Martin Luther King Jr. is a towering figure in American civil rights and social justice history. Despite this, there are not many comprehensive biographies about the activist. With increasing research and public records, King as a person can be fully portrayed.
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers attempted to understand King as a person.
In 1986, David Garrow wrote Carrying the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership ConferenceThe work includes over 700 interviews, King’s personal papers and thousands of FBI documents and traces his life from a young pastor to one of the leaders of the civil rights movement.
Jonathan Eig wrote King: A Life in 2023. It explores the dark and complex emotions King faced in his personal and professional life as he became a civil rights icon.
Today on Created equal, Both Eig and Garrow joined moderator Stephen Henderson to discuss how the American understanding of King has evolved since his assassination on April 4, 1968.
Guests
David Garrow won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1987 for his book, Carrying the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The author and historian says King felt uncomfortable being pushed into the role of a celebrity while being credited with the civil rights movement.
“King was not someone who aspired to be a public leader, and in fact, as he became more famous over the years, he became more and more uncomfortable with the level of fame and praise that was being given to him,” Garrow said. “He felt, quite rightly, that it was excessive and that the credit for the movement should be distributed much, much more widely.”
Jonathan Eig wrote King: A Lifewhich won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The biographer and journalist said that reading previous biographies of King allowed him to take a more personal perspective when creating his work.
“I felt it was time for a book that reminded us of his humanity, that he was flawed, that he didn’t have to be perfect to be a hero and to be as brave as he was, and that this book would be in a different place than some of the previous ones.”
