Writer's Voice: Aran Shetterly on The Greensboro Massacre, MORNINGSIDE & Jonathan Eig, KING, A LIFE
Black History Month: A forgotten massacre and an intimate biography
In this episode, we welcome Aran Shetterly to discuss his powerful new book, Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul. Shetterly unearths the long-overlooked history of the Greensboro Massacre, a brutal attack in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis murdered five labor and civil rights activists in broad daylight—while law enforcement stood by.
Shetterly takes us deep into the history behind the massacre, from the labor struggles of the 1970s to the FBI’s infiltration of both the Klan and the Communist Workers Party. He also explores the life and evolution of Nelson Johnson, a central figure in the movement, who transformed from a radical organizer into a leader of **faith-based activism and racial reconciliation**.
This conversation exposes the deep roots of white supremacy, the role of law enforcement in racial violence, and the hard-won fight for justice in Greensboro—a struggle that continues to resonate in today’s America.
Then we replay part of our 2023 interview with Jonathan Eig about his biography of the Reverend Dr. MLK, Jr., King: A Life.
Note: This is a transcript of the February 19 episode of Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon.
This transcript was automatically generated using speech recognition technology. We apologize for any errors in the automated transcript.
Segment One: Aran Shetterly, MORNINGSIDE
Francesca Rheannon
A forgotten massacre.
Aran Shetterly
And all of a sudden a caravan of nine cars carrying Klansmen and neo Nazis and some from other white supremacist groups showed up, picked a fight, and 88 seconds later, five people were dead and 10 were injured. And no one was ever held criminally responsible for what happened that day.
Francesca Rheannon
That's Aaron Chederle. We talk with him about his powerful new book, Morningside, the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City Soul.
That's Aaron Chatterley. We talk with him about his powerful new book, the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City Soul.
Then we replay an edited version of our 2023 interview with with Jonathan Eige about his biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A life that's all coming up on today's writer's voice, smart conversation with writers of all genres. Thanks for joining us this hour on this station, your favorite podcast app, or@writersvoice.net I'm Francesca Rhiannon.
On November 3rd, 1979, activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for an anti Klan march adjacent to Morningside homes in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Suddenly, gunshots rang out.
Known as the Greensboro Massacre, the brutal attack by the Klan and neo Nazis murdered five labor and civil rights activists in broad daylight while law enforcement stood by.
The event and its aftermath encapsulates the racial conflict and economic anxiety, clash of ideologies and toxic mix of corruption and conspiracy that roiled American democracy then and threaten it today.
In Morningside, Aaron Chatterley takes us deep into the history behind the massacre, from the labor struggles of the 1970s to the FBI's infiltration of both the Klan and the Communist Workers Party.
He also explores the life and evolution of Nelson Johnson, a central figure in the movement who transformed from a radical organizer into a minister who practiced liberation theology and racial reconciliation.
The book exposes the deep roots of white supremacy, the role of law enforcement in racial violence and the fight for justice in Greensboro, a struggle that continues to resonate in today's America.
Aran Shetterly, welcome to Writer's Voice Green.
Aran Shetterly
Great to be here with you. Thank you for having me.
Francesca Rheannon
This was really one of the best books of narrative history that I think I've read. Morningside, the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City Soul.
At the end of the book, you reveal that you hadn't known about the Greensboro massacre of 1979.
And you know, I didn't either. And I was part of the movement, as we called it at that time. You know, I knew about Other massacres. Kent State, of course, was more famous. So first, tell us what happened on November 3, 1979 at the Morningside Homes.
Aran Shetterly
Sure. And you're right, I didn't know about it. And part of that not knowing is what drove me to try to understand this story. So on November 3, 1979, Saturday morning in Greensboro, North Carolina, a sort of mid sized American industrial city that still had some of the largest textile mills in the whole world. Greensboro Textile Mills produced the Levi's dungaree that we all wore in our jeans for about 100 years.
And there was this group of radical activists organizing there, a multiracial group that had gone into the mills and were trying to build strong unions in a state that was notoriously hard on unions and had weak unions. And they were having trouble building alliances among workers across race and believed that the Ku Klux Klan was interfering, perhaps with the tacit approval of management in preventing more unity. And so they decided to hold a march in conference that they called the Anti Klan Marching Conference and then had a nickname for it which was Death to the Klan. And they had been very provocative. They were, you know, loud and opinionated and brilliant, a lot of these people. And they also truly believed, since they had a parade permit and the police had agreed to protect them, that the Klan were not the kind of people who would show up during the day inside a city, in a black neighborhood and start any trouble. So they were setting up that morning and all of a sudden a caravan of nine cars carrying Klansmen and neo Nazis and some from other white supremacist groups showed up, picked a fight, and 88 seconds later, five people were dead and 10 were injured. And no one was ever held criminally responsible for what happened that day.
Francesca Rheannon
You spend a lot of time in this book in Morningside setting up what was behind this history. And in doing so, you anchor this background to one of the most remarkable characters I can remember who was at the center of it. Nelson Johnson. Tell us about Nelson Johnson.
