Narrator: On a cold December evening in 1955, a 26-year-old pastor with a doctorate but little experience in activism stepped up to a pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama. He had only twenty minutes to prepare a speech for a crowd of five thousand, their anger and hope hanging heavy in the air. They had just launched a boycott of the city's segregated buses, and they were looking to him for direction. The young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., was initially reluctant, a man thrust into a role he never sought. Yet, the words he delivered that night would ignite a movement and set him on a path that would change the course of American history. Jonathan Eig’s comprehensive biography, King: A Life, draws on newly released FBI files and personal letters to move beyond the sanitized icon, revealing the complex, flawed, and radical man who was forced to confront a nation’s deepest sins.

Narrator: Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against injustice was not born in a vacuum; it was inherited. His family history, deeply rooted in the post-Reconstruction South, was one of constant struggle against racial violence and economic exploitation. While his father, Martin Sr., was a figure of ambition who escaped the sharecropping life for the pulpit, it was his grandmother, Delia King, who embodied a fierce, unyielding spirit of defiance.

A powerful story from the book illustrates this inheritance. Around 1910 in rural Georgia, Delia’s young son, Michael—who would later become Martin Luther King Sr.—was assaulted by a white mill owner for not fetching water quickly enough. The owner kicked over his milk pail and left him bruised and bloodied. When Michael ran home, Delia didn't console him with platitudes. Enraged, she marched to the mill and physically confronted the owner, beating him to the ground. Her message was clear: “You can kill me! But if you put a hand on a child of mine, you’ll answer.” This act of raw courage, though it brought the threat of a lynch mob to their door, instilled in her son a profound lesson about dignity and resistance. This legacy of standing up to oppression, even at great personal risk, was a foundational element of the man Martin Luther King Jr. would become.

Narrator: When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in December 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. was a newcomer to the city, focused on his church and finishing his dissertation. He was not the predetermined leader of the Civil Rights Movement; he was, in fact, a reluctant one. When local activists like E.D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson organized the bus boycott, they needed a voice, and they turned to the charismatic new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

King was hesitant, aware of the dangers and the burden of leadership. But at the first mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, something shifted. Facing a massive, overflowing crowd, he delivered a speech that transformed him. With no time to write, he spoke from the heart, declaring, “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He connected their protest to the highest principles of American democracy and Christian faith, famously proclaiming, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong! If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong! If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!” In that moment, he not only galvanized the crowd but also accepted the mantle of leadership that had been thrust upon him, setting the stage for a year-long struggle that would capture the nation’s attention.

Narrator: The success of the Montgomery bus boycott taught King a crucial lesson: nonviolent protest was not passive, but a powerful force for change. As the movement grew, he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) refined this into a potent strategy of nonviolent confrontation. The goal was not to avoid conflict, but to create a crisis so dramatic that it would force the nation to confront the ugliness of segregation.

This strategy was brutally effective in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The campaign, known as "Project C" for confrontation, initially struggled to gain momentum. In a controversial move, organizers decided to enlist children in the protests. On May 2nd, the "Children's Crusade" began. Hundreds of students, some as young as six, marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, singing freedom songs. The city’s public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded with unrestrained brutality. He ordered firefighters to unleash high-pressure hoses on the children, sending them tumbling down the street. The next day, he brought out police dogs. A photographer captured a searing image of a dog lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy. That picture, published on the front page of The New York Times, shocked the world. The calculated use of nonviolent protest had exposed the violent heart of segregation, creating a moral crisis that President Kennedy could no longer ignore.

Narrator: As King’s influence soared, culminating in the 1963 March on Washington and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he became a global symbol of justice. However, this fame came at a steep price. He became a primary target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Hoover, driven by a deep-seated racism and a paranoid fear of communism, saw King as “the most dangerous Negro” in America. He launched a relentless campaign to destroy King’s reputation.

The FBI placed wiretaps in King’s hotel rooms and offices, recording his private conversations and extramarital affairs. In late 1964, this campaign reached a chilling peak. The FBI compiled a "sex tape" from their recordings and mailed it to King's home along with an anonymous, threatening letter. The letter called him a "colossal fraud" and an "evil, abnormal beast," and seemed to suggest he should commit suicide to avoid public exposure. The package arrived while King was in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony. The psychological toll was immense, leaving King deeply depressed and fearful. This episode reveals the dark side of King's journey, where his greatest triumphs were met with the most vicious and personal attacks from the highest levels of government.

Narrator: In his final years, King’s vision expanded dramatically. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were monumental victories, but King realized they were not enough. He saw that racism in America was inextricably linked to the "triple evils" of poverty and militarism. This led him to launch a more radical, and far more controversial, phase of his activism.

He took the movement north to Chicago to fight against slum housing and economic inequality. There, he was met with a hatred more visceral than anything he had seen in the South. During a march through the white neighborhood of Marquette Park, he was struck by a rock as mobs screamed obscenities. He also became one of the most prominent critics of the Vietnam War, arguing that it was draining resources from the fight against poverty and sending poor Black men to die for a freedom they didn't have at home. This anti-war stance cost him allies, including President Johnson, and led to accusations of treason. His final, ambitious project, the Poor People's Campaign, aimed to bring an army of the dispossessed to Washington to demand a "revolution of values" and a radical redistribution of economic power. This was the King who had moved beyond the dream of integration to demand a fundamental reconstruction of American society itself.

Narrator: Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life masterfully dismantles the myth of Martin Luther King Jr. as a gentle dreamer, revealing instead a man of profound complexity and radical vision. The book's most critical takeaway is that to truly honor King is to grapple with his entire journey, especially his final, challenging years. We have conveniently remembered the "I Have a Dream" speech, but have largely forgotten his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War and his call for economic justice, which he saw as essential to true freedom.

The book leaves us with a challenging question: Have we, as a nation, truly listened to King? Or have we simply built a monument to a sanitized version of him, allowing us to ignore the revolutionary changes he demanded? King’s work is not a closed chapter of history; it is an unfinished revolution, and his call for a radical transformation of values remains as urgent today as it was in the final, fraught years of his life.