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Lexi Kraft
13 May 2013
History 104
A Hero Uncovered
More than often famous individuals are only recognized by what appears on the
outside: their image. The inside is overlooked. Although Dr. Martin Luther King
appeared to be the most driven civil rights leader, father, speaker, and motivator, he had
his own flaws. Lerone Bennet, the author of the oldest book and a friend of King,
illustrates and praises his successful side by highlighting King’s feelings during his life
events while the second author, David L. Lewis also analyzes King’s positives, but gives
a more critical view on what he did throughout his life. Even though Stephen Oates book
was similar to Lewis, he builds an even more critical edge on King, and the book written
after that by David Garrow is a major break through compared to previous others. He
asks new questions that weren’t addressed in the other two books and provides
information on King’s flaws. Dyson, the most recent author, critiques King the most. He
respects King, but gives the reader the truth of his character.
Lerone Bennet’s book What Manner of Man, published in 1964, is the most
biased because the author was a friend of King. They were both African Americans who
attended Morehouse College and got far in their careers fast. Bennet got his information
from King’s books, his wife, relatives, friends, and classmates who were all willing to
praise him. But, he didn’t provide information on anyone who didn’t praise King. Since
he got information from biased sources, his book is too celebratory to be a reliable
source.
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The focus of Bennet’s book is King’s life within the civil rights movement. He
discusses how King grows up, where he goes to college and studies, how he becomes a
preacher, and how he “leads” the civil rights movement. According to Bennet, events like
the Montgomery boycott in 1955 could only be lead by Martin Luther King because he
was a special and one-of-a-kind leader. No matter what, King is behind his nonviolent
beliefs every step of the way, even when it required facing danger.
In this book, there is a major turning point for Martin Luther King. When his
house gets bombed out of hatred, he isn’t home, but his family is. Once he gets news of
the bombing, he speeds home, and finds angry rioters outside of his house. After seeing
his family is safe, he goes outside to the rowdy crowd to tell them not to fight back. Even
though the white men are challenging the black, King states, “We [black men] are not
advocating violence. I want you to love your enemies, be good to them and let them
know you love them.” 1 The bomb could have killed his family, but King wasn’t for
fighting back. The people rioting around his house were willing to react violently to
protect King, but he didn’t want that. This showed the public how compassionate he was
towards nonviolence and “What a Manner of a Man” he really was. After that incident,
he became a civil rights symbol to America and showed how to forgive people that
showed only hatred towards his race.
It appears that King doesn’t have problems with anyone in the civil rights
movement, but Bennet does state that, “He has been criticized, perhaps too harshly for
not leading the rebellion he created.” 1 However, he doesn’t go into depth on what this
means and why he was criticized. Also, Bennet adds on his personal opinion by
mentioning this criticism may be harshly portraying King.
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King is portrayed as a hero in Bennet’s writing because he only shows one side.
The positives of King are the only factors that make up this book. He appears perfect
with his “intelligence plus character,”1 that is shown throughout his choices. Also, his
assassination, on April 4, 1968, adds onto his heroic legend. Throughout the book,
Bennet relates him to Gandhi, and one of the last thing he writes is “His [King] grace,
like Gandhi’s, grew out of a complicated relation not to oppression but to the ancient
scourges of man, to pain, to suffering, to death.”1 King was willing to suffer and die for
his cause and that makes him fearless but peaceful, like Gandhi. They both had similar
beliefs. When King was alive, he claimed, “A man who won’t die for something is not fit
to live,”1 and that revealed his Gandhi-like ideas. He emphasized love, peace, and
movement during his time alive and because of that, he is viewed as a heroic icon.
Like Bennet, the next book, King: A Critical Biography, published in 1970, the
author, David L. Lewis was personally exposed to King. However, they weren’t
collegiate friends. Lewis, a member of the army, only met Martin Luther King three
times, but was heavily interested in him. Ironically, he was asked to write this biography
two weeks before King was assassinated. After that, Lewis felt differently about King. He
claimed, “Suddenly, what had begun as primarily fascination with an exercise in
professional craft- a competent work unrelated to my own specialty- 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.” 2 His
assassination sparked even more interest in who he was and what he did. This inspired
Lewis’s book.
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Although Lewis doesn’t continuously offer praise, like Bennet, he does focus on
celebrating King, but adds in more details. He also had a research assistant, Wendell
Holbrook, and they did research with the help of professors and Boston University and
Morgan State College libraries. These sources provide historical views of King, but not
anything personal. The book doesn’t provide a balance between King’s private life and
heroic facts because it’s based on academic sources. But, Lewis didn’t get the
opportunity to search through King’s home life because he tells the reader,
“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.” 2 The people close to King perhaps weren’t ready to
talk about him because they were still getting over his death. Or, they didn’t want society
to be exposed to anything else besides his heroic deeds.
