Some of King’s gravest moments of self-doubt came in 1955, at the beginning of his activism in Montgomery. He was newly married, and the floods of death threats and obscene phone calls that he had begun to receive made him wonder if he could stand to press forward with civil rights work. The following excerpt from David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross describes the inner turmoil King faced:
“I felt myself faltering and growing in fear,” King recalled later. Finally, on Friday night, January 27, the evening after his brief sojourn at the Montgomery jail, King’s crisis of confidence peaked. He returned home late after an MIA meeting. Coretta was asleep, and he was about to retire when the phone rang and yet another caller warned him that if he was going to leave Montgomery alive, he had better do so soon. King hung up and went to bed, but found himself unable to sleep. Restless and fearful, he went to the kitchen, made some coffee, and sat down at the table. “I started thinking about many things,” he recalled eleven years later. He thought about the difficulties the MIA was facing, and the many threats he was receiving. “I was ready to give up,” he said later. “With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward,” to surrender the leadership to someone else… “I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born …. She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak. Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way. And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it … I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.'”
But King says that as he prayed, he felt God telling him to stand up for justice, and reassuring him that his cause was right. Through his faith, King was able to press forward despite his nerves and fear.
To me, King becomes more impressive the more we understand him as a full, and complicated, human being with emotions and frailties. When I first learned about King’s infamous moral weaknesses, of infidelity and academic dishonesty, it didn’t spoil my image of him. Instead, it made him an even more fascinating character; not more admirable, to be sure, but more relatable. And it emphasized the challenge that King’s life poses to everyone that comes after him: if he, an ordinary flawed human being, albeit one with extraordinary intellectual and rhetorical gifts, could muster the courage and energy to take on segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and the Vietnam War, and do so knowing it would likely cost him his life, what excuse do the rest of us have for not doing more against the injustices of our time? The less we view Martin Luther King as some Christ-like aberration, the more difficult it is to escape the tough questions he raised about what an ordinary person’s obligations are in a world of violence and cruelty.
King was a radical, then. He didn’t just wish for the integration of schools, but for universal human equality and an end to violence and conflict. But just as importantly, King was a person. And the more we appreciate King the human, rather than King the icon, the more powerfully his beliefs and actions should trouble our own consciences.