Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983
Prophet with Honor
By Marshall Frady
Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Stephen B. Oates
New American Library, 560 pp., $8.95 (paper)
He was close, before it was over, to becoming the American Gandhi—a stocky, solemn man, deliberate and ponderous of manner in his deacon-sober suits. His round face, black as asphalt, had a bland gaze of bourgeois placidity, even while, from the pulpit, he bayed forth his billowing moral metaphors like a pipe organ. 'For too long have we been trampled under the iron feet of oppression, too long bound in the starless midnight of racism'—the real eloquence of his heaving locutions was in the cry of the human spirit gathering itself for slow and terrific struggle. But beyond his Promethean part in the 'black awakening' of the Fifties and Sixties, Martin Luther King, Jr., was on his way to becoming a prophet to the whole national community at America's Augustan high noon of pride and power. To the extent he failed in both those struggles we sense the immensity of his absence now.
Review, 5750 words
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