King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (review)

Why are all biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. essentially the same? Is it because at just over a dozen years King's leadership role in the civil rights movement was so short? Is it because the research materials for King's life have been so exhaustively mined? Is it because King's "Montgomery-to-Memphis" life narrative has become so much a part of modern American folklore? Whatever the reasons, the reason that such books continue to appear is less of a mystery. King still holds an insatiable fascination for students of the civil rights movement and the general public alike. Harvard Sitkoff's account is timely in two ways. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of King's assassination, and it may well see the first African American elected to the White House.

Sitkoff's book is part of an increasing body of work that seeks to challenge the cosy images of King in popular culture, grounded in his 1963 "I have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, which portrays him as a saintly figure of racial reconciliation. Sitkoff presents a more radical and sometimes flawed King, one who is willing to declare that "fucking's a form of anxiety reduction" (64) to excuse his numerous marital infidelities, and to criticise America's militarism with reference to the Vietnam War, as much as he is willing to affirm brotherly love and a belief in the American way.

Nevertheless, at times Sitkoff is seduced by the folklore. For example, he repeats the notion that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) pivotal 1963 Birmingham campaign was a carefully orchestrated strategy in "Project C—for confrontation" (92). In fact, it was King's SCLC lieutenant, Wyatt Tee Walker, who labelled the Birmingham campaign Project C after the fact—it was called Project X at the time—and who played up just how premeditated events there were in the years after. At other times, Sitkoff can be harshly over-critical of King to make his point: "King privately indulged an appetite for women and gluttony as grandiose as his ego" (64) verges on the Jesse Helms-like uncharitable.

But this is largely nit-picking. What Sitkoff delivers here is in line with his earlier overview of the civil rights movement The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), which has become a staple undergraduate textbook in numerous editions: an easy-going, readable account that dependably touches all the relevant bases while delivering dramatic poise. In scholarly terms the book has nothing new to say, but what it does say it says well, and in doing so it has as much to recommend it as any of the other short biographies of King currently on the market.