These are the concluding thoughts in an article written by Jonathan Eig that appeared in the Washington Post (January 16, 2025). He is the author of King: A Life, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

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Illustration Credit:  Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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The content of King’s character? It was ferocious.

He never suggested that his dream of a discrimination-free society should make us blind to the persistence of racism.

King felt the pain. He was hospitalized numerous times for what he called exhaustion but friends identified as depression. He said privately that he felt as though Americans were no longer listening to him. We know this because the FBI tapped his phone lines and recorded his calls. The government — the same government that honors him today — worked aggressively to destroy him, at one point urging him to commit suicide or face public humiliation for extramarital affairs the FBI had been documenting.

Even facing such threats, King took action that he knew would make him less popular, expanding his work from civil rights to human rights, advocating economic changes that would address poverty, hunger and economic inequality in both the North and the South — and even worldwide — among people of all colors.

“The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country,” King said, addressing an audience in Michigan days before his murder. “Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is.” Had he lived another week, he would have presented a Sunday sermon called “Why America May Go to Hell.”

That is not the message we hear on the King holiday, and yet it serves as a reminder of how King himself felt: deeply sad at times, and profoundly frustrated, but never hopeless. On this MLK Day, we might all benefit by remembering the more complicated King and the ferocious content of his character.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.