Aran Shetterly
You know, I met Nelson Johnson in 2015 and I met Nelson and his wife Joyce, and we were in a little cafe on the edge of downtown Greensboro. And they told me sort of a sketch of this history and some of their. A little bit about their lives.
And I left that meeting Francesca with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. First of all, I couldn't believe I didn't know about any of this and the reasons for that. And second of all, I couldn't believe their big hearted optimism, that lack of cynicism in these people who had lived through such trauma and remained as committed to working for the marginalized and the poor in our country as they ever had been. I felt that when I had the chance a couple years later, I wanted to go be closer to them and understand what that spirit was and where it came from. So Nelson Johnson grew up in a independent farming family in eastern North Carolina. A bit rare, you know, they owned their own land, they grew their own food. His father had pulp mill trucks. And he grew up with this a tremendous sense of independence.
And it went in all sorts of different directions. He joined the Air Force, and then he came home and enrolled under the GI Bill to North Carolina A and T, the state's flagship black college and university, and immediately got involved in civil rights activity in Greensboro, North Carolina, which was already famous for the sit in movement and for the founding of sncc. But what was coming next was this very interesting and complicated period. The Voting Rights act had passed, the Civil Rights act had passed. The question was what to do next?
Francesca Rheannon
How.
Aran Shetterly
How to wrestle human rights out of these civil rights. And what Nelson becomes is this a very important figure in that movement nationally, even though he's often focused very locally in trying to figure out how to make the country not just sort of equal in terms of its laws, but equitable in terms of its economics. And that sets him on this journey that leads him through the massacre that we just talked about and on to liberation theology. And, you know, as he journeyed away from King into black power and into communism, he ends up circling back in his later years and starting an organization called the beloved Community center to build community that is truly tolerant and accepting and small d democratic.
Francesca Rheannon
And this contradiction or conflict between what I guess you could almost say between identity politics and class politics was one that he really tried to reconcile. Not just he, but the group that he was part of, which was called the Communist Workers Party.
And what's so interesting is, well, first of all, I'd like you to talk a little bit about how that conflict was prosecuted in the movement. He also had an evolution on it. I mean, I think he started more on the identity politics part of it and then evolved more to the class politics. But are they really a contradiction at heart?
Aran Shetterly
That is such a great question. You know, I don't believe they are such a contradiction. And I believe that in the same way that you look at history and the way black and white workers have been kept apart tactically in order to maintain power, and we see it happening all around us, Right now, among the corporate and political leaders, I think that this conflict between identity and class, there's always a tension, but I don't believe it's the kind of fissure that it's sometimes made out to be. But part of what happened is there's a long history of creating fear in this country around conversations about class and economics and using phrases like class warfare and such. And one of the things I try to do in the book is show the evolution of that thinking, primarily through the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover and the way in which civil rights and workers rights, they made it an active part of their work to try to keep these things separate. And what always made me inspired by Nelson Johnson was his courage to look beyond the confines of what we're told we're allowed to think here, and his willingness to explore ideas that are taboo or forbidden, whether they be black power or Pan Africanism or communism. And, you know, he refused to let people tell him that those weren't the keys to opening up a door to something greater equality, and had to try them out. And I deeply respect that and allow him the freedom to make mistakes and to come back and refine and, you know, in other words, practice praxis.
Right. You know, try out an idea and learn from it and then present a new idea.
Francesca Rheannon
Oh, I haven't heard that, Heard that word praxis in a long time. And it is an excellent one.
But it was problematic that they were communists, not because the group itself, I don't think its ideology was any more problematic than what might be ideology of any group. They had their good points and bad points in it, but because of how communism is viewed, how the story is told, and how that opened them, them up to an even more intense persecution than might otherwise have happened. Talk about the Communist Workers Party and how Nelson saw communism, how he was thinking about communism and its place in making social change in America evolved.
Aran Shetterly
So what he really came to was this idea that it was the way to create deeper quality equity in this culture was to confront the economic systems and confront capitalism in this country. And, you know, the thing about communism is it offers a method and ideology for doing that. And so it's very attractive to people. And it has Marxist analysis, has a very powerful explanatory power.
And so he's someone who believed that by making the decisions in power more democratically, in both political and corporate America, that things could be more fair. And it seemed that that was an ideology that made sense for that time period. Now he was doing it at the depth of the Cold War. And so it was a terribly scary idea for a lot of people. And they were taught, we were taught that these were the bad guys. And while Nelson and his group were not, you know, Soviet affiliated or China affiliated, they were homegrown American communists.
They fell. Just the use of that word created fear in people, including the black community that Nelson had worked in for so long were uncomfortable with being allied or conflated, if you will, with this idea.
So there were these incredibly moving moments after the shooting when in a sense, the black community tried to stick up for Nelson and Greensboro and said, listen, just. Just say you're not a communist and come on back into our embrace.
