets, the Martin Luther King Drives and Boulevards and Avenues still segregated, but they actually have higher poverty rates and higher segregation rates than the rest of the cities in which they're located.

So we have not seen the transformation.

And one of the things Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte and others who I talked to for this book complained about is that it's almost as if it were intentional.

It's almost as if by, and this is, you know, Dick Gregory could be a little bit conspiracy minded, as you know.

- Yes.

- He had the opinion that the national holiday was done in a way intentionally to defang Martin Luther King.

And as Harry Belafonte said, it's because we only like dead radicals in this country.

We don't teach radicalism, we don't celebrate radicals except after we've rendered them safe.

We do the same thing with Muhammad Ali.

We forget about the time when he was dangerous and we celebrate the time when he was lovable, when he was lighting the Olympic torch.

And there's a danger in that, there's a danger in teaching Martin Luther King only in the safest way.

We need to remember that he challenged us, or else I think he loses his power.

And that's why we need new books every generation.

- Could we have a Martin Luther King today?

Is the environment politically, is the media environment open to, susceptible to somebody like him who would be pushing and pushing and would be successful in some respects, but wherein another 50 or 60 years we'd be looking back and saying, "This person kind of defined the activism and the radicalism of our time?"

- I hope so.

- Are we passed the point of having radicals out among us is the question.

- Yeah.

Radicals who can actually speak to us all and get us all to at least think about what they're saying.

Because that was a huge part of King's appeal and a huge part of his power was that he could say the same thing, deliver the same speech, and people from all different parts of the country, different races, different income levels would hear it and listen to it and respond.

And it was in part because he had the church and Americans still went to church back then.

Two thirds of all Americans belonged to a church in 1960, and half of them had their butts in the church every Sunday.

- Right, they were every Sunday, not occasionally.

- So there was, and you had three television networks that everybody was tuned into.

- I mean, that's really kind of where I'm going with this, is that the circumstances at the time enabled Dr. King to be Dr. King in a way that today it's much more fragmented, fractured, decentralized.

The media environment is different, the political environment is different.

It's so much more toxic.

- Yes.

- I just, I hesitate to think what a Dr. King would be able to accomplish today.

- Yeah, I mean, it's worth noting that there was still a lot of stratification.

There was still a difficult time getting through to northern audiences.

It was hard to get politicians to feel like they had to do something about it, which is why King had to keep holding their feet to the fire.

Which is why Birmingham is so successful after the police dogs come out and the water cannons because then finally he's able to reach even those people who didn't wanna be reached or weren't paying attention.

At some point he was able to pierce that and speak to all of us in a way that really changed history.

Can that happen today?

It's gonna be harder for sure.

- I absolutely think that.

So we have a couple minutes left.

I wanna talk about you.

So you grew up in the suburbs of New York, - So did you, huh?

- Well, I was gonna say, do you know who went to your elementary school in your high school?

- Yeah.

- Yes, I did.

- I know, I remember.

- That's exactly right.

(audience laughing) - I remember you.

We didn't hang out that much 'cause you were you younger.

- I was a year younger, but we played Little League together.

- Yes.

- Little League Baseball together.

- Yes, we did.

- We go back a long way.

- We were not exactly the All Stars, however, as I recall.

- No, I know that looking at us right here on stage, you would think.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- Clearly.

- Aaron Judge and Jose Altuve, (audience and Jon chuckling) but it was not to be.

And then you went on to Northwestern University to study journalism.

I followed behind you there.

And you had a very distinguished career as a journalist, Jon, prior to writing these books, you were a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

You wrote for a number of other publications.

You made the decision to leave daily journalism and write books.

- Before it left me, yes.

- When you looked at daily journalism today, I can't imagine why you would've wanted to leave it.

(audience and Jon chuckling) Talk about that and how your career evolved that you were thinking about.

- Well, leaving daily journalism was not a plan, actually.

I really thought I would just work in newspapers the rest of my life.

That's all I ever wanted to do.

And what could be more stable than the newspaper industry?

- Of course.

Right.

Yeah.

(audience chuckling) - That's really how I looked at it.

Like, I just wanted a steady job, and I thought newspaper's sure thing.

But around 2000, I had this idea for a book on Lou Gehrig and I wrote it while I was working at the Journal, nights and weekends before we had kids.

And then I did another book, and then I quit the journal and just figured like, "I can always go back if the book thing doesn't work out."

And I have a wife who's got a steady job, so that reduced my risk factor.

It still makes it possible 'cause it's really hard to string books together and make a solid living.

- I mean this book, if you go back to the Dick Gregory conversation, if the origins of this book are truly 2015, that's nine years ago by my math.

You were not done with the Ali book, working on this book in earnest.

But this book took- - This is six years of full-time work.

- Six years of full-time work.

- Yeah.

Nothing else.

I don't teach, I don't write magazine articles.

It's six years of full-time work.

So it's not the most practical way to make a living, but it's the most fun, I think, and it's the most rewarding.

- And to be able to travel the country, as you're obviously still doing- - And meet these folks, yeah.

- In the course of reporting the book to meet those folks, but then after the fact to get to tell the story.

I mean, one of the things about the book publishing business is, like the business of daily journalism, it's not doing too well.

- (chuckles) I've noticed.

- In the old days of writing a book and going on tour and being able to talk about that book and promote that book paid for by the book publisher, sort of the schedule of appearances, that's largely gone, except in very specific cases, rare cases too.

So the opportunity that you've had because of the success of this book to take the message of Dr. King, travel around the country, talk about it, that's got to be very rewarding for you.

- It's unbelievable, and I have to say that the response to this book has been phenomenal.

And I wasn't sure, as I said, I wasn't sure people would want to read about the human King.

But the response has been amazing.

I've spoken to 1500 students at Morehouse College, a packed house at the Apollo Theater.

My mom came and she said, "Did you ever think you'd be on stage at the Apollo Theater?"

- At the Apollo Theater.

- "Mom, come on.

That's the stupidest question ever."

Like of course not.

What am I doing here?

It's crazy.

But it's been unbelievable.

- Yeah.

Well, I will say, one of the great things about this book, many great things, is it's an enormously readable book.

It does feel like you're telling the story.

And so I just, I commend you and I'm- - Thanks.

- Happy for your success, old friend.

- Yes.

- And I appreciate you coming by.

- Thanks Evan.

- All right, Jonathan Eig.

Thanks very much.

- Great to see you.

Thanks.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience, and guests and an archive of past episodes.

- He wanted to move beyond civil rights to human rights.

He wanted to talk a lot more about income inequality and just the structure of capitalism in America.

I think he was pushing us toward a more of a European style social democracy.

He wanted to see guaranteed wages, guaranteed jobs, and he was gonna camp out in Washington as long as it took until that happened.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

(bright flute music)