Martin Luther King Jr: History Maker, by Richard S. Reddie (Lion Books), 2011 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace Prizewinner (the youngest ever at that stage), is one of the world’s three most-mentioned twentieth-century exponents of non-violent activism against injustice (with Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi). 

In this book we have a readable, and, as you’d expect with a (British) Lion publication, profusely-illustrated 185-page survey of Dr. King’s life and work. 

King was a brilliant speech-maker: his dream of a ‘color-blind’ society (where people are judged more by the content of their character than the color of their skin) has become his trademark quote. He was better at speech-making than as a conciliator, though he excelled there too in incredibly difficult circumstances – jostling with more radical ‘Negroes’ on the one hand (later in his life he switched to his preferred term ‘Blacks’) and with law enforcement officers and the nation’s leading political figures (notably Presidents JFK and LBJ) on the other. 

The overwhelming feeling one gets from reading all this again concerns the very deep hatreds racist matters invoked in the U.S.

Item 1: When Booker T Washington became the first African American to dine in the White House, with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, ‘one senator, Benjamin Tillman, argued that [this] action by the President… will necessitate our killing of a thousand [Negroes] in the South before they will learn their place again!’ 

Item 2: White extremist groups offered a bounty of tens of thousands of dollars on the head of ‘Martin Lucifer Coon’. ‘Moreover, the FBI had uncovered over fifty assassination plots to kill King: as a result, their agents had followed him to Memphis as much to spy on him as to supposedly protect him’. 

We learn a lot here about ‘protest politics’, about King’s getting less sleep than he needed right through his adult life, and about his juggling the roles of pastor and agitator. We all know King was somewhat notorious for his womanizing (thanks especially to J Edgar Hoover’s malicious phone tapping, and the FBI’s mailing some salacious tapes and transcripts to his wife Coretta during King’s absence). (King spent the last night of his life with a ‘long-time female friend’ Reddie tells us). The great man might also have had some other faults/addictions – his workaholism (and resulting neglect of his family), whisky, cigarettes, plagiarism in his PhD dissertation, and ‘soul food’.  (‘He liked his food too much to fast as his idol Gandhi did’). But, several biographers tell us, he was not motivated by material gain, ‘giving the movement most of his income, including the more than $200,000 he earned annually in speaking fees’. 

M L King was not only concerned to overturn the politics of segregation, but in the latter half of his life he was also deeply involved with issues of poverty – especially in the northern cities (‘Watts was one of the first of 239 outbreaks of racial violence in over 200 US cities in the five hot summers of 1964-1968’) – and also the Vietnam War (a concern which alienated him from many of his erstwhile supporters). King was eloquent about the disproportionate numbers of Black Americans killed in Vietnam ‘and condemned the fact that over 35 million Americans lived in poverty while the country squandered millions’ in that useless war. 

Two small concerns about this book: one loses track of all the names and organizational acronyms, and I would have liked to know more about Coretta and the family. (Are the children named? Can’t remember). 

But the eulogy at the end is a fitting tribute to a truly great man: ‘The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. His worth to the United States has been inestimable: he was one of the few people who could be the conscience of a nation that has always prided itself on liberty, but for so long denied too many of its people this much-vaunted freedom. Martin Luther King went some way toward redeeming this inherent contradiction. Yet he has transcended the USA and belongs to the world’. 

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Rowland Croucher

February 2012      jmm.aaa.net.au