Poured Over Double Shot: Héctor Tobar and Jonathan Eig

Jenna Seery

These two authors tackle important subjects with new research and keen insight.

Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls delves into the “Latino” identity with thorough analysis of history, culture and extensive interviews. Tobar joins us to talk about the concepts of ethnicity and race, hearing stories from people across the country and more.

King: A Life is the comprehensive new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. compiling new information with in-depth research to create a definitive portrait of this brilliant and complicated figure. Eig joins us to talk about new declassified documents that aided his work, what surprised him about this project and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.        

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.    

Featured Books (Episode):
Our Migrant Souls by Héctor Tobar
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar
Bearing the Cross by David Garrow
G-Man by Beverly Gage
The Sword and the Shield by Peniel Joseph

Featured Books: (TBR Topoff):
The Dead are Arising by Les Payne
Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack

Full Transcript:

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Héctor Tobar, oh man, I’ve been reading you for a really long time. You’ve got the Pulitzer, you are an NBC finalist, you’re a bbest-selling author, former Radcliffe fellow, current Guggenheim Fellow, journalist turned professor, and you are also the author of one of my favorite novels ever The Barbarian Nurseries, which came out in what 2011?

Héctor Tobar
That’s right, 2011.

MM
Oh, wow, it’s been a while. Your new book, though, is nonfiction, it’s called Our Migrant Souls. And I’m not going to reveal the subtitle right here, because I’m going to let you explain the subtitle because this book is everything. This book is fabulous. I’m so happy to see you.

HT
Yes, the subtitle of my book. Well, first of all, Miwa, it’s so great to be here with you on this podcast, and to talk to your readers. And thank you again, for your support of my work over the years and my current book, it’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” in quotes. That’s my book.

Okay, but you say something early in the book that really got my attention. You don’t particularly like the term, Latino or Latinx at the moment? Because you think it’s limiting?

Absolutely. You know, I mean, if you look at the root of the word Latino, it’s obviously Latin, it’s referring to the fact that most people who are of Latin American descent speak, you know, Spanish, which is a Romance language. And in so doing, it anchors this identity in Europeanness, and the fact is that, yes, most of us have European roots, but we also have Indigenous and, you know, African roots, and sometimes even Asian roots. And so I think that, that Latinx, Latine, Latino, Hispanic, also, they all sort of, they hide that and that sense, they don’t really, they don’t really capture the fullness of the identity. But of course, what term could? What a label does, it’s, it’s a shorthand way of discussing where we fit in, in the race and social and ethnic milieu of the United States, which is, of course, also in its way, you know, limiting when it comes to describing the life of an individual or a family or even a community.

Where does mestizo and mulatto? Where did those descriptors fall in to your sort of timeline of us?

Yeah, well, you know, mestizo, like, mulatto is an old term from a kind of racist notion of mixing, right? So mulatto is a term invented to describe, you know, a mixed black and European or Spanish person, same with mestizo and indigenous person with a Spanish European person, like some writers have in the past, I use mestizo sometimes as a kind of term of endearment recognizing its origins in racist thinking, but also using it as a shorthand way to talk about our indigeneity. Which is something that’s been erased from us, you know, my most recent trip to Guatemala, I was listening to my uncle, who is a very, very indigenous person talking about how in his, an indigenous presenting person, even though he won’t acknowledge his own indigeneity, but talking about the village where he grew up, and how people who are indigenous changed their names, you know, when they get a chance to European last names, because a European surname in Guatemala is a way of social climbing. Right. And so this process has happened throughout, you know, throughout our histories. And, you know, most of us, including myself, I don’t know the specificity of my indigeneity. You know, I just know the features of my grandparents who refuse to admit to any indigenous heritage and so mestizo, to me, is a nice way of interjecting that into the conversation.

One last set of vocabulary words before we go charging into this conversation, because I just want to set it up for folks who aren’t as fluent in this kind of vocabulary. It is new territory for some people, not necessarily for all of us, but for some people, and I just want to make sure if people can ground themselves in the conversation before you and I did that thing that we do and go off to the races, ethnicity, and race. Let’s talk about ethnicity and race. These two words that people bandied about and man they have feelings, people have feelings. Yes. Lots of feelings.

Well, ethnicity is this notion that a group of people have a common cultural background, which is you know, I mean, indisputable, right. So French is an ethnicity. Hispanic is an ethnicity and race is this idea that there is a biological component to our cultural background, right. So for example, Black and white, there is this idea that biologically, those two conditions are different. And racism derived from race, obviously racism and this notion that being Black or white or Brown or mestizo or indigenous or whatever, gives you a certain kind of immutable quality. Right? So race when I, you know, when you talk about, you know, a racist notion about white people is that all white people are greedy, or rich or whatever, right? So that’s obviously a racist notion about white and of course, we all know what the racist notions are about Black people and about Hispanic people. Now, legally, and you know, bureaucratically, those terms are used differently. So for example, the idea of race is recognized by the United States government, it counts us as according to race. And so a person like me, has to choose am I white, Black, Native American, or other because those are the officially recognized races, which races exist is itself a product of history and a product of social conflict. For example, once in the 1930, census, Mexican was a race category, alongside white and the Negro, right, because it was 1930. And so the US government has these notions of race. And so Hispanic is supposed to be and Latino, is supposed to be an ethnicity, you can any different race and be a Latino person, because it’s supposed to be this common cultural condition, not race, which is supposed to be this biological thing. Although now scientists have shown that is meaningless, there is no difference in your DNA between a black person and a white person, there isn’t, right. In fact, two black people will probably have more difference in their DNA than a black and white person do whatever. So according but according to this notion, we’re supposed to be Latinos are supposed to be this ethnicity. But as I argue, in my book, people see Latino people like the idea of Latino as this race, right. So for example, police describe suspects, they’ll say a suspect as white, black or Hispanic. And it turns out, every country has its own idea of what the race classifications the police should use. So in practice, you know, Latino is treated as another one of the races of the United States alongside white, black and Native American and Asian.

Yeah, and I’m delighted to report we no longer have to check off other for those of us who have seriously mixed backgrounds, right, noy other anymore, I get to choose now, which I it’s the whole thing is weird. The whole thing is totally weird.

And plus, yeah, if you look at any background, any background has its own history of mixing. And its own its history of the things that you know, it you know, Asian is really about the relationship that the United States has had to these peoples of the Empire who you know, come from, who come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, right? That’s why the Japanese are lumped together with the Chinese and the Koreans and the Filipinos. Whereas in England, Asian means essentially, India, right? It means the Indian subcontinent. So yeah, these terms are all pretty bizarre, and that’s part of the fun of my book is taking it all out apart and showing how absurd it is, and how hurtful and how there’s ideas of power behind this.

Yeah, I’m gonna quote you for a second because this is just a really fun line “like mutant, Vulcan or Wookie, Latino, Latin X and Hispanic are made up words of storytellers, describing a group of people engaged in an adventure.” And I mean, okay, we’ve got Star Wars, you bring in the Donner party, we are going to get to Donner Party, you can’t write a book about California and not have the Donner party in here. I’m sorry, I just can’t. But also, we’re talking about the border, we’re talking about place, we’re talking about geography, we’re talking about DACA. We’re talking about all of these labels that get applied from outside of the community. And then in some cases, there are members of the community that accept those labels. I mean, the parallel I’m going to pull in is model minority, which is a phrase and a label, I loathe I cannot stand what it represents. I cannot stand that I am somehow expected to embrace the idea of model minority being applied to Asian Americans. It makes me bananas, bananas, and it’s one of the worst tools we have to drive a wedge between communities.

Well, there’s a, if I may use the word, there’s a dialectic to it. There’s kind of two things going on at once with these terms. So they are in positions so the term black or the idea of negros invented as a result of the slave trade, right. So the peoples who come from Africa, they’re from Dahomey or they’re from Angola, right, or they’re from Gambia, whatever. They don’t have a notion of themselves as Black. They’re brought to the United States, they’re called negros. They’re called Blacks, and then Black after a while it becomes a way of expressing seen their shared histories with other people from Africa. So that same thing happens with Latinos, my companion, my longtime companion is a Mexican American, my family is from Guatemala, our kids are Mexican and Guatemalan. But they just call themselves Latino for short, right? Because they haven’t, because my wife and I, we have these commonalities, right, we both come from families that spoke some Spanish or a lot of Spanish, whatever. So yeah, terms are imposed on us, but we also use them to express an alliance. And that’s, it’s definitely the history of Asian, right, especially from the 1970s onwards, right, when you have Chinese and Japanese activists at first, you know, making these alliances, so etc.