And in that crisis moment, Nelson couldn't do that. He had to stick with his multiracial group of comrades and see this through, which meant that in a lot of ways he was alienated from the community that he'd started working in for the first time. And it was a very painful thing. And so you saw that what you're talking about, the identity politics and the class politics playing out in real time in a very emotional and difficult way for him.
Francesca Rheannon
You spoke before about the divide and conquer, which I think is really at the heart of this whole story that we're talking about.
You know, it does seem that the most vicious and implacable repression occurs at the point where blacks and whites begin to make alliances in this country. And in fact, the Ku Klux Klan was formed when the populace began to unite black and white farmers.
So now talk about the Ku Klux Klan and their heyday. Many people thought was back in the 1920s, but they actually had a real resurgence at this time.
Aran Shetterly
Yeah, it's really interesting. It's sort of a little known historical fact, but they have a resurgence and they're also beginning to shift a little bit, which is interesting and relevant to today. But so the FBI, after some of the horrific things the Klan did in the mid-60s and Lyndon Johnson really pushed them, for example, to go down and investigate the murders of in Mississippi in 1964 that were committed by the Klan.
They entered and infiltrated the FBI. A lot of the Klan Klaverns, if you will, these little Klan cells or clusters, and to the point where the FBI had as many as, you know, seven out of eight members in a particular rural Clavern, were reporting to the FBI So they had informants reporting to informants.
And what's interesting about this history is that unlike what the FBI did to the Black Panthers or some of the radical black groups, where they tried to essentially eliminate them, in the case of the Klan, they, in a sense, tried to manage them. So you could argue that the FBI was really running the Klan from the mid-60s forward.
So anyway, the Klan doesn't go away, and it persists. And then coming out of the Vietnam war, when all of a sudden there are. There have been a big uptick in black politicians and black people moving into the mainstream victories, really, from the civil rights movement and all the work that had been done. The Klan is resurging, and they're thinking about communism, they're thinking about black people, they're thinking about Jews. And all of these things are getting conflated into a more radical, even more radical. So they begin, instead of looking back toward Jim Crow, people are beginning to look forward to white power and a white ethnic state and Christian nationalism in a new phase. And so Greensboro, when it happens in 1979, a lot of people think of it as sort of a detonating moment for that white supremacist, a new version of the white supremacist movement that moves forward and ends up forming things like the Proud boys.
Francesca Rheannon
Yes, exactly. Today that we're dealing with right now.
In fact, Greensboro's most famous Klansman, you write, George Dorset, was in the employ of the FBI from 1959 until 1970.
So talk about the role of the FBI in the Greensboro massacre.
Aran Shetterly
You know, this is one of the interesting things. So, you know, a lot of the ways that this story gets told and has been. And one of the things that I really wanted to address in my book was it gets told as communist versus Klan. And that's actually a very incomplete telling because law enforcement, including the local police, the FBI, and the bureau of Alcohol, tobacco and Firearms were deeply involved in what happened there that day. And the reason they were is because they had informants. So the Greensboro police department asked a man named Eddie Dawson, who had been a longtime FBI informant, to figure out what the Klan was going to do about this march, this anti Klan march that the communist workers Party and Nelson Johnson had organized for November 3, 1979. So Eddie did that, and he reported back to the police that the Klan was planning to come. Maybe as many as 80 Klansmen, and they were probably going to be armed. He also went and told his old FBI handler.
So the FBI knew, but they knew. Not officially. Right. That he wasn't actually their informant. They didn't have to create reports about what he told his old informant, but they were very aware of what was happening. And they even held meetings at the local FBI office in Greensboro to discuss this. And yet on the morning of November 3, 1979, there were no law enforcement people present when the Klan and Nazis drove up on the marchers.
Francesca Rheannon
And why do you think that was true? I mean, this is a question that you asked yourself. What was their motive in failing to prevent this violence?
Aran Shetterly
Yeah, that's one of the things that I really wanted to do in this book, was to show the individual people and their motives and their evolutions as people so that we could begin to get at that mystery. Because to me, it's the only way to get there, as opposed to just giving a simple answer. But I think that we spend so much time in this culture normalizing the sort of white supremacist right here, right wing. I don't mean agreeing with it, I mean talking about it and explaining it as part of who we are. We do much less work normalizing the sort of idealistic left. And they're the ones who are responsible in a lot of cases for a lot of the progressive change that has happened in our country since its founding. But they are a deep part of who we are. But I think that that bias plays out in very difficult and hard ways. And in this case, for example, I think the Klan and Nazis in a strange way felt more American to a lot of the law enforcement than these long hair radicals who were trying to change the way the mills worked. So the mill owners complained to the police about the organizing that was going on there. The police and law enforcement felt these people were a bother. They thought they were dangerous because they'd been taught that communism was bad and radicals trying to organize for an economic revolution in this country were anti American. And so I think there was tremendous frustration and bias with these people who wouldn't just tow the line. And they hoped. My guess is that there would be a big fight, the Communist Workers Party would be embarrassed and people would stop following them.
