David Levering Lewis - King: A Biography

THE DAY MARTIN KING was assassinated, I had reached a decision that I had never imagined would be mine to make. I had been asked to consider writing this biography just two weeks earlier. As I was drafting the letter of acceptance to the publisher, the news of the Lorraine Motel tragedy was announced. Suddenly, what had begun primarily as a fascination with an exercise in professional craft became a passion for comprehension of the true significance of Martin King and, through him, something of the nitty-gritty reality of blackness, collective and personal, in America. In my months of traveling, researching, and writing, I tried to reconstruct the civil rights movement and the spiritual odyssey of Martin King, from its beginnings on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue to the finish on the balcony of the Memphis motel. When I wrote the last page of the book, it was April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of his death, and I cannot now say that I have not been stirred by the man and his philosophy. I think I understand why, on several occasions, my reactions to Martin King were unenthusiastic and why those reactions were self-indicting and much too harsh but not entirely wrong.

I know, better than most of its readers will, the extent to which this biography fails. I have tried to be thorough and objective but also empathetic, without once bothering, however, to consider the racial or ideological advantages or disadvantages of the facts or thoughts that this work contains. There are people, black and white, who will argue that objectivity is a pose, a defense, that some middle-class blacks just naturally strike up. For them, this book's only value will be like that of an enemy's captured munitions depot. Such people were the first to attack Martin King for his objectivity, and that is pretty good company for one of his biographers. Criticisms of a nonpartisan nature are a much more serious matter. There will be a fair number of these, I suspect. It is a comfort to me, if not an adequate defense against them, that my convictions about the serious limitations of instant history have not dissipated with the writing of this biography.

The number of people who could be compromised by an expression of appreciation for making this book possible would run on for pages. Most of them will probably be relieved to be thanked in person or by letter. There are, nevertheless, several whose encouragement, criticism, and hours of research or proofreading must not remain anonymous. There is Wendell Holbrook, my research assistant, who had no idea that he was going to work so hard; I had none that he was going to work so superlatively well. There is Howard Silverman, who taught the bulk of one of my courses. Then there are Henry S. Robinson, Annette Pinckney, Tiff Carroll, and Gail Tucker, who suffered a bit with prose and spelling; Andrew Keller, who was an invaluable source for the oral tradition of Morehouse College; Stephen Banker, who passed on a number of useful tips from his nest in the National Press Building; Caroline Dash Davis, whose good parties and good liquor cabinet suffered, I fear, some abuse at my hands during the last few months of writing; Julian Bond, Chevene King, and Professor Benjamin Quarles, who read portions of the manuscript and warned me away from many of my worst mistakes; and Preston King and William Weatherby, who conspired to have me write this book. An expression of appreciation is owed, as well, to Dr. Howard Gottlieb, director of the Mugar Library's special collections at Boston University. Finally, I must thank the Faculty Research Committee of Morgan State College for a generous stipend to help defray my expenses. Of course, they cannot, any more than can the captive editor and typist who is my wife, be blamed for my shortcomings. Unfortunately, I cannot thank Martin King's widow and parents and the officials of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as they refused to be interviewed until after the publication of Coretta King's book. However, Mrs. King's book appeared before the final revisions of this manuscript were made.

Washington, D.C. D. L. L.

October, 1969

When a new, revised edition of this book was suggested, I discovered, on taking it up again, that littlefactually or conceptuallyhas come to light since I wrote the last line of the biography eight years ago. A few errors of detail had to be put right and one or two harsh judgments softened in the postscript. For these reasons, the perfectionist temptations inherent in revising a first book were the easier to resist.

In addition to those whose contributions were acknowledged in the preface of the first edition, August Meier, whose scholarly counsels have followed me from college, and Richard L. Wentworth, a venturesome editor, compel special thanks for rescuing King from the musty fate of most books nearly a decade old.

Washington, D.C. D. L. L.

January 15, 1978

King: A Critical Biography was finished sixteen months after Martin Luther King, Jr., died a few minutes past 6 P.M. on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The original title was not intended to connote disapproval of its controversial subject. There was no censorious agenda or provocative advertisement behind the critical. Rather, it denoted my commitment as a newly minted Ph.D. and novice author to the ideal of objectivity prescribed to professional historians. That the choice of title was to prove less problematic than it well might have was signaled early on in the canonical American Historical Review where a distinguished senior historian judged King to be an excellent book that would do more to keep Martin Luther King and his dream alive in a different era than would a more fulsome tribute.

The biography not only established itself as the first scholarly appreciation of the martyred civil rights leader, it surprised me with its large initial sales and shelf life of gratifying durability. Equally surprising, my skepticism about my work's professional value now seems much too severe. Four decades after a dutiful preface confession that the serious limitations of instant history have not dissipated with the writing of this biography, King: A Biography (unfettered of critical in the second edition) retains its special value as a book written in the unique interpretive space between Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death as a beleaguered public figure and his future beatification as America's greatest secular saint. The past had only just begun to become unrecoverable from its future. It was still possible to track Mike or M. L., the privileged son of a powerful fixture of Atlanta's racially segregated, conservative, black middle-class, as he absorbed his family's rich religious tradition, acquired a more cosmopolitan academic culture, and alternately led and followed the black freedom movement as it accelerated beyond the control of his nonviolent passive resistance, until he surpassed the civil rights parochialism of his peers to combine racial emancipation, economic democracy, and world peace into a transcendent, if still inchoate, philosophy of human rights that inspired many, yet puzzled and offended many more.