I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. by Michael Eric Dyson

This is a deep dive into Martin Luther King Jr. as a growing, changing person. Michael Eric Dyson shows that popular misunderstandings are often done on purpose. People love to borrow convenient lines from the “I Have a Dream” speech and act like those few pages is all he is. Memorializing him like that severely tones down his message. And then treating him like an overdone hero makes people feel like they don’t actually have to engage with his actual ideology. When really the best stuff is about King is that he faces his lessons head on. Like after some successes in the South, King comes to Chicago to do the same thing and realizes it’s not the same thing. What worked for him down there was tailor-made to their social conditions. Dyson breaks down that dynamic between the “quiet rebellion” in the South and the “subversive exaggeration” in the North so smooth (Dyson 104-7). Dyson also mentions that part of Malcolm X’s problem with him might be because deep down he knew his own methodol