A lot of it is actually fun stuff when you see people coming in to I mean, especially like when you see the Young Lords and the brown power movement in the 70s. And also, you know, the rise of Asian American as even not just a nomenclature, but as a political identity. I mean, absolutely, this was all very, very radical stuff. But you drove 9000 miles around the US, talking to people, and how many hours of talking is 9000 miles?

Well, you know, you have to realize that it’s like, you know, 10 hours of driving to get, let’s say, from Salt Lake City to El Paso, that’s a good 20 hours and then, two hours of talking. So it was a lot of driving. But it was just a wonderful journey through the through the country and all these different ways of being Latino or Hispanic.

You talk to people of all ages, and you talk to just lots of different experiences. And one of the things I love those, you keep shouting out working class intellectuals, your dad was a working class intellectual, he always valued books, he kept you in the life of books and the world of books, which you know, kind of accounts for you being a writer. But I do want to talk about this idea of class as well, because class is a huge part of this conversation, and where you, quote unquote, belong in the world, right? And the idea that you either are working class, and that’s it, or you have a very different experience, or you’re simply illegal, there seems to be not a lot of middle ground. And again, these are all labels that are being applied. And in fact, taking away from actual experience.

I think that the dominant image of a Latino person, or Latinx person in the American imagination is of a working-class person of a person working in either the service industry, or as a farm worker, you know, in agriculture. And that’s part of the racial notions of who we are that that’s actually you know, that the racist way of thinking of that is like, we’re just naturally hardworking, subservient people who aren’t very intelligent or ambitious, that’s the sort of very, very general and you know, and you can see that it, you know, plays itself out, in many, many ways throughout the culture. But that’s, that’s the sort of idea and it’s very much tied to class. So to me, increasingly, working class life in this country is, is defined by its interaction with Latino culture, right? And so, you know, you go to all these places, and you see all this mixing, you see Black and Latino people mixing, you see white and Latino people mixing in different parts of the country, you go to Appalachia, and you know, it’s not uncommon to find an Appalachian family of white family that’s, you know, intermarried with the Mexican guy who showed up to work on the tomato harvest or whatever. To me, this is very, extremely, you know, tied with class. And I would say that all at it when they begin, pretty much all racial classifications begin with, you know, with a class hierarchy.

Without a doubt, without a doubt.

With the Chinese, the Chinese come to work on the railroads, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, we’re gonna get to the Chinese Exclusion Act, I promise you, we’re getting there. And we just have some other ground to cover first because one of the things too, the idea of you talking to as many people as you possibly can, the shouts back to your role, or your work as a journalist for years and years and years, you’re bureau chief in a couple of different places. You are a columnist. I mean, you covered the riots in LA, which don’t we call them the LA Uprisings now, we don’t have to use riots anymore to describe it, do we?

Well, to me, it was an uprising for the first hour and then it was a riot for the next five.

Okay, well, I mean, I was in Boston at the time, so I was sort of physically far removed right from a lot of it. But you know, this is kind of going back to your roots, there was a book in 2005 that you did called Translation Nation, which sort of set the groundwork for this as I want to say you’re revisiting. But, you know, it’s been a while.

No, yeah, in many ways it is revisiting, you know, I was a really bookish kid, very shy and journalism forced me to interview people, because the only alternative was to make things up and that’s basically the one sin that will get you kicked out of journalism heaven is t to make things up. So you have to go interview people. And so I just developed that as a practice. And, and as a writer, you know, the one thing you learn when you interview lots of people is they’re always going to surprise you. And everyone has their own unique little novel that that, you know, walking around America or the world. And so yeah, I absolutely applied that to this to this book. My book from 2005, Translation Nation that was more journalistic in the sense that it was really just it was reporting these lives and telling stories. And now, you know, 18 years later, you know, having raised kids and having been a citizen and written novels, and being a little grayer, and so forth. You know, this is my reflecting and also having lived through the, you know, intense ama anti-immigrant movement of the last, you know, 20 years or so, I’m more in essayist and reflecting mode. And the real big inspiration I have to say, is James Baldwin, having read James Baldwin later in life, you know, especially The Fire Next Time, having seen Raoul Peck’s, incredible documentary, I Am Not Your Negro and you know that that voice of Baldwin’s was inside my head that I need to make an impassioned statement about our human worth, right? Because the worth of Latino people, it’s constantly being demeaned. It’s been lessened, and cheapened, right in American popular discourse in the American media.

Yeah, dude, you watched a lot of bad TV and a lot of bad movies, and you write about them in the book. And I feel for you, I have seen bits and pieces of some of the stuff you mentioned and I couldn’t finish any of them. I have to say like I there are a series of television shows where people get all excited. And I’m like, Yeah, can’t do it. Can’t do it. Like you just can’t have my brain

I mean, Breaking Bad deserves his reputation is one of the best, you know, the one of the best television shows of this century so far. But yes, Breaking Bad and all the cartels genre, are essentially allegories about how white people feel powerless in the world. And to be able to break that down and to have that insight that essentially the Latino people in those stories, the good ones, and the bad ones are basically standing in for the forces that are, you know, driving white people crazy, which is data driven capitalism, you know, the breakdown of the family. And so Latino people become the symbols of all these things. And so the writers who are, you know, very rarely Latino, they’re transposing all of their hangups, all of their fears onto these cartel type characters. So that was a lot of fun to take to take apart, and very empowering myself.

I’m glad you took it apart, though. It was the second season of Breaking Bad, the way it opens. I was just like, yeah, I’m done now. Thanks. And I get where the story was going and why it was going. But like, I yeah, it’s just that first episode. I was like, okay, I’m good. Thanks, done. Now, here’s the thing. And, you know, it happens to all kinds of communities, representation, when you’re starved for representation sometimes it feels like any kind of representation is better than none at all. Like we fall into these traps, and we see it in the book business, too. You know that stereotypes get perpetuated and, you know, Always Running by Luis Rodriguez is a masterwork. And it is, absolutely, if you haven’t read this book yet, go back, read it. Rodriguez has a complicated history. He was a gang member in Los Angeles. He is now a poet and this book is beautiful and you need to read it if you haven’t, you know, and certainly this is a conversation that Asian Americans are having right now, when do you fall in? When do you settle for a thing that is not great, but might also be true? To an extent like you teach and you talk about this early in the book, you talk about this early in Our Migrant Souls, where you’ve got kids, romanticizing their parents, you’ve got kids trying to explain to you who they are, what their experience of being Latino is, and sometimes it’s a lot.

Yes. It’s really it’s a lot and it’s really rich. You know, it’s I think that the unwritten narratives of the Latino experience are a lot like Harold Pinter or Arthur Miller, or like James Baldwin or Toni Morrison. One problem we face is that I think a lot of Latino writers, a lot of writers are afraid that what they write is going to be representing all of us. So it becomes not so much a work of art, as much as it becomes a kind of like, poster about us. And so there is a real hesitancy to talk about, you know, family dysfunction, which of course, all families are dysfunctional, again, and that’s what makes each culture interesting is its dysfunctions. And I think a lot of Latino writers are, you know, just starting now, we’re just starting now to be able to have the freedom to explore that. Also, yes, New York publishing, with a very often very stereotypical notion of what will sell this idea that, you know, who the readers are and what they want to see about our experience. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a difficult moment, to be a creator, and, you know, film and television, so much money involved, so much risk involved for the creators, that they’re not willing to take risks on our stories. And so we have this either eternal criminalization in terms of the cartel stories and all these sort of gang stories or eternal victimization, which is the dominant image, right of the Latino and the mainstream liberal media is of the, you know, victimized immigrant. And neither one of those is a complete truth.

Well, and you have this great line, I mean, literally, I’m just reading, I destroy galleys, anyone who listens knows. But I love this line, “sociology, fate, racism and the law hanging over us.” And I want to talk about fate for a second because all of this sociology, racism, the law, I get all of that, right. Fate is an interesting word. And I want to go there for a second with you because, I mean, you even say, we live in a time of migration, this is what we do. The US border is everywhere. It’s not just along the edge of Mexico, borders everywhere. So fate, where does fate come into all of this?

I think it’s a way that a lot of Latino people have of explaining how messed up their situation is, and the and the sort of the shades of hopelessness that sort of float around them. And so, you know, your, your father is one of 12 kids and has the story of starting to work when he was 10 or 11 years old, he has all this trauma. And you know, you’ve lived with this, and you and you have no way to escape this. You don’t necessarily have an ideology that explains it to you, other than pride in your race, or pride in your Mexican-ness or whatever. And so a lot of people begin to think of it as just something that I have to live this brokenness. This is just something that was, you know, imposed upon me, and there’s no escaping it. And you know, of course, that’s a lie. It’s a lie. But it’s a way a lot of people think about it. I talked to a man from Georgia, who’s undocumented, every day, he goes out to work, he has a wonderful upper middle class life in Georgia owns his own construction business. But every time he leaves, he knows that he can be stopped by the police and deported. And so he says, it’s out of my control, it’s all with God. You know, I’ve been a good person in my life but if God decides that, that’s my fate, that’s what’s going to happen. And so it’s a way people have of coming to terms with things they can’t change. That man in in Georgia, he can’t convince the Republican House to finally allow, you know, an amnesty to go through, that’s not going to happen. And so his quote unquote, fate, it feels sealed to him in that way. And so it’s the way people have of explaining things that, that that just make them feel powerless.

