The King Saga
Watters, Pat
The King Saga What Manner of Man. a biography of martin luther king, jr., by Lerone Bennett, Jr. Johnson Publishing Company. 227 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Pat Walters Tn Selma, Alabama, as he...
...He misses no opportunity to sketch in the background of events, if needs be didactically, from the research into the neglected field of Negro history which went into his Before the Mayflower...
...King—a real comparison with Gandhi, for example— because it is not that kind of book...
...Judged in the light of what it tries to do—which is to tell Dr...
...His account of Dr...
...Bennett writes in a style that is suggestive of the success of Ebony magazine, of which he is a senior editor, and suggestive, somehow, of a time somewhere back in American life and letters...
...King's life thus far is fascinating, from the unspectacular, Atlanta middle-class origins (he and Bennett were classmates at Morehouse College), to the largely unsought, unexpected beginnings in Montgomery of his mission and ordeal, to his emergence as inspiration if not innovator during the years that led to the explosion of direct action in 1960, and to the creation, from his campaigns in the crisis cities of Albany, Birmingham, and St...
...This, of course, is a favorable account, at times almost embarrassingly laudatory...
...He held an informal press conference at his motel in pajamas, the scar from the 1958 stabbing by a demented Negro woman visible on his chest...
...When he entered, they sang, with a tiny girl of eight holding a big microphone to lead them: "We love Dr...
...Reviewed by Pat Walters Tn Selma, Alabama, as he contin--¦¦ ued his saga beyond the pages of this book, Martin Luther King spoke one night to a church-full of Negro children and teen-agers...
...At a little church in nearby Gee's Bend, Alabama, he spoke with so much fervor that tears were in his eyes, telling the rural Negroes there that they might not know their "do's" from their "does'es" but—"You're good...
...Augustine, of today's new era of deep Federal involvement and new-dimensional Southern struggling with the whole fabric of institutionalized discrimination...
...Criticisms are dutifully noted but usually dismissed...
...And it is from an understanding of what Martin Luther King and such a book mean to Negro Americans that the definitive biography will be written...
...It carries the story through 1964, far beyond previous biographical and autobiographical works, but with no attempt at the depth in L. D. Reddick's Crusader without Violence...
...We love Dr...
...Most of the questions were about new threats on his life...
...King's story to the masses, mainly the masses of Negro Americans—the biography is successful...
...The book might well have explored more fully some of the criticism—such as what has happened to the Negro communities in the crisis cities since Dr...
...This is the level, that of the living news story always close to death, the walking myth, and the speaker to the greatness in Negro Southerners, which Lerone Bennett's book seeks, and for the most part captures...
...But it cannot be expected to have explored the deeper historical and philosophical questions about Dr...
...King left...
...It is a popularized biography, not a scholarly or critical study...
...You're just as good as anybody...
Vol. 29 • May 1965 • No. 5
