Introduction, Part 2

Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Marshall Frady

(Page 2 of 4)

Over the years since then, ironically, King has passed into the cloudy shimmers of a pop beatification, commemorated with parades, memorial concerts, schools and streets and parks named for him, his birthday a national holiday, his image on postage stamps. But in the process, a benignly nebulous amnesia has settled over how in fact tenuous, fitful, and uncertain was his progress through those years from Montgomery to Memphis, and the final, truly revolutionary implications of his message. More, the man himself has been abstracted out of his swelteringly convoluted actuality into a kind of weightless and reverently laminated effigy of who he was. To hallow a figure is almost always to hollow him. And the truth is, King was always a far more excruciatingly complex soul than the subsequent flattenings effected by his mass sanctification. As one of his biographers, David L. Lewis, put it, in "the nation's canonization of Martin King...we have sought to remember him by forgetting him."

Four years before Memphis, there was one glowering summer night in Florida's little moss-hung antique of a city, St. Augustine, where King had mounted a series of demonstrations that I was sent down by Newsweek to cover-night marches that proceeded with a hymning of freedom songs from the black quarter of town to the town square, once a slave market, where they would be met with an engulfing violence from the whites who had been steadily sifting in from the surrounding palmetto flatlands. After those nightly melees on the square, the reporters there-many of them veterans by now of racial uproars all the way back to the Autherine Lucy riots at the University of Alabama of 1956-would quickly retreat to their motel rooms to get swiftly, slammingly drunk. But then came one particular Walpurgis Night of mayhem on the square-a storm of swinging baseball bats and trace chains and shrieked rebel yells, through which the black marchers made their way with a mute, unbelieving terror and stumbling frantic urgency, in a long leaning line battered back and forth like a canebrake in a wild wind, and at last breaking apart altogether, marchers scattering back for the refuge of the black section. Following them there, through several passing scuffles of my own, I happened to glimpse, in the shadows of a front porch, all by himself and apparently unnoticed by anyone else, King standing in his shirtsleeves, his hands on his hips, absolutely motionless as he watched the marchers straggling past him in the dark, bleeding, clothes torn, sobs and wails now welling up everywhere around him-and on his face a look of stricken astonishment.

Later that night, I found him sitting behind drawn blinds in the low-lit front parlor of another house, holding a glass of ice water with a paper napkin wrapped around the bottom. He said in a thick murmur, "You question-yes, when things happen like this tonight, you question sometimes-What are we doing to these people?..." Even so, when earlier that evening he had been watching that retreat from the square staggering past him, I had seen on his face not only shock at what had befallen these people acting on his exhortations, but also it seemed a kind of wonder and fascination at this collision precipitated by his moral vision's dramaturgy of good and evil-and at the same time, some deeper horror at that very captivation in himself.

"I am a troubled soul," King admitted more than once. Indeed, long before Memphis, he had come to dwell in a private Gethsemane of guilt over not only the cost of his mission on his people, but what he felt were his own personal betrayals of his high public meaning. Always haunted by a reverence for the austere and ascetic, he attempted to maintain a modesty in his own circumstances, confining himself to a meager salary, a small rented frame house in a humble neighborhood, an old car, plain dark suits. Yet those suits were often silk, as were the pajamas he would have brought to him whenever he could for his stays in jail. He remained discreetly but resistlessly infatuated with the glamours of importance: limousine transport to imperial hotel suites, the company of the wealthy and eminent. Neither was he innocent of a certain fretful pride in his appearance, in his intellectual heft, his historical import, which prompted journalist David Halberstam once to note that "the average reporter...suspects King's vanity." In truth, King was surrounded during his days by accusations, not just from antagonists, but from many journalists and occasionally close associates, of a breathtaking pompousness, a brazen and sometimes craven opportunism, as well as a forlorn ineptness in administering his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, even a troubling casualness in its financial accountings.

Also, King would frequently deplore "the evils of sensuality," declaring in one sermon, "Each of us is two selves. And the great burden of life is always to keep that higher self in command. Don't let the lower self take over." But not long after his death began the ripple of reports about his extramarital amatory disportings. They were almost impossible to believe at first, simply because they seemed so wildly at variance, just did not rhyme, with his unrelenting public demeanor of gravitas. But as the reports continued to accumulate of lickerish rompings in hotel rooms, multiple humid affairs, they finally became too plentiful from too many responsible sources to be reasonably doubted. Some apologists at first suggested that it was simply of a piece with the ardent nature of a man unable to apply economies to his passions. But more than that, in King's lapses into that "lower self" he so often decried, one sensed an extraordinarily harrowed man-caught in the almost insupportable strain of having to sustain the high spirituality of his mass moral struggle, while living increasingly in a daily expectation of death-intermittently resorting to releases into sweetly obliterating riots of the flesh. He seemed thus to move through some endlessly recycling alternation between the transcendently spiritual and the convulsively carnal. And with King's exorbitant propensity for guilt, it was as if all such lapses into a lesser self violating the high nobility of his public mission could be expiated only by surrendering himself to a readiness to die for it-a fatal expectation with him, in fact, from his beginnings in Montgomery. In a sense, then, the outer turbulence attending King's movement was all along matched by an unseen, equally turbulent struggle within King himself.

But such baser aspects in the Promethean moral protagonists in history-Gandhi himself, by the later testimony of associates, could be exquisitely vindictive, curtly cold to family and others close to him personally, with "an insatiable love of power and implacability in its pursuit"-hardly diminish the splendor of such figures. Rather, they lend them a far grander human meaning than their eventual, depthless pop exaltations. But we have not yet learned to accommodate in our understanding of such figures what the ancient seers, Sophocles and the King David chronicler and Shakespeare and Cervantes, knew-that while evil can wear the most civil and sensible and respectably rectitudinous demeanor, good can seem blunderous and uncertain, shockingly wayward, woefully flawed, like one of Graham Greene's dissolute, shabby, God-haunted saints. And what the full-bodied reality of King should finally tell us, beyond all the awe and celebration of him, is how mysteriously mixed, in what torturously complicated forms, our moral heroes-our prophets-actually come to us.

Copyright © 2002 Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Marshall Frady (1940-2004) was a veteran journalist who wrote for Newsweek, Harper's, and The New Yorker. He was also a correspondent for Nightline and ABC News. His books include Wallace, a biography ofGeorge Wallace, and Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson.