YOUNG KING

From Little Mike to MLK Jr.

Long before he became a proponent of nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr. was a pugnacious teenager who settled his differences by wrestling. He came up with a phrase for initiating fights: “Let’s go to the grass.” This is just one of many surprising details that emerge in this absorbing biography by Martin, a professor in religious studies at Stanford University. Seeking to flesh out the image of “a King who arrives in our consciousness and public memory as a determined superhero with no backstory,” the author offers a well-researched and immersive portrait of a bullied youth (called “Runt” and “Shrimp”) who transformed himself into a confident and impassioned young man whose eloquence (and sartorial elegance) turned heads. Readers learn of King’s middle-class upbringing in Atlanta as one of three children. King’s father, a stern figure who whipped his offspring with a belt, was then known as Michael; his namesake was Little Mike. The boy’s “photographic memory,” writes the author, “enabled him to recite Scripture verses.” Books were his “constant companion,” and his grandmother and aunt often read to him. After his grandmother died, King entered “a period of skepticism,” questioning the Bible. Rather than become a minister, like his father, he wondered if he should help others as a lawyer or doctor. A Morehouse College summer work program in Connecticut changed his mind: When not picking tobacco on a farm, he experienced life as a Black man in the North, freely going to movie theaters, stores, and dances in Hartford. He wanted “to bring God’s country to all,” writes Martin. ML, as he began calling himself, was a C student at Morehouse—he enrolled at age 15, “woefully unprepared.” But it was there that he was introduced to Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedience, and “Christian love…working nonviolently to defeat evil systems.” The seeds were planted for the aspiring preacher to become a leader for the ages.

A vibrant and illuminating account of an icon’s early years.