Book Review: Young King

Title: Young King

Author: Lerone Martin

Date: May 5, 2026

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-0-06-334094-7

Quote: "This book...asks us to strip [the] Reverend Dr. King of the iconic status that adorns him today and allow him to simply be an adolescent."

Fair Disclosure: This review is based on an advance review copy of the manuscript I received in February 2026. Though advance review copies are sent to reviewers in good faith, occasionally reviewers mention things in advance review copies that are changed when the final edition is published for everyone else to read. 

Before there was a Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, there was a boy, smaller than his younger brother and sometimes bullied by same, originally called Michael, then M.L., sometimes Tweed for the suits he liked to wear in the years when high school boys were required to wear suits, sometimes Will Shoot for the way he played basketball. This book is about that boy. It is a real, thoroughly researched, "Childhood of Famous Americans" story. 

Because Martin Luther King himself never told us much about his childhood, this book is based on other people's memories and written records. It's not as intimate a record, nor in some ways as accurate, as memoirs like Helen Keller's Story of My Life or even memory-based novels, where other people's identities are blurred in order to let the author/character speak frankly, like Little Town on the Prairie. It probably contains all that is known about the early life of Martin Luther King.

Lerone Martin raises the question that the future Dr. King showed both introvert and extrovert behavior; he did seem to have a strong internal conscience. He was nonviolent as a little boy and as a man, despite a conscious plan to develop the ability to fight like a man of his time in his teen years; he was also one of those "outgoing" children who want to "make friends" of every other child they meet. I've suspected that this mix occurs when a healthy introvert brain sustains some minor damage. The baby later to be known as Martin Luther King didn't start breathing easily; his mother had been ill and there was some question whether he was going to survive. Just a data point, for whatever it may turn out to be worth.

"ML," as Martin calls his subject, was not the best student, either. To some extent this may have been due to competitiveness. Children and some parents admired a student who was able to skip through school and graduate earlier than others. Little ML King wanted to start kindergarten before he was old enough, then wanted to skip through high school and start college before he was even sixteen years old. He was bright enough to get into those classes with older students but not bright enough to do very well in them; he was mostly a C stream student who could sometimes pour on the effort to achieve a B. What he learned as an undergraduate at Morehouse was mostly public speaking; he entered Morehouse unsure about whether he wanted to be a preacher, and emerged as one of the greatest preachers of all time. But he didn't write much and his sermons borrowed heavily from other people's words, notably those of the poet Langston Hughes. 

And was he really a Christian? Warning: the reviewer is about to say something "liberal" here. In the history of Christianity there have always been people who naturally love "religious language" and contemplative prayer and thoughts about Heaven. They can look, especially when young, alarmingly similar to people with certain kinds of mental illness, though they are not mentally ill and can have effective ministries. Then there are people who may believe Heaven is real and even wish we could spend hours in contemplative prayer, but whose idea of being Christians is essentially practical, firmly rooted in this earthly life. There have always been tendencies for people with these different types of approaches to our religion to question whether both types really are Christian. Some people think the other kind of believers aren't doing Christianity right--they are "trying to be holier than God," or "all about people rather than God." Some people think the other kind may be doing Christianity better than they are, and wish they had the ability to express their faith in the other way. I think both kinds are at least capable of serving Christ. He did, after all, call both John and Peter.

As a young ministerial student Martin Luther King was a good match for Morehouse. He had quarrelled with his father, asserting that many things in the Bible were "fairy tales." Morehouse's teachers met young men who felt that way where they were and challenged them to discover the spiritual truth behind the "fairy tales." They took the "Of course Jonah wasn't really swallowed by a whale, so what can we learn from the allegorical story about him?" approach, and, as a university for young Black men, turned out preachers prepared to take their place in the Black American tradition. White churches could afford to have pensive, contemplative spiritual sons of St John in the pulpit. Black churches demanded active, practical sons of St Peter, which happened to be what King had aspired to be--to the extent that he'd dreamed of being a doctor or lawyer before he considered being a minister. 

Martin shows evidence that ML really was the idealist people wanted to believe he was after he'd become a martyr. Not in all ways, of course. On jobs that involved physical work he was voted the laziest student laborer in the crew. In his social life he was the typical selfish young man, coolheadedly pursuing the right combination of charm, beauty, talent, and altruism necessary to an ideal pastor's wife (or unpaid minister) in a series of three girls he seriously considered marrying, joking with friends about seeking treatment from young women of lower social background as "doctors" who cured all a fellow's problems so long as he made sure to wear his "shoes," and planning to go on exploiting and betraying women similarly after marriage. But he really did hate race prejudice and segregation with such a passion that, given opportunities to put it behind him and live in a place where segregation was not the law, he preferred to live in a place where segregation was the law and work to change that law. He really did know that working for change might shorten his life expectancy. He really did seem to think that ending segregation was a cause worth being a martyr for. 

So, although this book is not a hagiography, although it mentions ML's moments of rebellion and indiscretion and even quotes teachers who gave him low grades, it will still leave activists who read it feeling humbled. None of us will ever, at least not for several more generations, escape comparison with Dr. King. Few if any of us will ever accomplish as much as he did. Knowing that he had his moments of insecurity, frustration, and being-a-bad-example may at least reduce any resentment the comparisons make us feel. Nothing will ever change his status as the "King" of all activists.