And it got out of hand and people were killed and it was much worse than perhaps they expected.
Francesca Rheannon
That's so interesting what you said about the normalization of the extreme right in this country.
It goes along with the normalization of Christian nationalism as a violent interpretation of Christianity.
I wonder if you could talk about these two strains of Christianity in this book. Aaron Shetterle, in your book Morningside, and that is liberation theology, because Nelson Johnson actually became a preacher after the trials were over for the Greensboro massacre. He became a preacher, as you've already mentioned before.
And I'm always, you know, I'm Jewish, but I always tear my hair out at the kind of hatred that is expressed by the Christian nationalists and their supporters and their normalizers because it's so inimical to what I think Jesus's message was.
Aran Shetterly
Yeah, I agree with you. And in that first coffee that I had with the Johnsons, Nelson told me this incredible story that I is in the book that happened eight years after the shooting, after all the trials were over and he was in seminary and the Klan announced that they were going to come march in Greensboro. We're talking about 1987. Francesca. I mean, it shows you. You know, one of the reasons I want to tell this story was so that we didn't, in a sense, think all these things were relegated to the past, you know, and to show how they move forward. As a friend of mine told me when I was working on this book, bad ideas travel, too, and if we don't hold them accountable, they keep traveling. And this is one of those cases. But so 1987, the Klan's going to march in Greensboro, and Nelson's trying to figure out, well, what am I going to do about this? And what he decides at this point in seminary. And this is part of the shift that he's making from communism and sort of erasing the Klan to being a radical Christian who believes in the power of transformative love, decides that he's going to drive out by himself into rural North Carolina and talk to these Klansmen and ask them not to come. Now, remember, these are the same people who killed his friends and comrades. And he's going out there, and it turns into this incredibly complicated but also illuminating moment where they have this deep discussion about history and what really happened and who's taking jobs from whom and whether black men are raping all the white women.
I mean, it's a startling conversation that they have in a hotel room. But behind that, to your point, what you see is Nelson reaching out with one Christian philosophy, trying to appeal to this group through the idea of Christianity, that they have a place where they can meet, right, to talk about Jesus and to talk about the Bible in a way that could be productive.
And even though they have a conversation, even though the Klan agrees not to cause trouble when they go to Greensboro this time, and they don't, there is this divide where, in a sense, it's not everyone's God but their God that they're holding onto. And that's something that I think we see that you're talking about.
Francesca Rheannon
You also say that the contested nature of the narrative was itself an important part of the story. I wonder if you could say more about that.
Aran Shetterly
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think I'm generally drawn to these histories where there's conflict in how the story's told, and I find that that conflict itself is illuminating. And so in greensboro, one of the activists, this wonderful woman named signe waller foxworth, who she had been married to jim waller, who was killed that day, said that greensboro was a city of two tails.
And I think she was really onto something because there was basically the story that this was all the fault of the communist workers party, all the fault of the activists, all the fault of nelson johnson, who, in a sense, is held up as this almost satanic figure by establishment greensboro, Someone who is disrupting their comfortable and calm way of life. Right. Where everything is really just fine.
And then there's another version which says the establishment was deeply involved in what happened, and its resistance to treating people more fairly and shedding the shackles, if you will, of the racism that holds the city back are what caused this horrible event, this tragic event. And finding a bridge between those two stories has proved very difficult in greensboro. It's interesting because when I showed up there to start research, my own privilege showed, I think I thought, I'll just go and I'll establish the facts here, and then people will say, aha.
And I realized that the power of these narratives is less about facts, particularly the establishment narrative, and more about a way of doing business and what it wants to believe about who it is.
Francesca Rheannon
Yeah. You quote Winston Churchill that history is written by the victors.
And so a central feature of the story, you know, revolves around who got to tell the history of the greensboro massacre. That really evolved, but it took 42 years. So say a little bit about how the telling of that story changed.
And I think now, in this time of the attacks on dei, on critical race theory, there are many forces that are trying to tampa those stories down again.
So maybe address both how we know more about these stories now and the threats to knowing more.
Aran Shetterly
Yeah, I want to. I'm so glad you asked that question, because it seems to me that guarding these histories is so critically important because we don't know when we're going to be ready to hear them again or when we're going to be ready to hear them, you know, and I call it kind of slow activism. You Know, we need to work urgently. You know, there are court cases being filed every minute right now to hold on to what's left of our democracy here in some ways.
But there's another kind of activism which is guarding the history, guarding the truth of what's really happened and what we've really done and how we face these issues in our past. And to that, I really credit the activists and the Johnsons and other people who held onto this story in greensboro and refused to just let it go, refused to just let it be water under the bridge, and said, no, no, we need to grapple with this. And we need to grapple with this not just so we know the past, but so that we show our way forward. Because the real form of reconciliation for something like this is to make sure it won't happen again. Now, what they did, which was pretty extraordinary, was in the early 2000s, they got the idea that maybe they could run a truth and reconciliation process in greensboro to try to understand this history and tell the truth and reach some of that reconciliation.