Lewis stresses how strong of a civil rights leader he was. When speaking to 3,000
people at Brown Chapel about boycotting Montgomery, he exclaimed, “I have no
alternative but to lead a march from the spot to carry our grievances to the to the seat of
government. I have made my choice. I have got to march. I do not know what lies ahead
of us. There may be beating, jailing, tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of
Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience [Pause] I ask you to join me today as
we move on.” 2 He spoke for nonviolence to tons of people throughout the entire civil
rights movement and went to jail may times for his cause. As for white people, they saw
him mostly through the media. Lewis tells that the media only covered the more violent
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actions instead of focusing on nonviolent. This lead whites to believe that the black
people were evil.
To add onto his nonviolence attitude, he also didn’t believe in war. During
Vietnam, King loses support from both blacks and whites. He exclaims, “We must
combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,”2 to a crowd.
Lewis goes on to admit that King was no longer one of the ten most admired Americans
after he made this view known. His campaign turned into being more than just for civil
rights, but for human rights. King began to speak of not only the racial struggle, but also
class and poverty. He believed they all related each other in the US environment.
In 1982, Stephen B. Oates wrote a book, Let the Trumpet Sound that is very
similar to Lewis’s. Oates typically wrote on the civil war, but he also was fascinated with
King. Like Lewis, he mentions that King addresses the poverty issue, but goes on to say
that it wasn’t mentioned until right before his death. Oates provides more detail of what
Lewis wrote about, from start to finish, off King’s life. Like Lewis’s research, it was hard
for Oates to find people who were willing to be interviewed. People who witnesses to
King refused to talk. Finally, a retired New York lawyer who was close to King, agreed
to an interview.
His name was Harry Wachtel and he brought a new claim that the two books
before this one hadn’t touched on. He helped Oates to realize, “I knew from
unimpeachable sources that King had been guilty of sexual indiscretions,” and “I could
scarcely ignore them, since J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the FBI, had
exposed them to religious and political leaders across the country, in a relentless and
reprehensible campaign to destroy King’s career.”3 Now that Oates had people speaking
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who were personal with King, he was exposed to new and deeper facts. Unlike Lewis, he
now had inside information. Although Oates was able to find dirt on King, he admitted,
“Above all, I wanted to demonstrate that King’s sexual transgressions were part of the
terrible price he paid for his fame.”3 The author made excuses for King’s sexual behavior
and was relieved that he felt guilt from it, unlike John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Oates makes note of the fact that he felt shameful for his actions because they hurt the
people he was close to and the movement.
When he was young, King’s dad was treated horrible in front of him. A white
man called him a nigger, and he was greatly shocked. In reaction to the evil Southerners
way of treating his father, King promises to hate every white person for the rest of his
life. No matter what happened, his parents told him to love white people because it was
their Christian duty and although King didn’t voice his hatred, he didn’t understand how
he could love people who hated him. However, as he grew up he was careful to control
his hatred because “uncontrolled hatred can be self-destructive.” 3 For example, Hitler
used his hatred to hurt and violently slaughter the Jews. If King performed these acts in
America, it would start another civil war, and King was deeply against that. Lewis asserts
“It was his [King’s] strength of character, a combination of his Christian faith, his
humanity, and a self-esteem inculcated in him by his parents and a loving grandmother,
that allowed King to remain open to the possibilities of positive change.”3 It was the
influences of his family and church that painted his motivational, encouraging views.
Martin Luther King discovers the power of Christianly and brotherly love through
his years at Cozer. He then commits himself to the social gospel and preaching. Oates
shows that King applies his Christianity to global issues, such as, “reacting to hatred with
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hatred only added to the bitterness and divisions in the world.”3 Not only was King hurt
by decisions America was making, but also the problems that were happening around the
world. Oates shows that King is concerned with global struggles and believed that the
only way broken communities could be “cemented” together is with true Christianity
attainment. While he was at Cozer, he fell in love with the superintendent’s white
daughter and got to the point of talking about marriage. After this is mentioned, Oates
drifts away from that thought and explains after Crozer, King attends Boston University.
Furthermore, he goes on to marry Coretta and moves from North to Montgomery.
