By Dan McGrath
Leo’s students heard from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author on Monday, March 10 when Jonathan Eig visited the school.
“King: A Life,” Eig’s biography of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in American journalism. It was hardly the first book devoted to the iconic leader of the American Civil Rights movement, but it is regarded as the most comprehensive and was six years in the making.
“I wrote it because I consider Dr. King to be on a level with the Founding Fathers for his impact on this country,” Eig told a schoolwide assembly in the Leo Auditorium. “The Civil Rights movement changed America, and there is no way to overstate Dr. King’s role as a leader in the Civil Rights movement.”
Eig is a native New Yorker, but he has lived in Chicago since graduating from Northwestern and beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He visited Leo at the behest of journalism instructors Bill Figel and Daniel Ridges.
His other works include biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali; “Opening Day,” a chronicle of Jackie Robinson’s first season in major league baseball, and “Get Capone,” which recounts the government’s efforts to bring notorious mobster Al Capone to justice on tax-evasion charges.
Eig addressed the student body for roughly half an hour, after journalism students Kaleb Larry, Chase Jordan, Damari Griffin and Nick Armour read passages from the book that they found especially interesting. A 40-minute Q&A followed Eig’s talk.
The book’s narrative begins with Dr. King’s involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, which was set in motion after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing a bus driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus.
“Dr. King was 26 years old,” Eig said. “The Civil Rights movement grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Dr. King became the leader at age 26. He had stature as a pastor and great skills as an orator.”
But the role came at a price. Dr. King, Eig said, was “the most hated man in America” for much of the 1960s as the white establishment, personified by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, came to view him as a threat to the status quo. They were relentless in their efforts to discredit him, tailing him, recording his phone conversations and leaking salacious details to the press.
“Can you imagine trying to do your job and be effective in something you really believe in with the weight of the entire U.S. government against you?” Eig asked the students. “The tactics were unethical, immoral, illegal … none of it mattered to Hoover. He hated King and was out to get him.”
Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 is another seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
That, perhaps, is the most memorable passage. But from its first word to its last, the speech is so powerful, so eloquent and so reasoned a demand for racial justice that Eig considers it one of the greatest speeches ever given. Not quite five years later, Dr. King would be dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet in April 1968 in Memphis, Tenn.
“He lived in fear of it,” Eig said, “but it never stopped him from doing the work he felt he was put on earth to do.”
Through the generosity of Ray Siegel ’65 and other alumni, young reader versions of the King book were presented to the entire student body, with “regular” versions available for faculty staff. Eig lingered in the auditorium for more than 40 minutes after the presentation signing copies of the books.
“Dr. King died in 1968, so he’s just a figure in the history books to most of us,” said Leo’s principal, Dr. Shaka Rawls. “But to hear his story from someone who has studied it so extensively and knows it so well, it was such a great experience for our students.