An Unvarnished Portrait
by Julia M. Klein
JANUARY 18, 2010 TAGS:
Time sands the rough edges of our heroes. Biographies can have the opposite effect, redrawing profiles and exposing unattractive features. Just in time for the U.S. holiday lionizing the civil rights icon, Martin Luther King (University of Michigan Press), by the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, offers a concise, clearly written portrait that manages to be both admiring and unvarnished.
Hodgson is neither a historical neophyte nor a parachute journalist. Now a visiting journalism professor at City University in London, he has published several well-reviewed books on 20th-century American history and politics, including America in Our Time (1976) and More Equal than Others (2004). He also authored a 2000 biography of former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan titled The Gentleman from New York.
While covering the American civil rights movement, Hodgson met and interviewed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But this relatively brief biography, though enhanced by Hodgson’s personal contacts with King, doesn’t belabor them. It relies heavily on Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Taylor Branch and David J. Garrow, as well as memoirs by various civil rights activists. As a result, the basic story Hodgson tells will be familiar to anyone steeped in the era, and a sound introduction for everyone else.
Hodgson describes the black bourgeois milieu in which King grew up, his theological antecedents, his sophisticated schooling (which included philosophy courses at Harvard), and his passage toward nonviolent activism. While King is often painted as an acolyte of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hodgson points out that his introduction to civil disobedience was strictly American, via Henry David Thoreau.
In Hodgson’s account, King is rarely less than eloquent and courageous. Indeed, more than four decades after his April 4, 1968, assassination, King lives most powerfully in the popular imagination through his rhetoric. When we think of King, we remember the stirring “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, in 1963, which Hodgson calls “the best-known political speech of the twentieth-century.” Also unforgettable is King’s eerily premonitory oration in Memphis, on the eve of his murder, in which he compared himself to Moses, offered a tantalizing glimpse of the Promised Land — “I’ve been to the mountaintop!” King declared — but unable to enter.
It wasn’t just words. King repeatedly put his own body on the line, facing police brutality and jail in the violently racist towns of the Deep South, including Albany, Ga., and Selma and Birmingham, Ala. In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King, arrested for participating in a mass protest against Jim Crow laws, outlined the philosophical justification for countering injustice with direct, nonviolent action. Responding to the pleas of his fellow clergymen for patience and moderation, he wrote, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
Hodgson nevertheless reminds us that King was arguably as much a follower of a social movement he could not control as its esteemed leader. In Birmingham, he notes, “Martin Luther King’s whole career was rescued by the actions, which he opposed, of a man of whom he disapproved.” The man, Jim Bevel, a colleague in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, launched the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, which provoked the city’s brutal counterreaction. Mass-media images of police attack dogs and fire hoses mobilized sympathy for the protestors and helped spur passage of the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King faced rebellion and disorder not just within his own ranks, but also from emerging younger leaders, including those of the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was stymied at times by Southern intransigence and stalemated in Chicago by Mayor Richard Daley. He was subject to wiretapping and harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which tried to tar him as a Communist (untrue, though Hodgson regards him as a social democrat) and a philanderer. Hodgson touches on King’s many sexual affairs, and seems to regard them as a reasonable reaction to tremendous strain. “King was enabled to cope with the ever-present fear of violent death in part through the strength of his Christian belief in the afterlife. But he also turned for comfort to the company, and the sexual solace, of women.” King’s affair with Kentucky State Sen. Georgia Davis, with whom he spent his last night on earth, “fulfilled his need for relief from almost intolerable pressures,” Hodgson says. Less forgiving interpretations suggest themselves. But Hodgson steers clear of psychobiography, while acknowledging King’s growing guilt over his infidelities and today’s judgment of those relationships as “inexcusably exploitative.”
Hodgson’s King is a flawed hero but a hero nonetheless. The British biographer appreciates the way King’s thinking on the Vietnam War, social justice, and economic inequality evolved and broadened, allying him to other 1960s movements while antagonizing some supporters (not least President Lyndon B. Johnson). King’s opposition to the war, hugely controversial at the time, was “prescient as well as courageous,” Hodgson says. Hodgson sees King whole — and on the whole likes what he sees. “He remained an inspiration to his supporters and a delight to his friends, for his warmth and kindness and not least for his irrepressible humour,” Hodgson writes, evidently speaking from the heart. In the decades since, he asserts, King has come to be seen as a great teacher, a moral leader and “a luminous figure” whose life made both our imperfect racial progress and Barack Obama’s historic presidency possible.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
Hodgson is neither a historical neophyte nor a parachute journalist. Now a visiting journalism professor at City University in London, he has published several well-reviewed books on 20th-century American history and politics, including America in Our Time (1976) and More Equal than Others (2004). He also authored a 2000 biography of former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan titled The Gentleman from New York.
