I’ve finished reading both biographies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (the one by Jonathan Eig and the autobiography edited by Clayborne Carson).
Both books were fascinating. Many of the accounts of King’s life were familiar to me mainly because I had seen them written about in other books and articles. Some of them are a strange mixture of pathos, terror, and even a little humor if you can imagine it. For me, one of the most touching anecdotes was the one about the white girl who wrote a short letter to King after he was stabbed by a demented black woman on September 20, 1958. It was in both biographies.
He was at an event in which he was autographing one of his books. A black women pushed through the crowd and asked him if he were Martin Luther King. He didn’t look up and said simply, “Yes.” The woman stabbed him with a letter opener. The blade stopped very close to his aorta and the doctor who treated him said he could have exsanguinated if he had just sneezed.
Dr. King got a lot of kind letters from people about that, but the one that is most memorable to him (and me) was from a 9th grade high school student who wrote that she was a white girl and said “I am so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”
Later, King would use the phrase several times in his final speech (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”) which he delivered at the Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel there in April of 1968.
Both of the biographies are riveting documents of the life of a preacher devoted to the principle of non-violence. We can still learn from him.
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