Bennet and Lewis both discuss the bomb that alarmed King’s family and had him
in a hurry to get home. But, Oates shows the reader a new perspective by sharing a quote
from C.T. Smiley, the chairman of Dexter’s board of trustees and the principal of Booker
T. Washington High School. In reaction to the bombing of the house he says, “Regrets
are very well, but you [Martin Luther King] are responsible. It is you who created the
climate for this.”3 Even though King was all about nonviolence, he was still promoting it
by making people want to fight back. This caused King to think twice about being
protected with guns. He allowed pistols and shotguns into his house and told the public
that they were only for self-defense. After he thought about letting guns in his house, he
debated to get rid of them. King decided, “if something happens, it is meant to be.
Nothing can stop the cause. You don’t need guns to protect yourself or your family.”3
Having guns in his house would promote that it was okay to have guns and attract more
people to use them.
Oates shows King as the civil rights leader who pushed the hardest for the
movement. He was so busy with speeches, meetings, and church that he didn’t have any
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time left for his family. President Kennedy tried supporting King and the movement but
he admitted he needed to be pushed sometimes and King offered to do the pushing. Like I
mentioned earlier, Oates shows King was interested in society globally, not just in the
United States. It is no secret that during his career, he wanted to lead the civil rights
movement to success. To get advice, he went to India [where he appreciated Gandhi
tremendously], New Delhi, and Jerusalem as a pilgrim. Once he got home, he came back
“with a deeper understanding of nonviolence and a deeper commitment as well. For him,
nonviolence was no longer just a philosophy and a technique for social change; it was
now a whole way of life.”3 He used 3rd world liberation struggles to help the U.S.
environment.
In this book, King’s failures became clearer. When he gets put in jail, he loses
control of his surroundings. He lost control of the Albany movement and it grew back
into being as segregated as ever. Critics were appalled at King’s lack of leadership while
he was in jail because when his plans would fail, he seemed to flee the town. In result of
the Albany movement failure, King admits, “Our protest was so vague, that we got
nothing, and people were left very depressed and in despair.”3 This discouraged King and
he needed persuasion to continue on after Albany. He began giving up on himself.
Meanwhile, his wife had just had her fourth child and Oates informs the reader
she receives a mysterious letter and tape from Miami, Florida. They claim King is a
fraud, even to Negroes, that he doesn’t believe in God, and that he has no morals. Also,
the unknown source claimed he had the potential of being a great leader, but he has fallen
short and his major awards, like the Nobel Peace Prize, will not save him. Sexual noises
are recorded at the end of the tape. Somebody was out to ruin his reputation and Oates is
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determined it’s Hoover and the politicians under him. Coretta chooses not to believe
anything that this evidence portrays because she couldn’t imagine her King doing such
deeds. However, King feels guilty and believes the tape is a warning from God for not
living up to his name. One he no longer had a good relationship with two big political
leaders, Johnson and Hoover, freely claimed King had a mistress, the wife of a California
dentist and they would meet in hotel rooms.
Not only was he losing hope and confidence in himself, but Oates explains why
King loses support, from both blacks and whites, throughout the movement. Instead of
preventing violence at boycotts he created, he would run away. A cartoon in a newspaper
during his time showed a cartoon of him saying, “I’m not firing, I’m only putting the
trigger.”3 King is provoking the violent outbreaks at his events by causing big strikes
with a lot of people who don’t like each other. Although he promotes nonviolence, he
doesn’t do anything to stop the violence. Instead, he turns his head.
Bearing the Cross, by David Garrow, an associate history professor at a city
college, explores the profane and special sides of Martin Luther King. Like Oates, he
talks about how King was fond of light-skinned women. Garrow gives more detail on
King’s white college girlfriend. The two broke up because their friends said it would be
dangerous and could affect his career. This heartbreak stuck around forever and King was
never able to recover. However, Garrow also admits that at Boston College, King was
known for scouting out the best looking girl and partying.
Unlike the first few books, Garrow doesn’t write about King as being a hero. He
admits King spoke like a hero, by saying he would die for the movement and his people,
but behind shut doors, he was overwhelmed. His appearance made him look strong, but
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he really had a hard time developing strategies and getting people to follow his lead.
When a hostile mob gathers outside of the Montgomery Baptist Church, King panics and
calls Attorney General Kennedy in Washington, from the basement. Kennedy felt that,
“King displayed little of the calm that he had shown the church audience before. Marshall
[the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights] found King ‘panicky’ and ‘scared’ that
the mob would set the church afire.”4 Even though King was at the church, he hid from
what he had caused and didn’t know what to do.
Oates discussed Kennedy’s involvement in the movement but didn’t go into great
detail. Garrow discusses how King and Kennedy began the civil rights journey as friends.