I’m going to switch gears for just a tiny second, because parts of the book appeared in Harper’s Magazine before it was published in the New Yorker. And I remember reading the piece that ran in the summer of 2019. And you grew up in a part of LA that I am actually pretty close to physically right now. It’s very close to where I live now. And I love where I live. I absolutely love my neighborhood. I live on the edge of two very vibrant communities, and I can choose between the two of them, and I love it. I absolutely love it. And to me, it feels like LA and I hear multiple languages at any given point. And now we also have like a third community coming in. It’s a good way to live. But one of your neighbors growing up was James Earl Ray, who ultimately went on to assassinate Martin Luther King. And I think I had forgotten that he had spent time in Los Angeles which is wild because it means he was not very far from where I am now. But I want I bring him into the story into the context of fear and whiteness and yet he was living in a piece of the city that was not white.

Yeah, his whole life. I did something that I don’t think many scholars have done, I looked up the census records for the street, where James Earl Ray was born in a town in Illinois. And I found that when he was born there in the 1930s, there were Black people living there, it was like a half Black neighborhood, a lot of poor Eastern Europeans, people from Ireland. And so James Earl Ray was born into a very diverse world, his white family was very often surrounded by so called people of color, right? And so yes, and when he lived in Hollywood, he lived 200 feet from a Guatemalan immigrant family and my Filipino friend, Luigi Tolentino, and he would take a shortcut right past James Earl Ray’s building. That neighborhood in East Hollywood, is one of the most diverse places the United States. In fact, I remember in the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times actually found the most diverse census track in in the United States. And it was, you know, somewhere like on Melrose, not too far away from where we live, you know, and so, James Earl Ray, extremely poor, born into this poverty, his father had a long criminal history. And their explanation for the for having been screwed by history was Black people, it was Black people that messed up America and he clung to that idea to his dying day, you know, and he, of course, it also drove him to kill this prophet of Black liberation, Martin Luther King. And so to me part of what this exploration into race, Latino identity whiteness has led me is to this point of compassion, really, the only way you can live with the fact that you’re the target of all of this hatred or oppression is to understand its origins and understand who the people are. And just like with someone who abuses you, in life, if you, once you sort of fully understand them, eventually you will have compassion for them. At least that’s what my therapist says.

Your therapist is not wrong.

To me, that applies also to the way we think about our society. You know, I don’t hate racist, white people, I have compassion for them, because I understand the insecurities or I can get, I can sort of fathom the insecurities and the history that’s brought them to that place. And that’s very, very true. If you look at the life of James Earl Ray, which is, of course not to forgive him, or excuse him, his horrific actions, but it’s more to understand we know where, where that those motivations came from.

It’s all narrative, and so on. I mean, again, I’m going back. I know I made this point earlier in the show, but the idea that labels are applied to your community by outsiders, the idea that the wall and all of the narratives that go around the wall, or somehow prop up the wall, what have you, it’s all story. And when you can connect with another human being and say, Hey, wait a minute, I get, I’m not Guatemalan American, we know this. But you can say all of these things. And I absolutely understand what you’re saying. Because yeah, in some cases, there’s a similarity or there’s a shared experience, you know, just change some of the nouns, but it’s a shared experience. And in other cases, I read a lot, my world got really big, because I can have empathy for people who aren’t me because I read. And that’s a really powerful way to be able to live and to have conversations and be able to say, oh, right, the frontier thesis. Have you been to the Huntington recently, the Huntington Library?

I haven’t been there in about six or seven months.

This was probably last June. So you might have seen this, but you know, they’ve got that exhibit right now. And it’s got the burned out Jack London manuscript.

Oh, yes.

So one of the other buildings further down is the American art collection and I walked in and the first things I see are sort of these classic very flat paintings of people that you would see in, say, New England or upstate New York, all the stuff that I grew up with. This is not interesting to me. How did all of this stuff make it 3000 miles on a wagon somewhere? Like, why is this here? This belongs, you know, back east, and we have an entirely different world here. And yet, you know, we’re still looking to class and power and old structures and systems and all of this kind of thing. And it’s like, even in the art, and then of course, there’s the other building that has all this stuff from Europe and I’m really super not interested in this. So, but all of these pieces, right, like, ultimately, they’re all narratives, each of those buildings is a narrative.

Yeah, and absolutely, and for me, from an early age, I’ve been fascinated by United States history. And, and I’m really fortunate that in the last 20 or 30 years, so many historians and thinkers have worked to show, you know, the narratives that we did not see, to take this journey through Latino, Latinx and arrive in Black history or to arrive at the history of whiteness, or even going to my family’s Eastern Guatemalan village, and finding that there is this Chinese history, all of these things, you know, overlapping. And that’s why, I arrived at this conclusion, as you said before, the notion that mixing and migration are just these human constants. You know, the United States history, California history is definitely a migration story. Those narratives of migration and moving and mixing are at the heart of all of our experiences.

And I mean, you touch on the Chinese Exclusion Act, you touched on the railroads, you even bring in the Holocaust, to be honest, because trauma is passed from generation to generation, like, we know this, there’s actual scientific proof that generational trauma exists, and it repeat, like it shows up physically in your body, which I think a lot of us suspected. But, you know, it was nice to have science say, oh, no, and it’s not in your head, you actually are physically right.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I talked about the Holocaust, because my father’s third marriage, he married a Jewish woman, and I married into a Jewish family. And I learned about the Holocaust, you know, at an early age. And then I just have always had this fascination with the Holocaust. I asked myself eventually, you know, my first novel, The Tattooed Soldier, which is about a Guatemalan death squad killer really has a lot of Holocaust themes in it. And I asked myself, is this something that’s been passed down to me, from my family history? I mean, not just because I’ve had this Jewish family for a while. I still do, I have two sisters who are Jewish, but also because in my indigenous Spanish history, Guatemalan history, there’s all this violence, the violence of empire, right? Yeah, has something been passed down in my psyche that draws me to these stories, to want to sort of understand them and that’s, that’s, that’s what I asked him the book.

But also, we’re Americans and our country does not have a great track record for doing the right thing in central and southern America. And Guatemala is one of those countries where, essentially, we walked in and said, No, we’d like this guy. Instead, we have done some very bad things in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and Guatemala and whatnot and I do think that becomes part of our story, too. But if you talk to some younger people, and I know you’re around younger people, much more than I am, but not everyone has the context for that. It’s wild to me like there are some because we don’t teach it. You have a lot of this information when you are an adult and a working journalist.

Yeah, you know, to me, it’s sort of a sin that your average California public school student doesn’t learn anything about, say the Salvadoran revolution, or the 1954 coup in Guatemala because there are so many Central Americans in California now and those events are now events of California history. I mean, my family, we became California residents, because of the CIA’s involvement in Guatemala in 1954. There are so many Salvadoran families here because of that incredible Salvadoran revolution, of course, the counter revolution. And so there is a tremendous amount of, ignorance isn’t quite the right word, but just like a lack of knowledge of the history, and when you teach it, I teach here at UC Irvine, and I teach these big lectures, I can just see people’s eyes light up as they as they learn this history. So, and I try to touch on it in my in the book and to reveal some of these histories to people.

I think it’s really important. I mean, this frontier, can we go back to the frontier thesis for a second? Because one, I love this and two, if you’re not Tongvan, you’re an immigrant to California. I don’t care when your family showed up. I don’t care if you were here in 1702. Guess what, if you’re not Tongvan you’re an immigrant to California. And I am one of those immigrants. I love this place, but you know, I am a transplant. When I think about Boston, I’m like, yeah, the Boston is popping up again. I mean, there’s stuff you carry with you from wherever you’re from. But the frontier thesis I think, is really important. I think it does shape some of the labels that get applied to the Latino and Latinx community. So let’s explain what the frontier thesis is.

