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Endowed with the twin gifts of the ability to craft his subject's life into readable prose and caring deeply about the subject and his story, Jonathan Eig is a quintessential biographer. His treatment of Muhammad Ali was comprehensive and memorable. With King and Ali, Eig has recently gravitated toward larger-than-life subjects, so the fruits of his labor have tended to resemble the doorstop, but the readability and flow of this prose will have the reader finishing these works sooner than he is ready to let go of the subject.

In King's case, Eig's book is so long because of the staggering amount of research the author performed. About a quarter of the book's length consists of notes and acknowledgments. The latter essay was impressively extensive and movingly written. More than 200 people were interviewed, each of whom is listed, and the author reviewed "tens of thousands of pages of newly released and newly discovered archival documents," including new documents recently released by the FBI.

Those FBI documents are pictures of a simpler time. J. Edgar Hoover wanted nothing more than to prove that King was a communist or, barring that, under the influence of communists. It seems that that effort was not successful. But it is quaint, isn't it, to think of an FBI director taking for granted that exposing a civil-rights leader's communist sympathies would matter. (So, too, is it quaint to reflect on the idea of television and newspaper reporters knowing of King's infidelity and refusing to report on it because such subjects were just not discussed in media then.) Today, the focus of such comprehensive surveillance would probably shrug and flip off the camera: "So what if I am a communist?" In King's time, which overlapped a little with Joseph McCarthy's, publicly aligning oneself with communists (especially Communists) was career suicide. (Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America is an excellent backgrounder.) King seemed to tread lightly in this area, but only to the extent that complacency would have undermined his work. In any event, no true communist would have chosen King for his standard bearer. King, after all, demanded only equality of opportunity. The Communist Party would never have accepted a leader who advocated anything short of equality of outcome.

In our time, communism and marital affairs may not be celebrated, but nor do they exactly raise eyebrows. However, a real shadow hangs over King. According to an FBI report, a woman was anally raped in King's Washington, D.C. hotel room by a pastor while "King looked on, laughed, and offered advice." The quoted language was handwritten over an otherwise typewritten report. The report, which was released last year, summarizes a recording that will be released in 2027.

Eig does not hide his skepticism and suggests that the recording will not substantiate the report. Considering King's life and body of work, it is hard not to share Eig's opinion. But if anything has the power to undo the reputation of the first Black person to be memorialized in the nation's capital, it is this. Eig expertly treated the tension that arose between King and the Black Power movement in the 1960s. With colorblindness having been cast aside as either passé or even racist by the Black Power movement's successors, a case can be made that King's philosophy of optimism and universal brotherhood is losing its battle with an obsessively racialized culture of victimhood. The modern-day opponents of King's dream would leap at the opportunity to write out of history the celebration of the content of our character as the boring ramblings of an abettor to rape. Let us hope that they will not have that chance.