For the very first time in American history, in Greensboro, a truth and reconciliation process on the south African model was brought to the United States, and bishop tutu was involved, and other people who had helped run the truth and reconciliation process in south Africa came and were part of what happened in Greensboro. And it was a pretty extraordinary process in which a lot of pieces of the community of greensboro came together to try to participate in telling a full history of what happened on November 3, 1979, and to understand the root causes as well.
They produced this extraordinary report that the city council of Greensboro voted 6 to 3 not to even read.
They preferred to stay in ignorance. But that report was there.
And another 14 years later, in 2020, in the depths of COVID the city council called a pretty extraordinary special session in which they apologized for the city's role in the violence that day, acknowledged that the police could have stopped the violence and didn't, and then named a scholarship for students from the historically black high school in greensboro, One scholarship each in the names of the five people who had been killed. Now, in Greensboro, can you imagine, there are scholarships named after five slain communists in an attempt to reconcile with this history, and the students who are interested in social justice and activism and write essays about it can apply for those scholarships.
Francesca Rheannon
As you point out, that city council, its makeup was quite different from any of the city council makeups that went before and that. That in some way, you know, Nelson Johnson, I don't know if he says it was a success or somebody said to him that despite, despite the terrible violence and the casualties and the lack of people being called to account in the criminal trials, that they had achieved a success because ultimately change did come to Greensboro.
Aran Shetterly
You know, it's so right. You know, what you just said. Because while the city would be loath to admit that they changed because of that violence, they did, you know, and one of the main things that you're talking about is before that, there were only at large council member seats in the city. There was no district voting. So in other words, if you were in a black neighborhood in Greensboro and 30% of the population is black in Greensboro, your city council person might be a white representative from a totally different part of the city because it was at large after this event and it was something that black Greensboro had been advocating with for a generation. By that point, the city changed their. The way the city council was selected and went to a district or ward system so that people in different parts of the city could be directly represented. And there were other changes too, but that was a significant one that immediately changed the complexion of the city council and opened it up.
Francesca Rheannon
So finally, when you sat down at the cafe with Nelson Johnson and his wife Joyce, and learned about the massacre, you sense that you were teetering on the edge of something essential, something you needed to understand about being American, about how to hold the country's ideals together with its painful contradictions. I think we're all struggling with that. We all feel the need to reach out to our neighbors who are on the other side of the divide, or many of us do feel that that's the only way we're going to make some real changes here.
What do you understand now that you have come out with the book?
Aran Shetterly
You know, it's interesting as I reflect on this and I think about here were these activists who thought that the way to save America was through revolution, a revolution of values and a revolution of economics, and that they were called anti American. And they were said that, you know, that they weren't representing this country and should maybe leave. And in some ways, I feel like they were the most patriotic people in the whole book.
And I think that we need to fight against this divisiveness that we talked about and reach across to normal people, reach across and. And have conversations and find out what the core things that are that we can hold onto together. Because if we're going to allow people at a national level and even at a state level to tear us apart with their rhetoric, we're going to have a very hard time confronting all the challenges that lie ahead of us, from climate to social challenges. And so I just hope that the model of the Johnsons who are willing to listen and talk to anyone, as long as those people will allow other voices to be heard, too, is one that is very important and very necessary.
Francesca Rheannon
Right now, as is your book.
I just think it is such a wonderful contribution to not only history, but to an ongoing struggle for justice.
Aran Shetterly
Thank you.
Segment Two: Jonathan Eig, KING: A LIFE
Francesca Rheannon
In 2023, I spoke with Jonathan Eig about his acclaimed biography, King A Life.
It's a captivating portrait of the renowned civil rights leader unveiling new material and providing an intimate perspective.
The book delves into Dr. King's upbringing, his initial hesitations about following in his father's preaching footsteps, and the pivotal moment when he realized that his path was chosen by a higher power, as he saw it, for the cause of racial justice.
And of course, it covers so much more. But we only have time to play an edited version of that conversation.
You can hear the whole hours interview at writersvoice[dot]net or by subscribing to the podcast.
Let's listen now.
This book, King A Life, is such an intimate portrait of King's life. I felt like I was a fly on the wall. I mean, it was absolutely riveting. There've been a lot of books written about Martin Luther King, Jr. So first, why were you moved to write this one?
Jonathan Eig
Well, you said the magic word for me, which is intimate. I felt like the King books, first of all, there hadn't been a king biography in 35 years when I began this project. It's now over 40 years. And, and the books that have really riveted me, books like, you know, the Taylor Branch trilogy and the David Garo book Bearing the Cross, intimate in that way because there's these giant histories and that encompass much more than just King's life.
So I set out to Write something that felt more intimate. So I'm glad that that was the word you chose. But the more immediate reason that I began is that I was interviewing people for my Muhammad ali book now, 10 years ago, that I was doing these interviews, and I realized these were a lot of people who knew Martin Luther King, Jr. And I just started asking out of curios curiosity, what was he like?