Yeah, that’s this idea put forward by American historians towards the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, that what made the United States unique was this open frontier, that essentially the European people who would become Americans and create this country called the United States, that what made them particularly special was the fact that they had this open land, they conquered nature, the Native Americans in this kind of thinking, are part of nature, that kind of thinking informs the way a certain kind of white American still thinks about their country. And so Latino people become kind of substitutes for the Native Americans, right. So in, you know, the old cowboy and western movies, the Pioneers are out crossing the Great Plains, and they’re attacked by the Indians, and they all have rifles to defend themselves against the Indians, who are this barbarous force of nature. And so that’s the way Latino people are seeing where these people who are, you know, from this barbarous territory to the south, and we are constantly causing danger and peril, you know, to, to white America, that to me is that sort of frontier thesis, applied to the here and now, right? That’s how the frontier thesis implies.

It has been kind of great to see the evolution of American history, right, and how we teach it now and the way we talk about it. And the way we open it up in ways I mean, I was taught American history in sort of very specific beats. And I remember when I first learned about the Japanese incarceration camps during World War Two, and I kind of lost my mind, I was maybe 11 and I lost my mind completely and I’m looking at all of the adults around me going, and they’re all sort of cavalier and I remember an old teacher of mine saying, well, we just didn’t know, no one told us, we just didn’t know. And I said, well, you know, now, you know, my 11-year-old indignant self, oh, I was so mad.

Well, you know, it’s worked in several ways, and we just can’t blame the education system or the machinery of history. It’s also because very often our parents and our ancestors want to protect us from that history. So, a lot of people that I mentioned someone I quote, somebody in my book, this Tongvan activist who grew up not knowing that she was Tongvan, she thought of herself as Mexican American, because her mother wanted to hide it from her to protect her because her mother had this experience of being Tongvan. Meaning that you’re going to be ridiculed that you’re going to be forced to sit in the back of the class or, and so a lot of times, we erase those histories from our past. You know, a lot of Salvadoran kids grew up not knowing anything about the Salvadoran civil war. And it’s not just because the school system doesn’t teach them, but it’s because very often their parents are trying to protect them from these traumas. Yeah, so there’s a lot of there’s a lot that goes into that erasure, as I discussed in my book.

But here’s the thing, now we can start to change those conversations. I mean, you’re working with kids and when I say kids, you’re working with college students, but the opening of Our Migrant Souls is so fabulous, because you’ve written it in the close second person, that voice is so intimate, and it’s so immediate, and it’s exactly the kinds of things we need to be talking about. Listen, I loved school, and I loved my teachers. But when you find out that you’re the first person they’d pack up and pop on a bus, right? I was the only pigment in my world until about ninth grade. So I was reading every single space I was in. So you know, you talk about otherness in the book, you talk about, you know, all of the labels that get applied. And it’s just well, when you find your history, you really kind of don’t want to forget it. And I think that’s absolutely a story that that’s a piece of the narrative that people need to remember, just because they might not know it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Right?

And you talked about the opening the book, because I mean, to me, that was one of the great gifts of being a university professor, is have seen people have this emotional and intellectual reaction, to learn about their own histories, and also to be given a forum where they can work it out, because that’s, like most of my classes have this writing assignment where I asked, just tell me a story about the Latinx experience. And, and usually their family stories, memories and whatnot. A lot of coming out stories, too. And so it’s just, it’s just to me, just to see, people recognize that this part of themselves is also this intellectual capital that they own right, that being Latino isn’t just this thing that you suffer, but it’s also itself is this subject of intellectual inquiry, you know, that that to me is it’s been a wonderful experience and one that I didn’t really expect or anticipate when I became a professor.

Was that the biggest surprise for you that putting together the book? I mean, there’s a lot of I mean, obviously, you and I have gone back and forth over, here’s some really rough stuff. And here’s some stuff that just delighted us to no end. And here’s just reality. But I mean, being able to put your students’ voices on the page like that, because they are the future. I mean, I’m very optimistic. Now after reading this, I feel much better about many, many things great, because honestly, people are doing the work. They’re really doing the work. And it’s great to see. But also just, you know, it’s nice to read a few pages and be like, Oh, the kids get it, they totally get it.

Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things you learn when you work with, you know, with 20-year-olds, and, you know, undergraduates is that the light never goes out. And you know, every year we get a little older, and they’re the same age, right? Because every year there’s a new class admitted, and that light of curiosity and, and questioning just doesn’t go out. And yes, it’s the I feel like I’m witnessing the birth of American literature, what’s going to be American literature in 20 years, because, as you know, it can take 20 or 30 years to make someone into a writer to become a writer, it’s, you know, literature is, is this, it’s the opposite of being a ballerina, you as your body deteriorates, you become you become better at it. It’s wonderful to see. And I’m very, very optimistic, because of the intelligence and the fortitude, and the soul in the heart that I see in my younger years.

And I think, too, they are, let’s put it this way, they’re on to us. They’re on to us in ways, you know, we think we’re so clever keeping our secrets and all of this and they’re like, no, we’re going to work around that we’re gonna, we’re just we’re going to do a new way, if this doesn’t work, the way we’ve been doing things, we’re gonna find a new way to do it. And I think that’s actually really exciting because, I mean, you and I are sort of stuck in this weird generation where the people ahead of us are very, very settled in a lot of ways and we’re going to talk about stuff and we navigated that to the best of our ability, but we still also didn’t have a lot of the language that kids now have. And they’re like, Yeah, you can just stand over there for a second. We’ve got this we’ve got this and a lot of that shows in Our Migrant Souls. And I really, I just, this book is a treat, like it really is a treat and beyond like, combining the Donner party and Star Wars, which only you can do, like, you’re such an Angeleno.

No, thank you.

It made me laugh. I was just like, okay, here we go with the Donner party, because you can’t have a narrative about California without the Donner party.

Right. This one also involves, you know, cannibalism and, but it doesn’t, it involves — against one particular person. So I guess we’ll leave that as an Easter egg for the readers.

I people should be able to enjoy the read as much as I did. Because, honestly, I mean, I didn’t even look at any of the copy that came with the book. I was just like, oh it’s Héctor? And you seem to alternate fiction and non, the last book was a novel, the book before that was nonfiction. So is this going to be the pattern going forward?

Yes, because I’m working on a novel right now. A series of novellas actually, okay. I love writing fiction. I love writing nonfiction and I love the way they feed off of each other. You know, it’s wonderful to be in the realm of the imagination. But it’s also great to be out talking to people to be, you know, questioning the real world and trying to make real world narratives nonfiction narratives. Yeah, it’s wonderful to go back and forth. And I think they’re very much interrelated genres, as many people have said before.

Yeah. And this is where I’m going to come back to my girl Aracely Ramirez for a second. In Barbarian Nurseries I love this woman and I have missed her, and I cannot believe this novel is more than 10 years old. It feels like because like, it just came out yesterday. I mean, I have always loved this book. And it has always felt very, very LA and yes, I know part of it takes pride in Orange County, but really, it’s an LA novel, just trust me. Do you miss that book? Do you miss those characters that felt like a personal book in a way that…

Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum?

Those both felt a little like you’d step back a tiny bit and Barbarian Nurseries I sort of felt like you were right there with me sort of walking me through LA

Well, yeah, you know, I live in LA actually. Now I commute back and forth between Orange County and Los Angeles so I’m in the worlds of those books because there’s a part of the novel begins in you know, suburban Orange County. All those books have their audiences and they’ve had their lives post publication. And that book seems to be gaining a lot of readership because, you know, there’s an undocumented protagonist in it all kinds of accolades have come to it. Sean McDonald at FSG just published a 10th anniversary edition. And it was named to an LA Times list of the 16 best novels of Los Angeles of all time, that was really wonderful to see. Aracely is perhaps more my alter ego than any other, you know, fictional character I’ve written about or created. So yeah, she’s a wonderful, she’s a wonderful part of my family.

And I’m so and when I saw there might have been some yelling, there might be yelling when I saw this. I was like, Yes, this absolutely belongs here. I’m shouting it out again, because I will not stop yelling about barbarian nurses, and especially because it captures LA as LA. So wait, when are you turning in the new manuscripts for the novellas?

Oh, no. Who knows? Okay, so we have to run a 2024, 25, 26. Who knows? You know, you never know what these things especially since my current project is nine novellas and I’ve written one and a half and it covers approximately 2200 years of Los Angeles.

Okay, fine. I’ll wait. I’ll be patient but I seriously…

Thank you. That’s that that means so much to me.

2200 years of Los Angeles history I’m like, yes, yes, I’m ready for all of this. Thank you very much. Anyway, Hector, it’s always good to see you we should do this more often Our Migrant Souls is out. Now. If you haven’t read The Barbarian Nurseries. That’s out in paperback go get that too.

Thank you so much.

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been waiting for this conversation. Jonathan Eig has written a new biography of Dr. Martin Luther King. It’s called King: A Life and it’s the first new biography in 30 years. And David Garrow, who wrote the last sort of big biography of King Bearing the Cross, which won the Pulitzer in 1987. He’s even said your book is now the book, which I’ve been a bookseller for a really long time, I’ve never heard that happened before.

