The Sorrow of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In reading Garrow's biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., I have been particularly struck my several themes that ring discordant with my general schoolbook knowledge of the civil rights leader. They are not the themes that disturb most people. Over the years, I've been made generally aware of his marital infidelities, but despite my distaste for infidelity I have largely set aside that flaw in my feelings about individuals in history. Instead I take the sad frequency of infidelity amongst leaders to be a general symbol of the flawed nature of even the most accomplished and ambitious men.

So I have not been surprised to learn of King's frequent associations with other women, and Garrow does not linger there. Instead I have been surprised to see just how unhappy a man he was. This was not a man who had ambitions of greatness, let alone a sense that he was destined for any such thing. He was constantly reluctant to take on roles of leadership, and at best came to accept that he must carry the burden that circumstance had put on his shoulders. He was away from home more than twenty-five days a month. He was constantly sick, and often downright depressed.

One of the main contributors to his unhappiness was a revelation to me that Garrow's book frequently explores: the drowning complexities of bureaucratic in-fighting in the civil rights movement, both between the various civil rights organizations and within King's own Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). I was vaguely aware of the tension between the NAACP, which favored the primacy of litigation, and other groups more drawn to direct action such as protests and boycotts. Yet I had no sense of the breadth and depth of rivalry between the NAACP, the SCLC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality, among others.

And this was in the days before Black Power, before Stokely Carmichael took over the SNCC from John Lewis. Even in the early days, it seems like at least half of King's time was spent trying to smooth over relations with the NAACP's Roy Wilkins or the leaders of other groups. SCLC was constantly accused of keeping money fundraised for the efforts of other groups (so much so that an umbrella fundraising group, the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, had to be created just to distribute money amongst the groups). King was personally accused of riding in after the groundwork was done by others, and refusing to personally bear the most difficult burdens (e.g. he declined to join the Freedom Rides).

The politics within SCLC were scarely less vexing. Ralph Abernathy became almost insanely jealous when King was given the Nobel Peace Prize, leading to a public rebuke from Nobel officials. There were constant arguments over salaries, titles, lines of authority, etc. The FBI and Kennedy/Johnson administrations hounded King over the past Communist affiliations of several advisors. It is marvel that the organization worked at all.

Honestly, it is also amazing that King found time for anything else, let alone time to be the leader of a revolutionary social movement. I'm only halfway through the book, and there are still three years bfore King's death. But when even the Civil Rights Act and Nobel Peace Prize provide mere glimpses of sunlight in an otherwise dark life, and the internal conflicts in the civil rights movement are about to burst right open, I'm fearful that the last years of King's life will prove to have been no more pleasant.