What was it like to be around the man? Because I felt like I really had no clue. Having, you know, grown up in an age when we've turned him into a monument and a national holiday and sometimes it feels like we've turned him into a Hallmark card. I really wanted to get a sense for what. What he was like as a person and. And then to put that story in context and to return some of the. The teeth to his personality. You know, he was. He's been defanged along the way, and I really wanted to remind people just how radical and how brave he was, too.
Francesca Rheannon
And that's one of the things that I think is so important about this book. He was a very complex man.
And what were some of the things that struck you most about his complexity, about. About some of his contradictions?
Jonathan Eig
Well, so many things. For one thing, he suffered tremendously from doubt, and he suffered terribly from the effects of the FBI assault on him. You know, he kept doing his work. He kept marching forward. He kept going more and more boldly into the breach. But it had an impact. You know, he was hospitalized several times, maybe, like, fair to say, many times for exhaustion, for just succumbing to the stress of what he was doing.
So that kind of courage in the face of doubt, to me, makes him even more heroic. There were so many contradictions. He was a protest leader who hated confrontation. He hated being in conflict with the people around him, including his father, including his wife. He was one of the most moral people I've ever encountered. And yet he was hopelessly immoral when it came to marital fidelity.
So those complexities are part of what made him so interesting and so human for me.
Francesca Rheannon
Now, why did Martin Luther King, Jr. Become a preacher? Because this was not something that was preordained, so to speak.
Jonathan Eig
Right.
He wrestled with that when he entered Morehouse, and he was two years younger than most of his classmates because he'd skipped some grades. He thought he wanted to be a lawyer, probably, or maybe even a doctor. He wanted to do good for his people. That was always one of his goals. But he resisted the call of the. Of the church at first. But, you know, he was so steeped in it. He grew up, you know, not just going to church every Sunday, but really being in church almost every day and having people from the church over for dinner every day and, you know, probably learn to read prayers and to memorize prayers before he learned to read, actually.
So I think the fact that. That it was his father's line of work, that it was the family business, and the fact that it offered a kind of an escape from the Jim Crow south, it offered a kind of an escape from a lot of the bounds of this white supremacist culture in which he was raised. Because preachers had a measure of independence. They ran their own churches. They didn't depend on the white man for their salaries, and they had literally a podium from which to speak and to be heard. And all of that appealed to King. You know, being a doctor or a lawyer would have allowed him some capacity to fight the system, but being a preacher offered a much more direct way of reaching the masses and moving people. And I think that really appealed to him.
Francesca Rheannon
At one point later on in his life, he pointed to his wife, Coretta King, as the person who actually got him involved in political activism. Is that a true assessment?
Jonathan Eig
That's absolutely right. You know, Martin was. Was always popular with the ladies, even though he was, you know, he was short. You know, he was. He was a handsome man, but not, you know, stunningly handsome, but he had this great charm, and he never lacked for dates. And when he met Coretta in Boston, when they were both in school, he had other women that he was seeing at the same time. And I think it's worth asking. It's important to ask why Coretta? And the answer, as best I can tell, there's obviously many reasons, but one of the big ones is that she had more experience as an activist than he did at that point. She had gone to Antioch College. She had been involved in protests there. She had been active with political parties, the Progressive Party in particular.
So King was deeply attracted to the fact that this woman burned with the same kind of ambition, not just to be involved in the movement, but to be on the front lines. And it was a great intellectual match in that way.
Francesca Rheannon
Now, this book is also, of course, a lot about the civil rights movement, because the two are inextricable. Life of King and that movement.
So you delve into some of the stories of other figures like Rosa Parks. So just to digress for a minute, to her, I was interested to read that the earliest interview, which actually has just been discovered, the earliest interview about her refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, was different from the myths. So tell us about that.
Jonathan Eig
This was fascinating to me, and it was one of my favorite archival discoveries. When the Montgomery bus boycott began, a group of sociologists from Fisk University went down to Montgomery and started documenting it without any clear purpose, just recognizing that something important was happening here and that someone should make a record. So these sociologists, black and white, began attending meetings, interviewing key figures, interviewing just people on the street, black people and white people. They would record overheard conversations. They filed memos on everything. And these thousands of pages are now at the Amistad Research center at Tulane University. And I was shocked to find what I believe, and I've conferred with other historians. I believe it's the earliest recorded interview with Rosa Parks. And she tells the story of her arrest a little bit differently. You know, over time, people tend to not just exaggerate their stories, but just polish them a little bit. And in that very first story, she makes it sound as if she didn't necessarily seek that confrontation, but once goaded, she planted herself firmly and was ready. And she had also been in conference with attorney Fred Gray of Montgomery before that moment. And Fred Gray had really helped prepare for that moment. So it was not so much the spontaneous act that I think many historians have made it out to be. I think it was a combination of things. She wasn't just the tired seamstress. She knew where to sit to make the most likely conflict.
And then she was prepared, if something happened, for it to really take her stand.
Francesca Rheannon
Now. It was a watershed moment, that Montgomery boycott for Martin Luther King.
