The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Abridged)
By: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. / Editor: Clayborne Carson / Narrated By: Levar Burton
Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
BeYONd inspiring; beYONd heartbreaking. Just truly excellent!
Compiled from a huuuuuge variety of sources, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., tho’ abridged (Egad! That’s TWO abridgments I’m doing this week!!!), certainly is compelling and, ultimately, heartrending. Also I should note, I read an online review that states that what was cut from the unabridged version is much of his wife and his family life.
That said, however, this compilation, in my own opinion and not speaking for others as I do but one MLK Jr. audiobook per year so I’m hardly an expert, truly captures the absolute integrity of the man, his absolute brilliance as a speaker.
It opens with remembrances of his childhood, where he had excellent models of love and fidelity from his parents—who had a rock solid marriage—and where he was told, despite society’s declarations otherwise, that he was as good as anyone, where King’s father acted on this truth by showing him how to confront prejudice. King had the experiences of walking out, of taking business elsewhere, when his father was faced with bigotry and the second-class mentality.
There’s a brief summation of meeting Coretta Scott that only made me hungry to listen to All Things Coretta as it baaaarely touches upon who she was, how she was raised, etc. We have only MLK’s own words where he sums up that Coretta is much more than just a singer, a woman with a deep, intellectual mind who can converse in a lively manner on matters of import, and that she has GREAT strength. In all, she’s just THE woman for King, and they soon wed. Toss in their first child, and I s’pose that’s where-all the abridgment comes into play as that’s pretty much it for his family life (Other than Coretta is vaaaastly supportive of each and every step/action King takes. And oh yeah, she and their baby girl survive the bombing of their home with great equanimity…!).
What I soooo verrrrry LOVED about this work is that it has the actual recordings of the many and varied speeches King made throughout the course of his career, from where he suddenly finds himself called upon to speak in front of eager and ready people ready for the bus boycott (Soooo stirring, esPECially with the absolutely THUNDEROUS applause and shouting!), all the way to the speeches right before he was assassinated. My GOD, did the man have a way with words, could he convey the sense of what was right weighed against what was popular, or what?!
It all gets a bit heartbreaking as time goes on, as victories in the South do NOT translate into victories in the North. In the South, a mighty struggle just to get the vote; in the North, where the Black man has that right, a mighty struggle against a system that is enTIREly racist through and through. King uproots his family and settles in the most struggling ghetto in Chicago, and there he finds that his own children are starting to display aggression and hopelessness, and he finds that the failure of the whole System is constructed to keep Blacks down and dependent upon exorbitant rents, lack of employment opportunities in the area, a lack of fresh food, with food costing more in the ghettos than it does in white neighborhoods.
Basically, much as The System remains today.
King is challenged as time goes on, by even fellow Negroes, is pelted with eggs by crowds who want to do more than Non-Violence, who want Action. A fine work to read that goes in-depth into that final, fateful year of ‘68 is Tavis Smiley’s Death of a King (Tho’ you might wanna read it rather than listen to the narration which is basically emphatic shouting…). This compilation handles his stirring final speeches, but it does NOT address his depression, the depth of his suffering as factions split, as the Non-Violence Gandhi preached and that King modeled the Movement after is completely questioned.
Levar Burton does really well; I appreciated that he narrated this by himself (Rather than multiple narrators as in The Radical King, which I found incredibly jarring to the ears and confusing to m’ inadequate brain), and he does particularly well with King’s early years. All the innocent and untried enthusiasm is there in Burton’s narration, but it becomes increasingly at odds with King’s own words in the recordings of his speeches as time went on through the years. Particularly, I’m thinking of King’s stance on Vietnam, which cost him so dearly, where Burton’s bounciness vies with the exhaustion and almost-despair in King’s voice in the speech.
In that speech, King is truly at his most inspiring, making the listener WANT to be a better person, inspiring us to honestly and genuinely seek inner-integrity even if it’s opposed to the going consensus. King could’ve taken the easy route, just not taken a stand; but he saw a nation willing to send its poor Black young men to kill yellow people, particularly napalm the bejesus outta little children, rather than spend that money on its own underserved, impoverished communities to be spiritually bankrupt. He HAD to speak, he HAD to remember that he was a Man of Jesus first and foremost. He was NOT a leader, he was purely and desperately HIMSELF, and he had to live with himself when all was said and done.
The speeches at the end of his life, where he went to show his support with the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, are the most joyous, the most heartrending. In them, he is ready to look back on his life, to see each age since the dawn of time but to swiftly bypass them, landing exactly in the age and the years he was born in, worked in, struggled in. In these speeches, he says he is ready to die, and tho’ things might still be a struggle, and tho’ he might be called up sooner rather than later, he’s “Been to the Mountaintop!”
God, not a dry eye in this house, I tell you.
Beautiful. Purely, simply.
Beautiful.
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