A Man in Full

In what has become an annual rite by now marking the anniversary of his birth, once again last January the nation passed through myriad ceremonies of remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. But the anniversary this week of his slaying, on that April twilight in Memphis 34 years ago, prompts a certain additional melancholy: In all the public commemorations now of King’s life and ministry, so little is remembered of the personal reality of the man himself and what he had more largely begun to undertake when he was struck down. It’s almost as if, after Memphis, he came to undergo a second kind of death, one of a circumspect forgetting.

It’s not as if there hasn’t since gathered a voluminous billowing of memoirs, commentary, biographies about King, which do hold, implicit in their compendious accumulations of circumstance, the elemental arc and motif of his life. Yet in a peculiar, perversely persistent disconnect between the word and the world, the public sense of King has remained reverently oblivious to the true thematic and dramatic heartbeats of his story.

To begin with, King was always a far more complexly dimensioned being, harrowed by self doubts and woes over what he felt were personal betrayals of the high morality of his mass struggle--more welteringly human and thus more heroic--than the weightless and gilded effigy his pop-sanctification has turned him into. In that beatification, we have lost an immensely important understanding: What the full-bodied reality of King should tell us is how in fact mysteriously mixed, in what excruciatingly convoluted and sometimes shockingly flawed forms, our great moral protagonists often come to us.

But another sort of selective amnesia has set into the celebrations of King’s ministry. The acclaim, the national tributes, have had the effect of ghettoizing him to only his importance to the black experience in this country. In fact, King became not simply a momentous figure in the history of African Americans, but ranged on in his last years to become, more sweepingly, a tragic-heroic prophet to the whole of the American community. That King, a strikingly more radical figure whose message and mission would be no less unsettling in this time than it was then to the prevailing social order, has been mostly edited out of general memory by comfortably consigning him, in the homages to him, to only his racial significance.

That realization, I must allow, did not fully emerge for me until somewhat recently, even though, having first encountered King in 1964 while a raw young apprentice correspondent in Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau, I have in a way been writing about him ever since, in writing about his effects on the South, on figures such as George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson.

But three years ago, I turned to face him directly and frontally for a concentrated biography (one in the series of short lives of cultural and historic figures published since 1999 by Lipper/Viking Penguin). And it wasn’t until undertaking that compacted narrative, while mining deeply from the vast lode of other writing about King--particularly Taylor Branch’s masterwork “Parting the Waters”--that the fundamental dramatic pattern to his life, somewhat submerged in the more profusely detailed biographies, leapt into compelling clarity.

There were in fact two great halves to King’s story. In the first, King emerged as the galvanizing Moses-like figure of the moral pageantry of the civil rights movement in the South during the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it’s of course for his heroic apostleship in that struggle from Montgomery to Selma that he is now quite fittingly honored--its emancipation of a long-subjugated people not only legally but psychically, and its astonishing transfiguration of the everyday life of the South that ensued, all likely impossible without King’s transcendent nonviolent gospel.

But King did not proceed directly from Selma to that motel balcony in Memphis on that spring dusk in 1968. In the second half of his ministry, he moved out beyond the South in a magnifying, yet more revolutionary mission to re-create the conscience of the whole nation. Through the same nonviolent mass protests that had remade the South, he meant now to confront America’s custodial complex of power, both corporate and governmental, in a grand Gandhian campaign to compel a “moral reconstruction” of the country’s entire social estate that would deliver not only its black citizens but the poor and discarded of all American society. It became a movement to humanize the nation’s policies, both at home and abroad, through nothing less than “a revolution of values,” as he proclaimed, declaring that, “a radical redistribution of power must take place.” Indeed, his old, pathological, carbuncular antagonist J. Edgar Hoover was not far wrong when he fumed that King had become “the most dangerous man in America.”

This new mission was an altogether different proposition from simply according constitutional rights to Southern blacks. His close confidant Stanley Levison warned him that such an amplification of his gospel militancy was almost certain to affront even his coalition of supporters outside the South, most of whom were still only “for moderate change ... without excessive upheavals” and that King could well wind up only “the leader of a fringe group.” King threw himself against all those forbidding prospects anyway.

What he wanted to bring about, to start with, was a multibillion-dollar federal initiative to completely erase poverty from the land. It would include a national program to assure full employment, a guaranteed minimum income for all households. A comprehensive Marshall Plan to salvage America’s inner cities. He pondered, as well, calling for the nationalization of the country’s essential public services and industries: power, transportation, its communications systems. Privately, he notified one assembly of aides that they must begin “making demands that will cost the nation something,” demands addressing not just racial but “class issues” because “something is wrong with the economic system of our country

In fact, he had come to feel caught in a race against a progressive deadening of America’s heart, a dulling of conscience being worked, as he saw it, by the advance of a new sort of bland, technotronic, corporate totalitarianism, acting in conjunction with the huge machineries of government, that was indifferently visiting a measureless vandalism on the lives of individuals not only in America but elsewhere in the world. In a sense, King wound up pitting himself against his very age.

But in this, King had pitched himself against a vast power field of interests that lacked the simple, guttural palpability of a Bull Connor or George Wallace, in a struggle without the passionate moral clarity of the Southern movement. It became like trying to grapple with a vaguely malign smog. Its first major engagement in Chicago, where he launched a campaign against the city’s labyrinthine patterns of housing apartheid, turned out a woeful misfire. In truth, from Chicago on throughout the rest of this second half of his ministry, he had not one real success. Soon turning his evangelism against the Vietnam War--at a time when there was still considerable support in the country for that military exploit--he received a wholesale scourging from a once-sympathetic press, and many of his backers in the nation’s liberal establishment, and even within the movement itself, began to fall away from him. It’s hard to remember at this remove of time how his moral pentacostalisms after Selma appalled, scandalized, outraged the conventional political sensibility.

But he had now passed into that far and solitary country of all true prophets ultimately, reaching beyond the nominally enlightened, the standard civic respectability. Even so, he shortly set about mobilizing the most expansively radical adventure of his life, the Poor People’s Campaign. It was to have masses of America’s marginalized citizens converge on Washington, with an encampment on the Washington Mall, from which “major dislocations” would be mounted to “cripple the organization of an oppressive government” to force “unwilling authorities to yield to the mandates of justice.” Even as the Poor People’s Campaign began hopelessly floundering, though, and despite all the other confoundments in this national expansion of his ministry, King’s messianic vision only seemed to reel out ever wider to embrace, finally, the world, all the Earth’s cruelty and grief. What he really seemed to want in the end was to actually re-create the moral nature of the human community everywhere.

Then came Memphis.

But since the rifle crack in that April dusk, it has become the King of the first half of his apostleship, those years from Montgomery to Selma, who is revered and commemorated with parades, memorial concerts, parks and schools and freeways named for him, his birthday a national holiday. In the process, the King of that last climactic half of his story has largely been etherized from memory. But that second, audaciously wider campaign was as profoundly in the prophetic tradition of quickening the conscience of a people, troubling the comfortable moral sleep of the land--and with it, King entered full into a tragic-heroic magnitude in almost the classic literary Promethean sense.

Over the years since then, though, it’s as if the society at large, which would be no less discomfited by the passions and preachments of that second King, has managed, by consenting to allot African Americans an officially celebrated national figure of their own, to safely relegate King to merely his relevance as a black figure. The result is that we have wound up honoring King by halving him. But the man in full is an even more formidably proportioned, enthrallingly dimensioned figure than most of this nation has yet allowed itself to realize.