An excerpt from a recent Democracy Now interview with Jonathan Eig, the author of the new book King: A Life.

I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that our heroes have flaws, and if we expect our heroes to be perfect, nobody will ever rise to the occasion. Nobody will even try.

And King was deeply flawed. As you mentioned, he attempted suicide twice as a teenager, jumping from a second-story window of his home when he was upset about, first, an injury suffered by his grandmother and then, later, by her death. And when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was hospitalized at the time for what he called anxiety, but for what Coretta described as depression. He was hospitalized numerous times throughout his life because the pressure had just gotten to him so badly.

And, of course, the FBI knew about this and attempted to weaponize it, as you say. They took his personal life, reported on it, distributed that information not only to the president of the United States, but to members of Congress and to members of the media, hoping that somebody would go public with it and destroy his marriage, destroy his reputation and, essentially, destroy the civil rights movement. At one point, they even planned for a replacement for King, choosing Samuel Pierce to become the next leader of the civil rights movement once they managed to get King out of the way.

So this was a deliberate, extended and really mean-spirited campaign, driven not just by their fear of King, not just by their fear of a race — of a Black man rising to prominence, but really driven by a fear of losing the power as was enjoyed by white people primarily at that time. They wanted to maintain the existing power structure.