markk

Like that of most famous men, Martin Luther King Jr.'s life is one largely remembered as a series of events: the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham marches, his "I Have a Dream" speech, his march in Selma, and his assassination in Memphis. While this list includes its most triumphal moments, it does little to cover the full range of his activities or the private life he lived. This is what Marshall Frady provides in this brief book. In a little more than 200 pages, he conveys the span of King's tragically short life, from his Atlanta boyhood through his early ministry to the activism that made him famous and helped to transform the nation. Though the familiar highlights are there, he adds to the reader's understanding elements that King's achievements have overshadowed, such as his failed campaign in the Georgia town of Albany, or the brutal resistance his efforts faced in St. Augustine, Florida. Their inclusion certainly qualifies the scope of what Kind accomplished, but it also helps readers to better understand the size of the challenge King and other protestors faced in challenging Jim Crow segregation.

Frady adds little that is new to the story of King's life, yet his analysis is informed by his personal experiences covering King as a young reporter in the 1960s. His account of the St. Augustine protests is a particular highlight of his book for that reason, as he recounts the events he covered there with his firsthand observations of the events he chronicles. These he uses to inform his portrait of a fatalistic, sometimes depressed figure, one who felt fully the burden of expectations and embarked upon his many campaigns with the expectation that he would die as a result. That loss stalks its pages may reflect an excessive degree of hindsight on Frady's part, but it helps to underscore the risks King took throughout his life and the loss we all suffered with his assassination barely a dozen years after he first emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement. For anyone seeking an accessible introduction to that life and an overview of what he achieved in it, Frady's book is a good place to start.