“BARBER, DO you read your Bible?”
A 25-years young man answering to the service of God by way of his station in life, enquired of a barber who had queried why he never tipped for service rendered.
The inquirer was short and tiny, grew a moustache which he kept neatly trimmed, displayed a dapper sense accentuated by a wardrobe of bespoke suits and possessed good looks and charm which, according to a lifelong associate, “attracted women in droves!”
Although a Negro born into a very brutally racist United States, he had, whilst studying at a seminary, a White girlfriend who he flaunted in front of those of like colour who didn’t harbour interracial dalliances and, in the US of that period – would go to extremes such as lynching dark-skinned offenders!
He was said to believe in love so much so that he disregarded a colleague’s advice to, “cool it down”, with a woman he was involved in an extra-marital affair with – and ran the risk of media exposure which would compromise his standing as a figurehead of the civil rights movement in 1950s and 60s America.
“What you say might be right, but I don’t care … I have no intention of cutting off this relationship,” he retorted – going on to aver during a sermon, as if to justify his indiscretion, that, “we know how to be just, and yet we are unjust.”
If South African author, Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie & Nelson book exposed Nelson Mandela as having been involved in extra-marital shenanigans, so does American author, Jonathan Eig’s regarding a fellow Nobel Peace laureate (a recipient in 1964 to Madiba’s 1993 award) – in spite of the latter being married to a woman the poet Maya Angelou waxed over as “destined to become a steel magnolia.”
Yet for all Eig’s subject’s knack for attracting women, one stylishly dressed Black woman proved an exception from the horde by registering her non-flattered state when she plunged the steel blade of a letter opener into the man’s chest whilst he was signing books at a Harlem department store!
Author, Jonathan Eig’s portrayal of this review’s subject of interest goes further – owing mainly to recently declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation files – than the well-documented legacy which long entered him in the pantheon of all-time history’s colossal figures!
Eig’s 500 plus page paperback tome throbs with identities of familiar landmarks and figures in history such as those of the Edmund Pettus Bridge (the Selma, Alabama site of the event which became referred to as “Bloody Sunday” when White law-enforcement officers violently dispersed African-American civil rights movement protesters in 1965), Selma, Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Malcolm X (who once referred to the subject as an Uncle Tom), Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, et cetera.
King – The Life of Martin Luther King, paints a church pastor who drank, smoked, played pool and ate his favourite Southern foods in massive quantities with his hands because it was too delicious to let utensils interfere with their consumption (a city boy who ate like a country boy – as his wife observed.)
What’s more, sharing an affinity with South Africa’s Struggle era and aeons afore Desmond Tutu urged economic sanctions against the apartheid state, in the 1980s – Eig’s subject was already trumpeting for “massive economic boycott” way back in 1964!
Distributed locally through Jonathan Ball Publishers, King – The Life of Martin Luther King, is available at reputable bookstores nationwide.
Image (King- The Life of Martin Luther King is out).