Jonathan Eig
That blew my mind. And David is a very generous guy. He’d helped me tremendously with this book to begin with. But yeah, I’ve never seen a biographer do that and it made me think about whether I’d be comfortable and confident enough to pass the torch in that way, when someone writes a better book than mine. It’s incredibly generous of him.

MM
It knocked me over and also having read King: A Life. He’s right. It’s a really, really fantastic book. And it’s really necessary to because you go to places that we haven’t necessarily seen with Dr. King before. It’s a much fuller portrait than we’ve been given previously. And also, it’s partially because there were new FBI files, I shouldn’t say new files, there was a new release of files that had been held since the beginning of time. And so far as I can tell, in 2018 is not when you started working on this book.

No, I started before that, knowing that there were new files already and that there were more to come. And I just want to say one important thing about what Dave Garrow said, and also how it relates to Taylor Branch’s wonderful books, my book is different, and I set out to do something different than those guys did. I wanted to write a more intimate portrait of King. Garrow’s book is really as much about the SCLC as it is about King and Taylor branch’s book is this epic sweeping trilogy 1000s of pages on the entire Civil Rights Movement. I wanted to write something much more personal where you were along for the ride with King where you felt his pain where you could feel the gut punches and celebrate the glory and really cry when he cries and a different kind of a book. So I don’t think that I I’m supplanting at either of those great works, I think I’m supplementing.

I think there’s room on the shelf for everyone and what Taylor Branch did. And I love this book. I love the Taylor Branch books, I really those, my copies are not in great shape. Let’s put it that way. There are many, many notations on those copies and whatnot. He’s so focused on sort of a bigger picture even more so than Garrow in a lot of ways with the SCLC so yes, there’s space on the shelf. For everyone. We should be clear about that. But let’s go back to you for a second. How long did it take to research? How many people did you talk to? How many hours did you spend interviewing?

Oh, I don’t even know I started this book six years ago. And I told my kids that I challenged them to learn more in school that I’m going to learn in the next six years working on this book. And I think I may have learned more than they did, which is a sad statement about the state of our public education. But we won’t get into that. I did hundreds of interviews, I found dozens and people maybe, you know, more than 100 people who knew King personally, knew him well. And that was part of the reason I set out on this journey is that I knew that the window for that was closing, that this might be the last chance to do a biography with living witnesses with people who knew King, including people from childhood. I mean, his older sister, God bless her, is still living and I wanted to seize that opportunity. And it was just one of the great adventures of my life to get to get to travel the country and meet people who were close associates of Dr. King.

I want to go back to Montgomery for a second, 1955, Dr. King and his wife, Coretta had just moved to Montgomery from Boston. He’s finishing his PhD, I guess. But he’s taken his first posting as a pastor, and he’s brought into the Montgomery bus boycott, and you can see him getting his legs. He delivers this the sermon in December of ’55 that sort of makes everyone say, hey, wait a minute, he just ends up on everyone’s radar. And you ask a question that other folks have asked over time, which is what made him special? How was everyone drawn to him? How did he lead? And I kind of want to start there a little bit because it’s sort of it’s so early in his career. And if you think you know, he was assassinated in 1968, it’s 13 years. That’s not very long.

No, and he’s 26 years old when he’s thrust into this moment, this pointless position of responsibility. You know, I think about so many great heroes throughout history or even in the movies, right? There’s this moment where they have to make a choice. Am I willing to do this? Am I willing to give up my life that I’ve known so far and take this chance and step into something that I don’t know where it’s gonna take me? And King is 26, he’s, like a lot of young Black people at the time, he’s, he’s passionate about fighting for change, but he’s not imagining a world in which he becomes suddenly this this national leader or even really a local leader. He’s the pastor of a new church, he’s got a new baby at home. He’s trying to figure out how to lead this new congregation and suddenly this boycott of the buses in Montgomery begins and they asked him to be sort of the spokesman. He’s not even the head of the associate of the Montgomery Improvement Association. He’s just serving as a spokesman, because, in part because he’s new in town, and he doesn’t have any enemies. So you know, there’s no rivalry among the among the protesters, and in part because everybody knows he’s a terrific speaker. And that’s where it begins. And that ability to speak so beautifully is really his superpower that it ignites the community, the media falls in love with him. So this in part becomes a national story. There are other boycotts, there are other civil rights protests cropping up around the country. But the media from the north in particular falls in love with this guy with the advanced degrees in theology and this beautiful speaking ability and endless fire in his belly to take on the establishment. It’s just a great story. And that’s why it goes national. I’m not sure it would have gone national in the same way if Ralph Abernathy who was obviously fearless and brilliant and brave. I’m not sure what would have happened with him.

No, I think you’re right. And one of the interesting bits of the story you pull out too is at one point. Dr. King’s home is firebombed. And he gets out on the porch and sort of the remainder of his house, and he stayed into the community. And he speaks to the community in such a way that everyone sort of, as you describe, it starts to act as if their own houses had been firebombed as well. And they were not going to be intimidated by this act of violence. And I just, I love the idea of that moment. I love that moment just on its own. Was it the speaking that really made him a leader, it feels like there was more than just his ability to command attention?

I think you hit on a key point is that when his house was firebombed, I mean, a lot of people I talked to from the south, a lot of you know, older, Black people talk to me about that fear, and how fear was really used to keep them in order. It was meant to keep them from demanding too much. And when Dr. King’s House was firebombed, when he was stabbed in the chest, when his home was shot out again, you know, months later, he would not allow that fear to rule him. And the people of Montgomery began to feel that same sense of competence. We don’t have to be afraid, and that had this huge effect. And over and over again, King throughout his career, every time there’s a moment when he might have been tempted to step back or at least tone things down, at least put himself out of harm’s way. No, he stepped into the breach over and over again. And to me, that’s the kind of courage that that really cemented his following that made people say, I’ll follow this guy anywhere.

And even if the FBI wouldn’t investigate the bombing, that’s sort of when the national media steps in and says, hey, wait a minute, people start calling him a modern Moses of Alabama and Alabama’s Gandhi, and sort of really start propping him up in a way that is going to make him a target for the FBI. And we know some of the story, we know some of Hoover’s story. But you have much, much more to work with here because of the release of the papers in 2018. But can we just start the conversation about because the FBI is going to come through this and we’re gonna get to Johnson in a second. But the new information?

Yes, it’s in this new information, the FBI’s pursuit, harassment, attempt to destroy King it goes hand in hand, with the kind of other fear we were just talking about — the fear that white segregationists, that white law men were trying to inculcate. They understood that this was a way to control, to maintain the power dynamic, you know, white supremacy, was a real thing, it is still a real thing. And it involves power. If you allow change, if you allow that dynamic to change, then you lose power, and the people in charge did not want to lose power. And that was one of the main messages that J Edgar Hoover accentuated all of his career. It wasn’t just Black people; Black people were one of the many people that he feared might change the power dynamic in America. And communists were another that he was that he was concerned with. And then he managed to combine the two by claiming that there was a lot of communist influence within the civil rights movement. That was one way for him to stoke that kind of fear. So that it wasn’t just FBI agents, he was spreading that message to the entire country. And that message was infiltrating our leaders in Congress are the White House and Hoover knew exactly what he was doing and ultimately, I would argue that message affected people who wanted King dead.

Yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt. ‘55 is the start of everything, ‘57 King is on the road for hundreds of 1000s of miles and delivers more than 200 speeches and sermons in the span of a year, and we’re seeing everything build and build and build. And then ‘61, we’ve got freedom rides, and you can see the momentum, but all of this community building is happening, all of this movement is starting to end, you know, when we think of the 50s, that’s not necessarily what people are thinking about. I think lots of folks really associate civil rights much more with the mid to late 60s, and they sort of leave off the ends of the 70s in the 50s. Right, as we’re building and his career is taking off, what did you learn? What did you find out that just sort of felt new to you in that, call it 57 to 61.

One of the things I love about King during this period is that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t have a plan. He’s being, he’s learning as he goes along and he’s improvising as he goes along. So the sit ins begin, and the sit ins are led mostly by students, and they say, we don’t want you Dr. King, you know, we don’t we don’t need the grown-ups telling us what to do here. He’s like, you know, 30 and King, to his credit says, cool, I’m here to help if you need me. And then often they say, Hey, would you come and drop in on our actions, because we know that the national media will follow you and he’s okay with that. So he’s willing to adapt, he’s willing to work with other people, he doesn’t always feel like he has to be the star of the show, the center of the attention, and he’s really good at figuring it out as he goes along. He’s pulled into protests in Atlanta, where he’s his father has begged him not to get involved. He’s pulled into protests in Albany, Georgia, which doesn’t go well at all. Some people think it’s a terrible failure and he learns from that. So, by the time he gets to Birmingham, he understands what went wrong in Albany and how he can use that to his advantage. And he becomes a lightning rod, he realizes that his great ability is in is in luring the press, in getting racists to overreact, which makes for a better news story. And then you can use that pressure, that kind of public change of opinion, that awakening to the plight of Black people in the south, to start to move the needle on public policy and lean on the president, lean on Congress, it’s not easy, and there’s no formula for it, and nobody’s ever really done it before. So King is, is really like flying by the seat of his pants. And that ability to sort of, to fail is not something we think about when we think about King’s greatness.