I think it really set him on his path to becoming the figure he was in the civil rights movement. How did MLK Jr get involved with the Montgomery bus boycott?
Jonathan Eig
This is one of the great quirks of history, and I love it when these things happen, because there's no reason to anticipate that King would become the leader of the boycott. He's new in town. He's still getting used to his new congregation. He views this as a stepping stone job to a bigger congregation and then eventually, perhaps to a teaching job at a.
And he's got a new baby at home, so he's not looking for this. In fact, Coretta and King have some long discussions about whether he should even get involved in a leadership position at the naacp, the local chapter, because their lives Are so busy at this moment. But he's asked to be the spokesman, not the leader, of the Montgomery improvement association. He just has to be the spokesman, in part because he's new in town and he hasn't made any enemies yet. And they think that if he's out in front, they won't have to worry about divisions. They want to worry about some people wanting to sit it out because they don't like the leader. King is a. Is a blank slate at that point. And, of course, they also know that he has great speaking abilities, and they're looking for somebody who will be able to rally the crowds because they don't know how long this bus boycott's gonna last. It might be one day, it might be two days. And, of course, it turns out to be a whole year. So King is thrown into this with little warning, and he's asked to speak on December 5, 1955, at Holstreet Baptist church to a crowd of thousands that are just waiting to be told what happens now.
And that speech is really the one that launches him. That's the first time that most people in Montgomery have heard his voice and his power to move a crowd. You know, it's just amazing. And it's like a star is born in that moment, and he's the perfect man for this moment. And, you know, we'll find out why in the days ahead.
Francesca Rheannon
Yeah, say more about that.
Jonathan Eig
Well, nobody's really thought yet about the impact of northern media about television. You know, television is still a fairly new phenomenon. It's rare to see TV news crews showing up in. In places, you know, outside the studio. You don't have a lot of TV news cameras. But all that's changing, and King is. Is this incredibly telegenic, incredibly gifted speaker who's educated in the north. So the northern media, when they discover this guy, they fall in love with him. They can't get enough. And suddenly you've got this guy who's. Who's clearly smarter and better educated than the white people he's tussling with who are trying to defend segregation. And it becomes this irresistible story that lights up the nation. He's soon on the COVID of time magazine. He's soon being seen as the most prominent black leader, and certainly at least a young black leader in the country. And the fact that he's a preacher, too, which gives him also this great moral authority.
Central casting could not have come up with a better man for that moment.
Francesca Rheannon
Now, he himself called the speech that he gave there the most decisive speech of his life. Why did he call it that?
Jonathan Eig
Well, he suffered a panic attack in the moments before the speech. You know, he usually took hours, sometimes days to prepare a sermon. And now he had about 20 minutes to get ready for this speech. And he felt like God spoke to him in that moment, that God told him to just trust in God and to let God speak for him. And that speech, he found his voice. He found not just his position as a leader, he not just, you know, embraced that challenge, but he found that everything that he had been taught at home, at Morehouse, where black pride was emphasized, perhaps you know, more strongly than any college in the country, at seminary, studying in the racist in the north, everything coalesced in that moment. And he gave this speech that rallied the people behind the forces of the Constitution, the forces of the Bible, nonviolence. He said, we're going to protest this unfair system by proving that we're better than them, by proving that we. We don't want to tear down the system. We want to make the system fair. We want to join the system after we make it fair. You know, that was the message that he would deliver for the rest of his life.
He would continue to call on the Constitution, to call on the Bible, to summon our higher moral values in pursuit of a better society. And I think that's what he meant when he said that was the defining moment for him.
Francesca Rheannon
Yeah. And talk a little bit more about his commitment to non violence, what it meant for him, because he came under attack by a lot of other black leaders, I mean, including, of course, Malcolm X, most notably for not being militant enough. But he argued that nonviolence came out of strength, not weakness.
Jonathan Eig
Absolutely. And I should say he was criticized on both sides. Some people thought this nonviolent stuff was a bunch of hooey, that it was really just a strategic move for him, that he didn't really believe it. And then you had people like Malcolm X saying, hell no, if you hit me, I'm going to hit you back. And white Americans are never going to respect us if we keep turning the other cheek. So King, as usual, found himself stuck in the middle. But this goes back to, you know, the core of everything he says and does is rooted in the Bible, is rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and nonviolence is right there. It takes him a little while to get the hang of it in a way, because, you know, when Bayard Rustin comes to Montgomery and sees that King has a gun, he says, we might need to work on your. On your non violent Tactics, you got to get rid of the gun, you got to get rid of the armed men in front of your house if you want to preach non violence. And King realizes there is a strategic advantage to it because it's really emphasizes the, again, as I said, that higher moral values, that we're going to go high here. We're going to teach the Bull Connors of the world, the mayors and the sheriffs of the south, that there's power and restraint, that we are going to appeal to the masses. We're going to get the sympathy of the nation by showing that we're willing to suffer for what we believe. And as King often said, suffering is redemptive, that there's a chance to really show the world through our suffering just how great our capacity for love really is.
