The digitization of old African-American newspapers, census records and other previously obscure documents has allowed him to craft by far the richest and most compelling history of King’s family and childhood yet, one that will remain definitive for decades to come. Rosa Parks, which kicked off the Montgomery bus boycott, not with King’s birth, and devotes only twenty pages (of 625) to King’s twenty-six years before his elevation as the Montgomery protesters’ spokesman.Įig in contrast has structured a far more traditional biography, devoting 135 pages, almost a quarter of his text, to King’s pre-boycott roots and life story. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.įorty years ago, I took to heart something the civil rights icon Miss Ella Baker said just two months after King’s 1968 assassination: “The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.” Thus BTC begins with the 1955 arrest of Mrs. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed - I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” - nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times.
Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life ( KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross ( BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account.
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