Death of a King The real story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final year

IN ONE OF those tragic coincidences that seemed to occur, chockablock, throughout the 1960s, exactly one year separated Martin Luther King Jr.'s momentous anti-war polemic at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 4, 1967, and his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968. The year between was more than King's last; it was also his worst, as the television and radio host Tavis Smiley explains in his lucid, if not exactly groundbreaking, book "Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year." While nothing in "Death of a King" will be new to those who have read their Taylor Branch or David Garrow, it makes a point that bears repeating: King's radicalism toward the end of his life has been papered over, while King himself has been reduced to "an idealistic dreamer to be remembered for a handful of fanciful speeches," as Smiley notes in his introduction. Smiley's goal, which he mostly achieves, is to personalize King, to show him in full and, in doing so, to display the radical behind the soaring rhetoric. Branch, in his three-part biography of King, portrays him as a latter-day Moses, a largely unimpeachable and, therefore, largely unknowable figure. But in Smiley's book, the more apt biblical figure is Christ: a revolutionary who sins, suffers and doubts, and yet somehow triumphs. Smiley opens with the Riverside speech, in which King denounced the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War, and faced a steamroller of criticism in response. King had always taken fire for his views, but in the past it had come from the likes of Bull Connor and J. Edgar Hoover. Now it was coming from friends - in the government, the news media and even the civil rights movement itself. "He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people," The Washington Post wrote. If the speech were King's only problem, he might have brushed off the blowback. But he was harassed on all sides: Younger activists like Stokely Carmichael were challenging him as too conservative to be the movement's leader, while older establishment figures like Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P. castigated him for moving too far to the left. His wife, Coretta, was growing distant, tired of his constant travel and infidelity. Meanwhile, he was enduring an endless loop of paid speeches and book deadlines to raise money for the nearly bankrupt Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he had helped found in 1957. All this brought King low. Like Christ in Gethsemane, he doubted - himself, his movement, his relationship with God. He grew depressed; his personal physician thought he should be seeing a psychiatrist. In early 1968 he considered leaving it all behind for a pastorate in England. But he didn't. Instead, King dived deeper into his work, with what Branch called a "frantic melancholy." Around this time, he announced the Poor People's Campaign, in which thousands of people would camp on the Washington Mall in protest against entrenched poverty. A few weeks later, he began traveling to Memphis in support of a sanitation workers' strike. It was there, at the city's Mason Temple, that he gave his "To the Mountaintop" speech on April 3, 1968, the day before he was killed. Smiley, who wrote the book with David Ritz (the collaborator with a number of celebrity authors), does a serviceable job of telling this story, and with a restraint that belies the treacly overtones of the title. There are moments of clunky writing - "The tears wet his cheeks. The tears expose the pain in his heart." - and Smiley can too often be heavy-handed. He writes in the present tense, and refers to King as "Doc." Still, it works. Smiley's King is at once more flawed and more human than we have come to see him. But for that reason he is even more courageous, and more admirable. CLAY RISEN, an Op-Ed editor at The Times, is the author of "The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act" and "A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination."

As he was growing up, Smiley, a best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster, was profoundly influenced by civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drawing on interviews with friends and major civil rights figures from Harry Belafonte to Andrew Young to Jesse Jackson as well as biographers Taylor Branch and Clayborne Carson, Smiley takes a fresh look at the 365 days leading up to King's assassination on April 4, 1968. Smiley recalls the threats and denunciations King faced, the obstacles he overcame, and the internal struggles he endured as the civil rights leader expanded his mission to human rights advocacy. Speaking out against the Vietnam War, King came under severe criticism from the Left and the Right. Smiley recounts King's growing concerns about the strains on his marriage, tensions among the ranks of civil rights leaders, and growing dissent fueled by black militants critical of nonviolent tactics. Written as a narrative in the present tense, Smiley's book aims to flesh out the man behind the now idealized image of King that has weakened appreciation of the depth of his personal struggle.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist

"In his last year, what kind of man had Martin Luther King, Jr. become?" is the question Smiley (What I Know for Sure) raises, asserting that he has "come to firmly believe that, in a critical way, [King] is misunderstood." The book focuses for the most part on the year between King's April 4, 1967 anti-war speech in New York and his April 4, 1968 assassination in Memphis, but also passes through such earlier landmarks as the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington. Snippets from King's sermons, speeches, and press conferences abound, along with tidbits from the media coverage of the time. Smiley also covers King's marital problems, depression, smoking and drinking habits, musical tastes, and even his (hypothetical) internal thoughts. Smiley's referring to his subject throughout as "Doc," which was King's nickname among his "most trusted colleagues," here comes across as distracting. It is, however, typical of the book's chatty prose, which stumbles when attempting weighty references ("Like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane") or lyricism ("The sea sparkles with moonlight.") The answer to Smiley's opening question appears to be that King became deeply concerned with peace and poverty, no great revelation for anyone even passingly familiar with the history of those years. But Smiley's efforts to show the man who was his hero since he was a young boy adds a dimension to the reams of writing about Dr. King. Agent: David Vigliano and Thomas Flannery Jr., Vigliano Associates (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.