While covering the American civil rights movement, Hodgson met and interviewed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But this relatively brief biography, though enhanced by Hodgson’s personal contacts with King, doesn’t belabor them. It relies heavily on Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Taylor Branch and David J. Garrow, as well as memoirs by various civil rights activists. As a result, the basic story Hodgson tells will be familiar to anyone steeped in the era, and a sound introduction for everyone else.Hodgson describes the black bourgeois milieu in which King grew up, his theological antecedents, his sophisticated schooling (which included philosophy courses at Harvard), and his passage toward nonviolent activism. While King is often painted as an acolyte of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hodgson points out that his introduction to civil disobedience was strictly American, via Henry David Thoreau.
In Hodgson’s account, King is rarely less than eloquent and courageous. Indeed, more than four decades after his April 4, 1968, assassination, King lives most powerfully in the popular imagination through his rhetoric. When we think of King, we remember the stirring “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, in 1963, which Hodgson calls “the best-known political speech of the twentieth-century.” Also unforgettable is King’s eerily premonitory oration in Memphis, on the eve of his murder, in which he compared himself to Moses, offered a tantalizing glimpse of the Promised Land — “I’ve been to the mountaintop!” King declared — but unable to enter.
It wasn’t just words. King repeatedly put his own body on the line, facing police brutality and jail in the violently racist towns of the Deep South, including Albany, Ga., and Selma and Birmingham, Ala. In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King, arrested for participating in a mass protest against Jim Crow laws, outlined the philosophical justification for countering injustice with direct, nonviolent action. Responding to the pleas of his fellow clergymen for patience and moderation, he wrote, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”Hodgson nevertheless reminds us that King was arguably as much a follower of a social movement he could not control as its esteemed leader. In Birmingham, he notes, “Martin Luther King’s whole career was rescued by the actions, which he opposed, of a man of whom he disapproved.” The man, Jim Bevel, a colleague in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, launched the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, which provoked the city’s brutal counterreaction. Mass-media images of police attack dogs and fire hoses mobilized sympathy for the protestors and helped spur passage of the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King faced rebellion and disorder not just within his own ranks, but also from emerging younger leaders, including those of the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was stymied at times by Southern intransigence and stalemated in Chicago by Mayor Richard Daley. He was subject to wiretapping and harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which tried to tar him as a Communist (untrue, though Hodgson regards him as a social democrat) and a philanderer. Hodgson touches on King’s many sexual affairs, and seems to regard them as a reasonable reaction to tremendous strain. “King was enabled to cope with the ever-present fear of violent death in part through the strength of his Christian belief in the afterlife. But he also turned for comfort to the company, and the sexual solace, of women.” King’s affair with Kentucky State Sen. Georgia Davis, with whom he spent his last night on earth, “fulfilled his need for relief from almost intolerable pressures,” Hodgson says. Less forgiving interpretations suggest themselves. But Hodgson steers clear of psychobiography, while acknowledging King’s growing guilt over his infidelities and today’s judgment of those relationships as “inexcusably exploitative.”
Hodgson’s King is a flawed hero but a hero nonetheless. The British biographer appreciates the way King’s thinking on the Vietnam War, social justice, and economic inequality evolved and broadened, allying him to other 1960s movements while antagonizing some supporters (not least President Lyndon B. Johnson). King’s opposition to the war, hugely controversial at the time, was “prescient as well as courageous,” Hodgson says. Hodgson sees King whole — and on the whole likes what he sees. “He remained an inspiration to his supporters and a delight to his friends, for his warmth and kindness and not least for his irrepressible humour,” Hodgson writes, evidently speaking from the heart. In the decades since, he asserts, King has come to be seen as a great teacher, a moral leader and “a luminous figure” whose life made both our imperfect racial progress and Barack Obama’s historic presidency possible.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
RELATED CONTENT
TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