It’s certainly never been presented in class, let’s put it that way. I mean, it’s not something you learn, maybe if you’re studying at a college or graduate school level, but when you’re first introduced to King, as an elementary school student, none of this would ever be discussed. It’s here are the major speeches, here are the books, here are the major points, but at the same time, I really appreciate sort of this side of him, and being able to sit with that as I’m reading through your book, but watching everything build for him, and then he wins the Nobel and then suddenly, you know, the critics are really sort of coming in a way that, you know, before, there’d been a little bit of sniping, but then suddenly, you know, oh, the prophet from Oslo, like you can hear sort of the change in the air. And that’s the first 64 is sort of the first turning point, it feels like people are concerned, he’s going to be a little big for his britches, because now he’s not only talking about race, he’s not only talking about poverty, he’s starting to hit bigger pieces of the world. He’s already done the India trip, the India trip was 59. So, he’s starting to have maybe bigger ambitions as well and that’s starting to freak some people out.

And one of the things that I think is really important to recognize with King is that he didn’t get more radical. He was saying the same thing all along. It’s just that we began to hear it or, and we began to appreciate it more. And he felt like he had the bandwidth now to start addressing some of these bigger issues, but it all came from Jesus. It all comes from the Bible. You know, poverty, inequality, war, materialism, these things are wrong. So it’s easy for us to focus, especially in those early years on the fight for integration. And that’s very simple, especially for the northern press to understand and to take sides on, but when King starts saying, hey, you know, you got problems in the north too, your schools are just as segregated as Selma, so is your public housing, your housing in general? You know, white flight is exploding, and we start calling those things out, suddenly, oh, well, can we just go back to talking about Bull Connor? You know, the white media is not as comfortable with that. So King starts taking these things on, because it’s his true belief, not because he’s ambitious and he wants more power, or because he wants to make more noise. His beliefs have been informed all his life by his religious study and he’s just saying, I’m ready to talk about these other things now as well. So, unfortunately, that does make him more enemies, it makes the FBI see him as more of a threat, it makes white people in the north a little less inclined to get on board. And if he also at the same time starts finding that, you know, some of the more radical Black leaders think he’s too conservative, because he’s still talking to the president and he’s still trying to negotiate. So he’s getting it from all sides and one of the other things that I want to mention is that he struggles with that, he’s not immune to feelings of insecurity to doubt, he wants to be liked. I say in the book that one of the most amazing things about him is that he’s a protest leader who doesn’t really like conflict. Personally, he hates conflict, he wants everybody to agree to get along, he has a hard time firing people have a hard time saying no to people. It’s fascinating. And it just makes his struggle all the more interesting and relatable.

Yeah. Which also brings us to Chicago in ‘65. And also there’s an LA trip in ‘65, as well and those seem to be moments that really shake him up as well. And, you know, there are people who said, Oh, well, Martin didn’t make the movement, the movement made Martin, which I think everyone would agree is certainly true. Chicago did not respond well to him. And it wasn’t just the daily machine. It was really, from, as you said, all sides. And Los Angeles certainly was not having it as well, can we talk about those two moments, because I don’t think a lot of people even remember that those happened.

Well, in Los Angeles, a riot erupted after a Black man was killed by police. And King felt he had to respond, his advisors said, don’t go out there, nothing good can come from this, you can’t control this situation. It’s too dangerous and it’s not what you do. And King said, it’s what I have to do. I am opposed to violence, I’m opposed to police brutality, I’m opposed to the racism and segregation that’s there too, just because it’s a little harder to grasp a little doesn’t mean I can avoid it. So, he goes there. And of course, you know, runs into city officials who just want to see him leave. And the same thing happens in Chicago, he says, against the advice of his of his closest counselors, I can’t speak out on racism and segregation in the South and ignore it in the north, it’s the same thing going on. It’s just more subtle. So he’s determined to go north and to make a point. Again, for King these aren’t just like media stunts. He believes that if he’s going to accomplish his larger goal of spreading justice, making America live up to its promise of equality, that he’s gonna have to do it everywhere, that you can’t just do the easy, glaring examples in the south. So he chooses Chicago because he thinks that it’s well organized and that he can really create a new kind of movement there people who are just as radical and brave as he is, people are saying don’t do it. You don’t know what you’re getting into there. It’s a different kind of a battle, and we’re not ready and King said, I have to do it. And it doesn’t go well and all the things that his advisers warned him of do come true. But King doesn’t stop there. He keeps doubling down and saying this is the only way I know how to do this, because I’m following my beliefs again, because the FBI is harassing him and bugging his phones. We can hear these conversations; we can read the transcripts, and it’s really painful. It’s heartbreaking. To hear him trying to make his closest friends understand that this is not political, that this is who he is.

You say it too, in the book at one point, you say that Los Angeles and Chicago change King, and the idea that you have access to these wiretap transcripts, that King knew, I mean, he found out in ‘66, that he was being tapped, or did he find out before then?

I think he knew his associates were being tapped. But it’s not clear if he ever knew that his home and office were tapped.

The FBI gets the taps on the basis of Stan Levinson, they say Stan, who’s one of King’s closest advisors, and you say he’s also his ghostwriter, which I didn’t know.

Yeah, King had a lot of ghost writers, but Levinson was one of his big ones.

Hoover says, oh, no, this guy’s a communist. So this is how we’re gonna get the wiretaps and that’s essentially where we go from there. I mean, part of me is just completely horrified that had happened and part of me for the historical record is very glad we have the information that we have, because the story was so manipulated, and you know, King’s image has been manipulated by so many people for so long. And here you are saying, well, actually, no, I’ve done the homework, and I’ve done the reading and here’s what you don’t know. And, you know, for a long time, Lyndon Johnson was sort of presented as the guy right and this is not to diminish anything Johnson did. He did some amazing, amazing things, especially with civil rights legislation. But it seems like Hoover was really yanking his chain a little bit, especially when it came to King in a way that actually ultimately sort of cleaved their relationship King and Johnson, who seem to have been working together well enough. And then though, you’ve got these transcripts, and can we talk about LBJ?

It’s, it’s sad, because when, when JFK was assassinated, one of the first calls, he makes this to MLK, and they’re friendly, and he calls him Martin. And even after Johnson’s reelection, he makes a point of calling King, one of the first people he calls to thank him for his support. And then you begin to see and you can hear it because not only do we have the transcripts of these conversations, we have the audio tapes, because LBJ was recording most of the calls from the White House. And we can listen, anybody can go listen at the LBJ Library to these calls. And you can hear the tone changing, you can hear the friendship, shriveling and dying and they still need each other they still work together. But the warmth is gone. And why? It’s because LBJ is getting a steady stream a shockingly steady stream of memos directly from J. Edgar Hoover, about the most personal details of Kings life that are oftentimes just tawdry that have nothing to do with King’s activities that in any way that would matter to the White House. It’s just that both men seem to be enjoying spying on King’s personal life. And it’s really sad and you cannot help but think that this changed history. This changed the balance of their relationship and limited King’s effectiveness, he no longer had this great working relationship with the President.

Yeah, I have to say, I understand that in the historical context. J. Edgar Hoover was you know, he created law enforcement as we know it, and all, you know, he was bringing law and order to a lawless state and all this other stuff. But frankly, I would personally very much like to have time travel and go back and pop him in the nose. Because I just the dude is a problem, the dude is a problem. And, you know, actually, there’s this great new biography of him that’s like 900 pages, the Beverly Gage, which that’s what I’ve heard, it’s fantastic. And I’m not sure I can spend 900 pages with this guy, I just, you know, and obviously, it says more about me as a reader than it says about her work as a historian. But this guy, J. Edgar Hoover is a problem. He is not a good guy. He’s just he’s a creep. He’s a complete creep.

Well, you don’t have to pop them in the nose, or you can’t, but you could take his name off of the headquarters of the FBI. I think that that building should be renamed tomorrow.

