King Sr, also known as Daddy King, later adopted the more auspicious name of the reforming German theologian for himself and his son. His subject was originally called Mike King Jr, named after his Baptist preacher father. His book aspires to “help us make our way through these troubled times” and arrives bearing copious endorsements from past biographers. Jonathan Eig, author of a monumental biography of the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali, promises to give us a new King, fully rounded and appropriate for our own moment. Scholars now argue about how much Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas influenced him, though the public often embraces a simpler image of King that renders his more radical racial and economic pronouncements in anodyne terms. By the end of that decade, however, with a national holiday in his honour (reluctantly assented to by Reagan) and prize-winning biographies by Taylor Branch and David Garrow in print, King’s image had undergone a remarkable transformation. As late as the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan could state that it was still an open question whether he had been a communist dupe, as King’s enemies at J Edgar Hoover’s FBI had long alleged. Beyond the US, he is widely celebrated in nations confronting difficult questions about their own racial pasts.Īt the time of his assassination in 1968, however, most Americans had a negative view of him, and the National Security Agency had tapped his overseas phone calls. W ho was the Rev Martin Luther King Jr? In America, the civil rights activist and Baptist minister is now embraced across the political spectrum even as the teaching of the history of discrimination and segregation that shaped him is being actively suppressed in many parts of the country.

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