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To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955-1968 To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955-1968 By Stewart Burns HarperSanFrancisco, 502 pp.; $27.95

If you made your way through the American public school system in the last quarter-century or so, you have probably heard more classroom references to Martin Luther King, Jr., than to any other historical figure. And of course it's impossible to read even for a week in the best newspapers and journals of public opinion without encountering mention of King and his legacy.

This very familiarity can be deceptive, in two ways. First, we can easily imagine we know more about King than we really do. Those documentaries with their iconic images are indispensable, but they don't magically confer knowledge in depth. And second, even if we have read a good deal in the massive and ever-growing literature devoted to King's life and his role in the civil rights movement—not "even if," in fact, but precisely because—we may very well be jaded, despite ourselves, jaded from overexposure and false piety, so that to recover a sense of those incredible events and, just as important, what they might mean for America right now, today: that is a formidable challenge, but one worth taking.

If you are up for that challenge, there's a timely new book, issued to mark the 75th anniversary of King's birth. (Did that stop you in your tracks for a moment as it did me? King could so very easily still be alive to day, I thought—but doesn't that miss the inexorable logic of his confrontation with Sauron-like powers?) The book is To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr,'s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955-1968, by Stewart Burns, for many years an editor of the King papers at Stanford and the compiler of Daybreak of Freedom, a valuable documentary history of the Montgomery bus boycott. (See my "Bookshelf" in the March/April 1998 Books &Culture, an issue which includes a special section, "Thirty Years After Martin Luther King.")

To the Mountaintop is billed as a biography of King, but that is misleading, and readers who come to the book expecting a "life" will be disappointed. It's neither a biography, strictly speaking—though it includes some stretches of biographical narrative—nor a straight history, but rather an unusual sort of book that combines biography, history, and spiritual exhortation. The closest analogue I can think of is the "providential history" practiced by Ian Murray, for example, though Burns is operating with a very different set of assumptions.

At the heart of Burns' book is an account of King's spiritual transformation. The young King, in part by temperament, in part under the influence of the intellectual establishment, practiced a fastidious detachment from the emotional faith that animated black congregations. "By the time he graduated from Crozer Seminary in 1951," Burns writes, "he was determined to find an orderly, rational God to undergird his faith, a God of ideas rather emotions, a thinking man's personal God befitting a suave, modern Negro intellectual."

The turning point came on the night of December 5, 1955, when King spoke to a congregation of thousands (most of them listening outside via loud speaker) at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks had been arrested several days before for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Here, Burns writes, King encountered "working poor people who, unlike [him], talked to God every day and lived their toilsome lives in an elevated world of Spirit."

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48