I’m profoundly uncomfortable by the idea that there are people running around who still think he’s all that in a bag of chips, you know. And then you see this rivalry with Robert Kennedy and Hoover. And it’s just it’s, it’s chaos. And it’s all of this ego. It’s all of this personal ego, where all of these people think they’re doing the right thing for the country.

Let’s point out that it’s also racism, that there’s a sense that Black people are a threat that they’re not quite treated like real Americans that they must be up to something they must be trying to destroy what we’ve built here, and there’s a there’s a sense of, you know, white Christian nationalism at the base of everything that Hoover’s doing. And there’s a great new book about that by Lerone Martin that I would recommend to folks, they’re not targeting King just because they think his sex life makes him a hypocrite. And they’re not targeting because they think he’s surrounded by communists. There are former communists everywhere in the United States in the 60s. They’re doing it because they see a threat to the order and that means the you know, the white order that they’ve come to know and love.

Yeah, we’re taping this right after Harry Belafonte has died at 96. And he was an advisor to Dr. King along with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and Sidney Poitier and Dick Gregory, I want to talk about how he helped Dr. King, become Dr. King, because he’s also doing a lot of this work while all of this terrible FBI stuff is happening and all Johnson is losing, you know, faith in Dr. King, and here’s Harry Belafonte saying, Well, I’ve got some money, right? I believe in what you’re doing. I can help and there was a genuine friendship there. But also, Belafonte really was committed to the work of to his own detriment in some cases, especially when it came to his career.

Yeah, and one of the great privileges for me was that I got to interview people like Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte. I spent three and a half hours with Belafonte at his home in New York, and these are people who knew King really well and were able to talk about the dynamic in his marriage and how he and Coretta not only got along, but how she helped guide the movement. These are people who really knew the Kings intimately, you know, to your point Belafonte and Dick Gregory and a lot of these people from Hollywood understood that they had a kind of power to shape culture to shape public opinion in a way that, you know, people might like my parents might not have been tuned into the words of activists. But when Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier came on TV, or when Louis Armstrong stood up and complained about the treatment of the kids trying to integrate the schools in Little Rock that gets through to the white folks like my parents in, you know, in the suburbs of New York, King recognized that this was an important part of the struggle to that he really needed these celebrities to magnify what he was saying, and to force people who maybe weren’t receptive to think differently about civil rights, those guys are really important to the story.

And Coretta, coming back to Coretta, who was so ahead of her time in so many ways, and you even say this in the book to the women made it possible for the movement to become a mass movement, not only because they’re supporting their families and their husbands, but they’re also doing the work amongst themselves. And in fact, Coretta is the woman who brings King more to an antiwar stance when it comes to Vietnam. Because again, like J Edgar Hoover, the Vietnam War was very popular until it wasn’t. And in that moment, King is coming out and saying, well, no, I’ve always believed in peace, this war is immoral. It’s unjust. We have to stop it now. And that’s when you start to really see people shift. So, you’ve got the whole undermining by the FBI, you’ve got Johnson losing faith in him because of the FBI, and now Johnson’s really mad, really mad, because Dr. King is coming out and saying, no, no, this war is garbage, this war is just the worst idea ever. So for you, I mean, obviously, you know that that was sort of the turning point. And we all know that that’s a big turning point in the relationship. But what did you find in the new releases of the FBI tapes that may have pushed it even closer to what’s in the book?

Well, I think one of the things I learned is that Hoover was much more aggressive in trying to destroy that relationship between King and Johnson, no question about that. And Johnson was not the passive recipient of these FBI documents. He was he was encouraging Hoover, in some ways, that just it’s incredibly deceitful. It’s a little bit like, you know, reminds me of Nixon and Watergate, where he feels like he has to know what his enemies are up to. And he’s treating King like an enemy, like the opposition, as opposed to, you know, arguably his most important ally. And it gets worse because by the end, you know, Hoover, the FBI, are producing memos saying that King is our number one threat. And there’s a memo early in 68, saying, I call it the Messiah memo, that there’s no threat anymore of Malcolm becoming the Black Messiah, Stokely Carmichael is too much of a fringe character, it’s really King, who represents the greatest threat to become the Black Messiah and to lead a true revolution in this country. And that’s shocking when you think about the fact that King’s values were all derived from the Bible, and that he was a true moral leader who was trying to bridge the gaps between people and for his government, treat him that way is shocking. But the FBI circulates this memo to every office, every FBI office in the country saying we must disrupt, we must destroy, we must render him ineffective, whatever it takes. And you’re creating the kind of environment and I think they know this, in which there might be some lone gunman out there who decides to take this into his own hands, because this is what American Government wants, this is what a patriot should do. And that’s, to me, one of our greatest tragedies.

And also, on top of that, because I think you’re absolutely right about all of it, on top of it, in ‘66, Congress swings to the Republicans. Johnson comes out and he says, well, it’s the liberals and it’s labor, but it’s Martin Luther King in Chicago. And you and I have just talked about how Chicago didn’t really work. King was still considered an outsider. He didn’t make the inroads that he thought it was going to be. And yet, here’s Johnson coming back and saying, no, that’s the exact moment and I’m wondering, what I don’t understand — Can you explain?

Johnson thinks that King is creating the sense of lawlessness, that he’s creating the sense that America is broken, that there’s rioting in the streets and Johnson blames King in part for this. And then when King starts speaking out against the Vietnam War, that’s when it really goes too far for Johnson that, you know, now he’s just out to get Johnson takes this personally, and I think Johnson is losing it, to be honest, I think he’s losing his grasp on his ability to really properly assess the big picture here because he’s taking it personally. He feels like this war is destroying his presidency, and it’s not my fault. You know, it’s King’s fault for calling attention to the disaster of this war, King becomes the one who’s getting beat up for it when he’s really just trying to call out what he believes in. And again, you know, he’s calling on his religious values. He’s a prophet, and we tend to kill our prophets in this country.

So I want to come back to Malcolm X for a second, because you mentioned him slightly earlier. And yes, he was murdered before Dr. King, part of me wonders if they’d both been able to live out their lives as they should have been, what would that relationship possibly have been like? And maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I mean, I do love this Peniel Joseph book, which is a joint biography of the two of them called the Sword and the Shield. Do you have an opinion?

Yeah, it’s a great book, by the way, by Peniel Joseph, I do have an opinion about it. I think that they had a lot more in common than they did have differences. And the media tried to provoke those differences, and still does today. And I think, you know, had they both lived, they clearly were already beginning to find more common ground. I mean, Malcolm shows up in Selma, and King’s in jail, and says to Coretta, you know, let them know that if I can be the distraction, maybe people will see that things could be a lot scarier if I’m the one being heard. So maybe that helps Dr. King, you know, in some way, I think that they, they recognize they had a lot more in common and Malcolm toward the end was even beginning to get more involved in politics, and I think they were they would have found more common ground. And one of the things I discovered in my research was that is new and that I was really amazed by was that Playboy magazine interview with King, which is the longest interview king ever did, was falsified, they changed King’s quote, this is Alex Haley, who’s doing the interview, we now know did have some plagiarism problems, among other things. He changed King’s quote, King did not say those incendiary things about Malcolm, he did not say that Malcolm was wrong for turning everything into violence. We need to correct the record and we need to understand that these guys were more allied than we tend to think.

Yeah, I just I think they both could have done amazing, amazing things, because we’re coming up on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Church. We’re coming up on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I mean, this is not that long ago. None of this is that long ago. 1968 was, you know, not that none of that 55 years ago, I mean, none of this is ancient history. And one of the things I really appreciate about the book, though, is, as you said, you’re trying to write a much more intimate portrait and so here we’ve got Coretta in a way that you know, if you’ve read her autobiography, certainly you have a fuller portrait of her but I think not everyone has quite the idea that you have, you know, the role you’ve given her and brought her back into the forefront, and what have you, but also, it seems that Dr. King was hospitalized at least a few times for exhaustion or depression.

Yeah, and that also goes to helping us better understand the important role Coretta played and I want to mention that, you know, I asked Harry Belafonte, what was it about Coretta that that made Martin fall in love with her? Because he had a lot of girlfriends and a lot of beautiful, intelligent women, who he went out with it, who loved him and were released, liked him a whole lot. Belafonte said, well, it was because she was a more experienced activist than he was at that point. She had, you know, really been involved at Antioch in all of these protests. And she, I think, what he said was that King was really blown away by her passion and her intelligence and her experience as an activist and she led him much of the way like she really, even though she had to stay home and take care of the kids and King was pretty sexist in his views about the role of the woman in the household. Nevertheless, Coretta was pushing all the time and she was out front on Vietnam, she was out front on a lot of these things. She was also aware that that her husband needed support, emotionally, that it wasn’t just, you know, being home to cook for him that he suffered emotionally. He was depressed at times his friends to said they thought it was clinical depression. He was hospitalized numerous times. And you can hear again on these FBI transcripts him saying I’d like to sustain the hospital a few more weeks, because I’m just wrecked. You know, I’m not ready to get out back out into the world. And Coretta had to hold him up through that, too. So somebody needs to write a new Coretta biography soon, too. And if they do, you know, call me I’m happy to help.