Kennedy told King that the United States belonged to him as much as it did to himself.
During the election, King gave a testimony for Kennedy. Soon enough, John Kennedy
failed to come through with some of the promises he made with King prior to his
election. He broke his word to the black voters, who initially gave him a victory, and his
failures weren’t forgotten. Kennedy wanted to push for civil rights, but he thought it
wouldn’t pass. Once the president was shot, King saw himself dying the same way
because of the “sick society” they lived in.
In some ways, President Kennedy, President Johnson, and several other men, like
Bayard Rustin, helped lead the civil rights movement. Nationally, Pope Paul VI even
“endorsed America’s nonviolent civil rights movement, and promised he would issue a
statement condemning racial segregation and discrimination.”4 Rustin believed that the
problem wasn’t American politics, but Americans failure to understand the moral justice
of the movement. In other words, it wouldn’t completely benefit them to try and elect
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new leaders, but instead the civil rights leaders had to change the minds of society. King
had help from several people and they could have done it without him.
Garrow provides a well-balanced look into King’s life with explicit facts. He
covers everything from King as a kid to him getting assassinated. He discusses King’s
family, who seems to be his lowest priority and also brings up other civil rights leaders
who encouraged its success. One thing Garrow really concentrated on was showing
King’s commitment to the movement. He put it over his family by missing major
holidays and putting his Nobel Peace Prize award money, $54,000, towards the
movement instead of to his children’s college funds. Garrow also was able to speak to
FBI sources about King’s sexual addictions and pulled valid research from the so-called
hero. In reaction to his issues becoming public, he stood up for himself by saying, “I’m
away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month, fucking’s a form of anxiety
reduction.”4 The research done by Garrow was revolutionary because he exposed many
details that weren’t there before him.
I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., by Michael
Eric Dyson, beat at Garrow for being the most critical. Dyson started writing this book
since he saw King shot on television, at age nine, and witnessed his assassination seize up
his family, city, and country. Being the most recent source out of the five books,
published in 2001, allows Dyson the most evidence to research with. Similar to Garrow,
he tackles the good, bad, and ugly of Martin Luther King, but much more crucially.
Dyson recognizes that King had remarkable accomplishments and was the most
courageous fighter for freedom in our nation’s history, but he also plagiarized and was a
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sex addict. He goes around the United States speaking, lecturing, and preaching about
Martin Luther King.
The author admits to loving King deeply, but wants America to see the real King.
Dyson mentions ever since King died, we treat his legacy with three mistakes. Americans
have twisted his identity and have lost his connections to humanity and have avoided
making him accountable for his mistakes. We have also cleaned up his ideas about white
American people and his commitment to his own race. Thirdly, we over do his image by
having a day off from school and work for a holiday recognizing him.
Before King was assassinated, he preached one of his sacred speeches. Ironically,
he exclaimed, “He’s [God] allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over.
And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight that we, as people, will get to the Promised Land.”5 He dies less than 24 hours
later and doesn’t even get close to the Promised Land. Dyson writes that the aim of his
book is to, “keep Dr. King alive, the way he really was, then we will get to the Promised
Land. And he will get there with us.”5 If we knew exactly who King was and what he did,
we would have a better idea of how much of a struggle the civil rights movement has
been and know that it isn’t over yet. This book is a work of biocriticism, which is “a
critical investigation of King’s career and cultural impact through the analytical prism of
biographical details and life episodes.” 5 Dyson’s goal isn’t to show America he was a
bad person, but to make Americans aware of whom he really was. We must understand
our country’s history by embracing the truth. In order to do this, it is more meaningful to
bring out both good and bad sides of King.
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Dyson illustrates King’s passions and concerns towards not only the civil rights
movement but also to poverty and economic equality. He wanted to solve all three of the
issues in America. Apart from the civil rights movement, he also tremendously addressed
his views, which originated from Coretta, about Vietnam. King believed that race, war,
and poverty all related, and Dyson explains that once he said this and made his antiwar
feelings known, financial support dwindled for the civil rights movement. By protesting
the Vietnam war, he was denounced by several black leaders and “In 1967, for the first
time in a decade, King’s name was left off the Gallup Poll list of the ten most admired
Americans.” 5 In the same year, studies show that a majority of both white and black
Americans supported the war. Only 25% of African Americans supported his antiwar
view. 6 Dyson sees it to be wrong that we offer so much of our attention to King in
today’s America, but the opposite was true when he was alive. Dyson hadn’t heard of
King until the day he was assassinated. Therefore, his assassination is the reason we
celebrate and recognize him today.
A new point Dyson makes in his book is describing King’s love for the South.
