Tavis Smiley – Memphis Flyer

Tavis Smiley recalled it as a defining moment: the day he was given a set of LPs featuring the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.

Smiley — national broadcaster, talk-show host, and author — was 12 years old when he received those recordings while he recuperated from the beatings he’d received from his stepfather. Growing up in small-town Indiana as a member of a large black family in a largely white community, Smiley hadn’t had King on his radar, but as Smiley said recently by phone from Los Angeles, King did more than change his life:

“He saved my life. He redirected me. In those speeches — in the reassurance of his voice — King talked about the power of love, how love was the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend. Here I was trying to figure out my life, and I hear King talking about love. He was talking about a nation, but he might as well have been talking to me as a child. I was going to have to love my way through this situation. Hatred was not an option. I would have to love my enemies, love those who used and exploited me, and forgive those I was angry with — including my parents.”

Smiley’s heartfelt response was an answer to why his latest book, Death of a King (Little, Brown), perhaps means more to him than any of his previous books. It was a question asked in anticipation of Smiley’s two upcoming Memphis book signings. He’ll sign and discuss Death of a King on Friday, September 19th, at the Booksellers at Laurelwood at 1:30 p.m. and at the National Civil Rights Museum from 6 to 8 p.m.

It certainly won’t be Smiley’s first time in Memphis. He was here in April to celebrate the National Civil Rights Museum’s redesign (which Smiley said exceeded his expectations). And he certainly doesn’t claim that his Death of a King competes with the “heavy-lifting” of King biographers Taylor Branch, Clayborne Carson, and David Garrow.

What Smiley and his collaborator David Ritz (along with researcher Jared Hernandez) have here, though, is a dramatic retelling of King’s final and pivotal year. What kind of man had King become during those 12 months? That is the question at the heart of the book, and it opens on April 4, 1967, the day the life of Martin Luther King would undergo fundamental change. He was readying for his speech inside Riverside Church in Manhattan — a speech denouncing America’s involvement in Vietnam, the third component in the triple threat to American democracy as King saw it: racism, poverty, and militarism. There were additional, more personal challenges, too, not the least of which the dissension inside the ranks of the civil rights movement and the rise in black-power rhetoric. King’s gospel of nonviolence was losing ground.

“Everybody had turned on him: the White House, the media (including the black media), black organizations,” Smiley said of the difficult position King found himself in. “We may think we know King, but we don’t know him unless we too wrestle with what he endured” — and recognize the toll that the pressure and the tension took on King physically and mentally.

The subtitle of Smiley’s book is “The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther’s King Jr.’s Final Year,” and that title, Smiley said, is “pushback” on the sanitized, sterilized image some may have of King. But the “real” King will come as no disappointment to readers. It came as no disappointment to Smiley himself:

“It is so rare to come across someone who truly is as advertised — King as truly who I thought he was. That was a beautiful realization for me. But that doesn’t mean King was perfect. He was a public servant, not a perfect servant. At the center of his working witness is this primary mission to love and serve others. He was the real deal.”

And by the time King heard of the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, he was given real hope — hope that he could build a bridge to the movement’s militants; hope that Memphis would direct national attention to the country’s poor of all races.

Death of a King comes with its author’s own hopes. “I’m hopeful that, of all my books, this will be the one that will empower the greatest number of people, will enlighten the greatest number, the book that years from now people will continue to refer to as the most accessible,” Smiley said. “Not the definitive book on King’s last year. That would be arrogant of me. But I want everyday people to understand the real story, the true story of Martin Luther King Jr., the man they maybe do not know.”

It’s not the kind of remembrance people like to attach to those we historically have deemed as heroic martyrs.

A man so disconsolate over what his critics and he himself viewed as abject failure, lying in a Memphis motel room bed, fully clothed, weeping and unable to move for 13 hours. Yet, in his book Death of a King, political commentator and talk-show host, Tavis Smiley, paints a sincere and honest picture of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a man whose human frailties are put to the test in the final year of his life — in a struggle to regain lost prestige, popularity, and his own moral compass.

Beginning with his controversial Riverside Church speech in New York, delivered one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, King attempted to lay out a new direction for the nonviolent movement he had fostered. With monumental civil rights legislation already on the books, King wanted to expand the scope and participation of the fight against what he saw as the interconnected triad of poverty, racism, and militarism that he felt was tearing away at the fabric of America during the height of the Vietnam War era.

It was an effort to expand on the coalition, which had proven so successful in winning the hearts and minds of those previously drawn to the civil rights movement. But, like others who’ve risen to great heights of leadership on oratory or sheer will, King unwittingly allowed himself to become more insulated from what was going on around him.

Smiley’s book deftly portrays King as a man on a treadmill. No matter how fast he tried to run, everything and everyone in his life was still passing him by, and he couldn’t understand why. He was the same. But, the rest the nation, which he once briefly held in the palm of his hand, had moved on in fractious directions, including his own previous inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In Smiley’s book, one of King’s greatest disconnects was with women, and most importantly, his wife, the long-suffering Coretta Scott King. When they first met when both were in their early 20s, King openly admired her not just for her stunning beauty, but also because she became the most strident and unflinching supporter of his nonviolent strategy. Once they started having children, however, King encouraged her to be more subservient, while at the same time he continued his dalliances with other women. So, entrenched in his chauvinistic attitude, King initially rebuked his colleague James Bevel’s suggestion to all male members of the SCLC and other black ministers to tell their wives about their affairs with other women. According to Smiley, King finally did come clean with Mrs. King about one affair, which he told her he put an end to.

I also was drawn to the turbulent final month of King’s life, when it came to how the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike had become a cause celebre’ with him despite warnings from his SCLC inner circle, including apparently Jesse Jackson, that the issues in Memphis were “small potatoes” and not worth getting involved in. But, coming in a year in which he’d been booed off stages, and he was jeered and ridiculed as out of touch with his own people, the reception King received in coming to Memphis was reinvigorating. Memphis had become to him the potential springboard for his still not fleshed out idea of having a “Poor People’s March on Washington.” He viewed it as a golden opportunity to reestablish the nonviolent movement as a viable form of effective protest.

However, as he did through most of that tumultuous final year of his life, King miscalculated, believing the power of his persona alone could bring together divisive factions. The ensuing riot on Beale Street in March of 1968 devastated him enough to seek refuge in a room at the former Rivermont Hotel. King would regroup. His unwavering faith in his mission would allow him to do no less. But, days later, a bullet would be unforgiving.

I applaud Smiley for his determined and compassionate attempt to humanize a man so many authors before have either lionized or demonized. The book provides a lesson, a study in our own mortality. It encourages us to never be so self-assured, so defiant in the face of unwelcomed truth, or so tunnel-visioned about what we believe is right that we ignore the sage counsel of friends and neglect the love and support of family.

For all of us, even the greatest among us, are only mere mortals in the end.