Francesca Rheannon
This really struck me throughout the book that he seemed to have a genuine optimism about human nature, a genuine optimism that his movement could bring about the beloved community that he spoke about.
And, you know, now we are in an age of, you know, the new Jim Crow, of incredible backlash, of just the undoing of the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act act, rather.
So as you saw this, as you were writing about this from this vantage point, what were you thinking as you explored this idea of his optimism about human beings?
Jonathan Eig
Yeah, on the one hand, I was deeply moved by his unending hope that we can be better people, that we can be a better society, that we can not just be a better country, but a better world. He never lost that hope. In spite of the fact that people were bombing his home and literally stabbing him in the chest, he continued to believe that love was a great enough force to turn everyone around and his most vicious enemies. I love when he, you know, when J. Edgar Hoover called him a liar and a threat to, you know, American society, that, that King's response was, you know, the FBI director must be under terrible strain to say something like that. I'm sure he felt anger, but he was not going to let Hoover get the best of him. He was going to show compassion. And as much as that inspired me to answer the second half of your question, it was disturbing to see how that moment of hope, when this country seemed to embrace a truly moral leader, has crashed and burned so badly that we are living in a society where so many of the things he warned about have come true, that our income inequality is greater. We're still living in segregated societies with segregated schools and segregated housing, and we still have police brutality aimed specifically at black people. We still have mass incarceration in which black people are disproportionately affected. So that's the sad shadow of this story.
Francesca Rheannon
Yeah, there was a moment of hope that I really had in 2020 when so many people came together, and, of course, that engendered such a fierce white supremacist backlash, that I actually began to think, as reading your book, that maybe it's. We are the ones who are wrong not to have that optimism. That in a way, King really did see into the heart of what could be.
It's just that the forces of reaction, maybe of a minority, are really powerful.
Jonathan Eig
There's no question about it. And unfortunately, in the case of King, you know, our government was stoking those. Those forces of. Of hostility, and they were afraid of change. They were afraid of radical voices. And, you know, that's human nature, too, is to try to cling to power. And when white society has the power, they're reluctant to share it, even in the spirit of democracy.
So it was painful to watch, and it's painful to watch today. But I like to think that, as you said, that King can still give us hope, that he moved us to. As close as we've ever come, I suspect, to getting past some of the, you know, this country's sins of slavery and. And racism and maybe that, you know, we need to hold out hope that. That we can. We can make that kind of progress again and got to keep working on it.
Francesca Rheannon
Martin Luther King Jr. Had a very particular attitude, you mentioned it before, that suffering led to redemption. He also applied that to the terror that he experienced in his life. I mean, the INC attacks, the incessant death threats. I mean, he was stabbed.
Talk about how he grappled with that, how he coped with it. I mean, I know there were many times when he didn't cope, but he also did cope with it. Talk about how he wrestled and. And found comfort.
Jonathan Eig
Yeah, he. You know, he woke up every day knowing that this could be his last, because it was not. It was not paranoid. When you have enough threats on your life and you're getting routine warnings that someone's coming for you, you know, you learn to live with that, I guess, but not comfortably. There's this fabulous, unbelievable piece of footage.
A film crew, just before King was assassinated, is getting with him on a small private plane, just King and three or four other people. And, you know, the camera crew is behind King and looking over his shoulder, and he's talking to Bernard Lee and saying, you know, I don't know who asked. Somebody must have said, what's The. What's the most scared you've ever been? And he starts, you know, just sort of chuckling about it and comparing these different moments when, you know, he felt like, this is it. You know, one of them was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the people who killed Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney were. Were standing behind him and, you know, muttering, you're next. And he felt like that was it. And here he is on this plane with his pals, you know, saying, yeah, I really thought that was it. I'm coming. You know, Lord, you know, and he's. He's talking about it as if he's talking about last night's baseball game or something. So to live with that day in and day out, you know, we can't imagine the toll that that took. We do know that he was hospitalized many times for exhaustion, and Coretta used the word depression to describe it. And that toward the end of his life, you know, many of his friends thought that he was seriously, you know, clinically depressed, that he needed some people suggested medication. He was afraid that if he were to accept a prescription for. For some kind of medication, that the FBI would. Would learn about it and would use that to further attempt to destroy his reputation.
And he also had to wake up every morning knowing that that could be the day that some newspaper reporter decided to print the rumors that the FBI was leaking about him, to print the details of his. Of his sex life or, you know, any of the other scandals that the FBI was promoting. So I can't even begin to imagine, you know, living under that kind of strain. And that's why, you know, you look at pictures of him and you think he looks 10, 15 years older than he really is.
Francesca Rheannon
That was Jonathan Ike talking with me in 2023 about his biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, A Life.
Next week on Writer's Voice, we continue with our Black History Month programming as we interview Dr. Bernadette Atuaheny about her book Plundered. It's about the history and the present of the racist policies that undermine black home ownership in America. Don't miss it.