This is an explanation as to why he didn’t want violence to destroy the South. He loved
the region and the people’s loyalty and spirit towards the land they lived on. His Southern
roots were shown throughout his speeches. In fact, whites hated him because even though
he knew them so well, he still loved them. He was killing them with kindness.
A view was presented in Dyson’s book that I hadn’t yet thought about. When the
author’s colleague was being interviewed, he surprisingly said “Fuck Martin Luther
King. The nigga was the worst thing to happen to black people in the twentieth century.”5
Thinking Dyson was taking his criticisms too far, I didn’t think anything of it until the
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colleague turned out to be educated and explained himself by saying “I’ve got three
reasons for what I am saying. First, the nigga is an aberration. He didn’t come from
amongst the people. He has a Ph.D. when a nigga couldn’t even get a drink of water.”5
King appeared to be an essential leader to the movement because of his strong speeches
and powerful voice, when really he couldn’t be personal with the people he was
preaching too because he was nothing like them. He couldn’t be genuine because he
wasn’t really in their shoes.
Dyson explains the truth about King and women; he was a sex addict. Coretta was
stuck day to day with his children while he was away seeing other women. The author
explains that, “King’s sexual sins were an often crude, occasionally pathetic, and at times
sadly ironic attempt to seize back a privacy that had been forcibly mortgaged to Southern
segregation.”5 He could have went home and had private time with his family. There is no
excuse for cheating on his wife with numerous women. After his final speech, “King
allegedly rendezvoused with two women at different points of the night and in the early
morning fought with a third female ‘friend’ before being gunned down later that evening
at the Lorraine Motel.” 5 Since this piece of evidence wasn’t released in any other book, I
was skeptical at first, but Dyson proved me wrong by explaining the source to be Ralph
Abernathy.
Abernathy was a huge Martin Luther King supporter and a great friend and helper
to him. Everything King did, Abernathy did with him. They went to jail together, he
opened for his speeches, and they stayed up late together on restless nights. King spent
more time with him than his family. It is easy to say they were best friends. Abernathy
told the truth about King’s sexual habits after he died because he wanted America to
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know he wasn’t just a civil rights leader. He was also an attractive man who was also a
great friend. Abernathy states even though he told the truth about King, “Only advocates
of moral perfection will seek to deny King his high place in history because of his sexual
sins.” 5 According to him, his accomplishments outweigh his flaws. Bennet’s biography
of King is almost an opposite portrayal of Dyson’s, and this shows how advanced and
unbiased historical facts and technology have gotten American history to be even greater
than it used to be.
Through better sources, Martin Luther King’s true character has slowly come to
our realization. Hopefully Americans will care about whom the real Martin Luther King
is and not just the fairytale. He was far from perfect and shouldn’t be given a holiday for
plagiarizing and having sexual relations outside of his marriage. Once he died, other civil
rights leaders filled his shoes and deserve just as much credit as King.
To continue research on King, historiographers should investigate through
relatives to King, Abernathy, Coretta, Kennedy, and to the women he slept with. Maybe
they kept diaries and can help explain whom he really was. Bennet and Lewis, like so
many other Americans, wanted to contribute to keeping King’s legendary leadership
alive. But, with better researching ways, the newer three authors show progression of
where sources can get you. Bennet may have had no idea of King’s flaws, but Dyson
seemed to know him more intimately even without personally knowing him.
It doesn’t help Americans to read praises of King because in result of that, we
celebrate a holiday for him. We are taking the easy way out of understanding him. To
break King’s mythical character apart, we need more historiographers like Dyson. The
next biographers should stick to facts and try to make their work unbiased. They should
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get inside information from King’s children to discover their point of view of their father
and try to uncover any evidence the trashy women he slept with left. It is important for
America to recognize other more important leaders and to not place Martin Luther King
on such a high pedestal.
1. Bennett, Lerone. What Manner of Man; a Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Chicago: Johnson Pub, 1964), 68, 165, 24, 242.
2. Lewis, David L. King: A Critical Biography. (New York: Praeger, 1970), x, xii,
279, 358.
3. Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1982), x, xxi, xiv, 33, 88, 91, 144, 199, 480.
4. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), 159, 351, 375.
5. Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther
King, Jr. (New York: Free, 2000), xvii, 4, 101, 154, 155, 157.
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Works Cited
Bennett, Lerone. What Manner of Man; a Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago:
Johnson Pub. 1964.
Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
New York: Free. 2000.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. New York: W. Morrow. 1986.
Lewis, David L. King: A Critical Biography. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New
York: Harper & Row. 1982.