I think it’ll happen at some point. I mean, her book came out in 17, though, so.

Right, but it’s an autobiography. It’s a memoir. And it’s and it needs you know, somebody with the scholarship and research chops needs to dive into that story. And maybe find her personal letters, which we still haven’t found.

I was about to say you mentioned a suitcase that was under her bed that apparently no one has seen hide nor hair of since.

Yeah, my biggest regret. I’m a relentless reporter, I spent, you know, two years trying to find certain little folders of information. And it took me three and a half years to find King’s unpublished autobiography. But those blue, the blue suitcase full of personal letters between Martin and Coretta, that I did not get a hold of, and I’m guessing maybe one of the King children has that suitcase full of letters right now. And that’s my, my white whale.

I get it. I totally get it. What was the biggest surprise for you that I mean, you have worked as a journalist for a number of years, you’ve done major biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, this is certainly not your first time with shaping this kind of project. I mean, it’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of labor. It’s a lot of legwork. But did anything surprise you?

Well, first of all, I was surprised by how much stuff on King had not yet been discovered. Because his life has been so well documented, there are at least three University Libraries dedicated to collecting his materials and yet I found a lot of new stuff. And that’s, I think, just a testament to the power of biography when somebody has the kind of time that I had and I don’t teach, I don’t do anything else. I don’t write magazine stories, I just spent six years doing nothing but digging, writing, you can find new things about even our most celebrated and well documented figures. So I hope that people, you know, continue to follow and attempt this difficult kind of work. I was just surprised that how vulnerable King was at how he let us see that not just in these recordings on the FBI, but in letters and in conversations with friends. We’ve treated him especially since the national holiday, which we treat them as a monument. Now we teach them in very simplistic terms. Even if you just read his books, which we don’t do in our schools, we don’t read King’s work even there, you can see the subtlety, the doubt, as well as the glory and the bravery. And I think that, you know, we need to we need to accept and sort of celebrate that.

The subtlety and the doubt, and also the anger. And, you know, again, it’s the fuller portrait. I mean, I am always amazed when I see his quotes taken out of context. I’m like, well, I know you clearly do not know where that comes from. You can say that, but wow, you do not know. And it’s kind of fascinating how we’ve co-opted, you know, things that he’s said, and just taking them straight out of contacts and been like, well, that looks like a great Instagram post.

Yeah, you know, he his drum major speech in which he’s decrying materialism is now used as a car commercial. So we’ve corrupted him. And I think that’s another good reason to go back and, you know, really engage with his life and with his words, because as you said, he was angry. He saw America, the dream that he talked about, in 1963 turned into a nightmare. He felt like America had lost its way and the speech, the sermon that he was going to give before he died, the last sermon he planned would have been this, you know that his next sermon, if he hadn’t been assassinated was, was all about how America had failed that the dream had died and he was angry. He wasn’t resigned to it. He was committed to continue the fight.

I’m also wondering how the media would have covered that speech and what it would have sounded like, you have this anecdote about Roger Mud, being sent to cover the March on Washington and he was so nervous that he wouldn’t have enough content that he barfed in the bushes. I was just like, wow, I because, you know, my entire experience of Roger Mud is, you know, a middle aged man delivering the news kind of thing, but hmm. Nervous, barfing in the bushes. Okay, but what do you think would have happened if he had been able to deliver that speech?

Well, he was already falling out of favor, he had plummeted off of all of the Gallup polls of the most respected Americans public opinion was really going against him. And one of the things I talked about as the if you do a chart of the popularity of the name Martin, by the mid 60s, it’s fallen off. A lot of black families aren’t naming their kids Martin anymore. And he was falling out of favor. So I think you would have seen the public continue to turn on him and certainly the mainstream the white media continuing to turn on him. Some of his friends said that his early death may have saved him from a lot of strife, from a lot of depression because things weren’t going well. This SCLC was falling apart. Funding was off, and it’s not clear what his course would have been. I, of course, think that he would have found a way to still be heard and I think he would have remained an important moral leader. Look at the way Harry Belafonte, you know, and others, John Lewis, you know, some of them continued, even as society changed, even as the country shifted in the Civil Rights Movement lost momentum or morphed into something different. They still found a way to be heard and I’m confident King would have done that he was not going to, you know, retire to the Riviera.

No, I think you’re right. Part of what is slightly hard going in this book, is seeing so many comparisons to life right now and the idea that you know, you’re covering. I mean, you do cover his youth in graduate school and all of that. But the soul of the thing is 11 years. 11 years, I feel like there are pieces of this book that make me think we’ve made no progress whatsoever. And yet, at the same time, the work that came before was shockingly advanced for its time.

Well, I wrote this book, much of it during the Trump administration, during the George Floyd protests during of Charlottesville and all of these other, you know, horrifying moments in recent history. And of course, you can’t help but draw parallels and to really feel sad that King was talking about these very same things. I mean, we forget that the March on Washington included a call to end police brutality, that it called for reparations that it said the America had written a bankrupt check to black Americans that have never fulfilled its promise that jailing black people was never going to be the answer, but it seemed to be the answer that Americans liked, the best white Americans liked the best king was saying all these things, you know, 60 years ago. So it was painful to watch the news during this time of writing this book, of course, that has to inform the way I’m writing. And I think that’s the important thing about biographies is that they exist in at least two times they exist in the time you’re writing about the time you’re writing, and then for the reader, the time you’re reading. And that kind of engagement is what makes the biography such a special thing.

And I have to say King: A Life is deeply satisfying read, it’s also the way you structured it, it’s the way you write. I mean, you do tend to write with a novelist eye for detail, which I appreciate because I mean, I do want to blow up my brain and, you know, sit with other people’s lives and whatnot. But at the same time, I don’t want to feel like I’m being fed my cultural vegetables, and you make it very easy to raise some very difficult stuff. So can we talk about your style for a second? Can we talk about some of the influences I know you’ve always worked, or you had always worked in newspapers until you started writing these very big biographies? So let’s talk about who you love to read and who’s influenced you the most?

Wow, good question. I mean, if you go way back, you know, to my newspaper days, I was reading you know, Calvin Trilling and Susan Orlean and trying to be a better journalist. And yeah, and a lot of these New Yorker writers, Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated just one of my huge early influences. And these are people who have enormous curiosity about the world and are just every story they tell it’s as if they’ve discovered this for the first time. So you know, John McPhee is writing a tennis match as if he’s the first person to see a tennis match, right? And I try to bring that to my work, I want to write a really informed biography of King, but I want to introduce you to him as if you’ve never heard of him or met him before and understand how he came to be. So I tried to go into it as if like, I’m the first person to tell this story and I do learn from my other writers. I do. I read almost all in all fiction when I’m working on a book, as I’m reading a ton of I can turn the camera show you all the books I’m reading when I’m when I’m doing this work, but in terms of like my writerly brain, I’m reading fiction. I’m reading Tolstoy, I’m reading the best storytellers in the world, and trying to figure out how to really use detail and color and character development and pacing to make the story work. I’m not an academic, and in some ways that that frees me to tell the story the way that I think will be the smartest and the most appealing and entertaining.

And as a reader, I thank you for that. Because really, I this was a pleasure. I mean, as much as there is difficult stuff in the book, and you leave nothing out. But it’s also it feels so of the moment, it feels so necessary. It feels urgent, like this book feels urgent and intimate, which is a really hard act to pull off. Not everyone can do that. So thank you from this reader.

Wow, I’m flattered. Thank you.

What are you working on next?

This is a big hard question. I have not yet chosen a subject for this book. I’ve got a bunch of little projects. I’m working on some TV and, and documentary stuff, which I’m super excited about. And I’ve got a couple of ideas for the next book, but I haven’t settled on one yet.

Okay, that’s fair enough. We’ll wait. We can be patient,

I hope. I hope I figure it out quickly because I really love doing this. And I start to get antsy if I don’t have something to really sink my teeth into.

And having read King, it shows that you like what you’re doing. It shows that you like the chase, and it shows that you care about the sentences and the structure and everything else. It’s really, it’s a pleasure to read this book. So Jonathan Eig thank you so much. King: A Life, life is out now. And there’s also the Muhammad Ali biography, there’s the Lou Gehrig, and I know I’m missing a couple of others.

Jackie Robinson, Capone, the birth of the pill, everyone forgets about the pill book.

There’s lots of stuff that you can experience with Jonathan after.

Thank you

Poured Over