King: A Life

How did King’s family background and early childhood help set the stage for the concerns that would dominate his adult life?

What role did Coretta play in King’s career? How does their marriage speak to his public persona and private character?

To what extent can King’s efforts in the South be considered a victory? What were the most important ingredients for success, and what were the limits of this success?

Why did King decide to turn his attention northward after the passage of the Voting Rights Act? What challenges did he face, and to what extent can these challenges be attributed to structural conditions or King’s own mistakes?

King and Malcolm X are often represented as antagonists representing opposite sides of the civil rights struggle. To what extent is this interpretation justified? How did their relationship shift, including during their brief meeting and King’s reevaluation of their positions after Malcolm X’s assassination?

Why did King make the fateful decision to halt the second Selma march and turn around? Was this a necessary maneuver, or a blunder he later managed to correct?

Why did King’s position on the Vietnam War earn him so much controversy, including among his Black allies? Given the large antiwar movement of the time and the general recognition today that the war was a colossal mistake, why in 1967 did King’s position place him in so much trouble?

If King, as Eig fears, has become a mythical figure shorn of his full humanity, what are some ways that educators today could help make King’s life and legacy more immediate to contemporary Americans? Does this book help in that task?