Needless to say, there were many less flattering images of him. Some Southern segregationists placed him at the other end, so to speak, of the theological spectrum, dubbing him “Martin Lucifer Coon.” Malcolm X and many in the Black Power movement saw Dr. King as an effeminate Uncle Tom: a real man, they thought, would respond to force in kind. And J. Edgar Hoover apparently believed the leading American campaigner for civil rights was a sexually depraved Soviet cat’s paw, and spent a good deal of US taxpayers’ money on surveillance, bugging King’s telephones and many of the hotel rooms in which he stayed, in order to provide material to support his view, material that was then leaked to politicians and the press.
One might propose a reconciliation of these visions of King (leaving aside the accusation that he was a Soviet agent), for the fact is that these different stories are not as inconsistent as they might seem. He did lead black America, for a while, speaking to it and for it. He did suffer for his people, as did thousands of others in the movement; and the force of his acceptance of that suffering was part of what made possible the legislative reforms—the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—that provided legal recourse to blacks in the American South. And so he was both a Christ and a Moses.
But he was also no saint, by the standards of his day or of ours. He was, by our standards, remarkably chauvinist, consigning his wife almost exclusively, against her apparent wishes, to the role of manager of his house and his children, and denying proper recognition in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to a number of women—Ella Baker prominent among them—who served that organization and the wider movement as well. There is no doubt, too, that he offended against his own standards. He was an energetic adulterer, and the language he used when alone with some of his close male friends was certainly saltier than most Americans expect in their ministers.
Assembling these different aspects into a single picture is by no means easy, and the difficulty is surely inherent to the genre of biography. We want to relate a life that makes sense; and the way we make sense of a life is by turning it into a tale that works. We want a solid plot: and so we flail about unhappily when confronted with a life like King’s that begins in privilege and achievement and ends with failure. Wouldn’t it be a better story the other way around? And we want characters with, well, character: faced with a Martin Luther King who is loyal to his principles and his followers but not to his wife, we want to know whether, deep down, he was really loyal or not.
But people just aren’t as our everyday moral common sense supposes them to be: to stay true to your friends and faithful to your spouse is not to exercise two varieties of something called “loyalty.” These are different things and you can easily have one without the other. More to the point, people display different characters in different circumstances. The courteous minister with his oratorical mastery in the pulpit is the same person as the philandering and foul-mouthed sinner who stays up late at night drinking with his buddies. We want one to be real, the other bogus. We want to say one is betraying the other; and perhaps he is. But betrayer and betrayed here are equally real.