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A torrent of words are being published about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Telling his story
Books and tapes put focus on Martin Luther King Jr.
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Monday, January 18, 1999 11:31:04 AM
ATLANTA (CNN) -- As a student, preacher, orator and civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found strength and solace in words. Now, in the week when the Nobel Prize winner would have celebrated his 70th birthday, a torrent of words are being published about him. Some are by former acolytes and fellow civil rights leaders.
There are tapes and transcripts of 11 sermons dating from his early days as a preacher in Montgomery, Alabama, to one only four days before his assassination. There's also a controversial new book, a new "autobiography" engineered by the King family as part of a multi-million dollar deal with Warner Books to expand Martin Luther King's presence in popular culture.
The cornerstone of the effort is the recently published "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.," edited by Stanford University history professor Clayborne Carson, a King scholar.
"I stand in fear and am trembling that Martin is going to be Mickey Moused and Fat Albertized. What I've heard about so far has been negative."
-- the Rev. Joseph Lowery
Other works planned as part of the Warner Books deal are an Internet site, recordings of King speeches, and books by both Coretta Scott King and Dexter King, who succeeded his mother as chief steward of the King center in 1994. (Warner Books is owned by Time Warner, which also owns CNN Interactive.)
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Dexter King, son of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has aggressively enforced his family's control over words and images of his father
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A few reviews have credited Carson for researching hundreds of thousands of documents MLK penned about his life to cobble together the book. But eyebrows have been raised by the use of the word autobiography in the title for a book King clearly didn't write.
"It's quite a curious product," said Calvin Reid, news editor at Publisher's Weekly. "I think its a mistake calling it an autobiography. It raises questions about who you are trying to fool."
For his part, Carson said he is solely responsible for the book's title and shrugs off concerns about it.
"I realized some people might see it as presumptuous to call it an autobiography but its a silly controversy," Carson said. "I wish people would just accept it for what it is."
Carson said he expressed his own concerns to Dexter King about the suggestion that money interests trumped an earnest desire to spread his father's legacy to future generations.
"I told Dexter there were some mistakes made when they emphasized how much money was going to be made on the deal and not what was the most important aspect -- to get the word out to a whole new generation on what King stood for," Carson said.
Carson said the debate has him feeling trapped.
"I feel like the message of the book is getting lost in this battle over the King family," he said.
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Several new books offer a detailed and comprehensive look at King's life
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Civil rights leader 'Fat Albertized'?
Criticism is also growing about an animated video about the civil rights leader.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a former King associate and past president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded, said he wouldn't pass judgment on the cartoon, titled "My Friend, Martin", until he sees it for himself. But the image of his former colleague as an animated figure leaves him a bit queasy.
The cartoon features a multi-racial group of children who get transported back in time and meet a teen-aged King. It features the voices of LeVar Burton and James Earl Jones.
"I stand in fear and am trembling that Martin is going to be Mickey Moused and Fat Albertized. What I've heard about so far has been negative," Lowery said.
Tale retold for the masses
As the civil rights movement of the 1960s recedes from memory, authors are trying to tell the story of the impact of Dr. King for a variety of audiences.
In "Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.", author Eleanora E. Tate offers a story of a child gaining greater insight into her heritage when two storytellers come to school with glorious tales of Africa.
In "Martin Luther King Jr.", published in September, historian V. P. Franklin provides a succinct profile of King, revealing the roots of his dream for the future of race relations in America. Franklin's treatment reveals the public and the personal lives behind the man.
Richard Conrad Stein's "The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.", published in March, offers young readers a detailed and comprehensive examination of the events leading up to, and the immediate aftermath of, the murder of the leader of America's civil rights movement.
Others in 1998 wrote of the assassination and James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin who later recanted but spent the remainder of his life behind bars. In "Killing the Dream", author Gerald Posner delves deep into the life of James Earl Ray, showing the stifling poverty and abject lack of education that molded his family. Posner, who wrote the award-winning book "Case Closed" to examine the assassination of John Kennedy, strives to show that Ray did pull the trigger and kill King.
From the other perspective, William F. Pepper, Ray's attorney, wrote "Orders to Kill" to argue that Ray was a pawn in a much larger plan to silence the preacher from Atlanta.
A paperback version of David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Bearing the Cross", a comprehensive book about King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was published in January 1999. In the book, Garrow traces King's transformation from a young, earnest pastor of a modest church into the foremost spokesperson of the black freedom struggle.
Also in paperback in 1998 was Taylor Branch's "Pillars of Fire", the second volume of the civil rights trilogy that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Parting the Waters". Branch recreates the dramas that affected every American as the civil rights movement grew in size, impact, and intensity.
Though Congressman John Lewis' "Walking With The Wind" addresses the growth of the civil rights movement, it is not a rehash of the lives of the famous black leaders such as King, Malcolm X, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson. This book brings the unsung heroes to the forefront of the Freedom Rides, Selma's Bloody Sunday, the 1963 March on Washington, and the voter registrations drives in Mississippi.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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