Transcript for Jonathan Eig and Yohance Lacour: New Perspectives on Stories From the Past

A quick warning: this episode includes cursing and stories of violence. Please take care while listening.

Host, Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Each spring 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with some of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.

Jonathan Eig: I'm Jonathan Eig. I am a journalist and the author of several books, including King: A Life that won the Pulitzer.

Nicole Carroll: Back in 2017, the historian and journalist Jonathan Eig decided to write a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. even though multiple biographies of King already existed.

He spent the next six years reading previously unreleased FBI memos, and interviewing Justice Department officials and people who were close to King. The final product was a book that shed important new light on the man – and on the extreme lengths the US government went to thwart him.

It also includes details of King's life that some readers found objectionable and a stain on King's legacy – information about affairs and in one instance, an FBI memo alleging that King had encouraged a rape that took place in his presence.

When Jonathan’s book, King: A Life, was published, he got a lot of praise. At the same time, he also got questioned about being a white man writing about some alarming aspects of King’s life.

Jonathan knew the risk he was taking when he embarked on the book. To him, it felt important to humanize the iconic American figure.

Taking that risk helped earn Jonathan the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.  

And when we reached out to him to see if he'd like to be a guest on this podcast, we assumed he'd want to talk about his book and his process, and the range of responses to his portrait of Dr. King. But he had a different idea...

Jonathan Eig: You guys reached out to me and said, You're doing these Pulitzer podcasts. And I immediately thought of Yohance. 

Nicole Carroll: That Yohance is Yohance Lacour. A Chicago-based journalist and writer who, along with his team at the Invisible Institute (a nonprofit media outlet), won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for Audio Reporting for a podcast called You Didn’t See Nothin.

Yohance Lacour: I’m Yohance Lacour. 25 years ago in Chicago, a little boy was beaten into a coma just for being Black. Almost overnight, the news stories turned to racial reconciliation and forgiveness. This is a podcast about how that happened and how it changed my life. This is You Didn’t See Nothin.

Nicole Carroll: You Didn’t See Nothin is about a brutal attack on a 13-year old Black boy named Lenard Clark. But it's also about much more than that.

It's about the anger Yohance felt at the time of the beating. And how he channeled that anger into covering the story for a small Black-owned newspaper called the South Street Journal, and it's about how Yohance's understanding of the story at the time differed so dramatically from the way it was being covered by pretty much everyone else.

As Yohance saw it – and still sees it – powerful members of both the white and Black communities in Chicago conspired to protect the white kids who beat Lenard Clark. And to do so, they pushed for racial reconciliation and unity, ultimately silencing angry members of the Black community. Decades later, Yohance set out to understand why the media, an almost entirely white mainstream media, ignored that story.

It turns out, Jonathan Eig was part of that mainstream media. Like Yohance, Jonathan reported on the Lenard Clark beating, but for a popular outlet called Chicago magazine.

Jonathan Eig: I didn't know about Yohance, I didn't know about him in 1997 when I was when we were both covering the story. I don't think our paths ever crossed and I didn't know about his podcast until it won the Pulitzer, and I'm embarrassed that I never heard about it when it first came out because it's great and we had this incredible overlap that we were both covering this story in 1997.

Nicole Carroll: As Jonathan listened to Yohance's podcast, he found himself in agreement with everything Yohance was saying about the push for racial reconciliation and the media’s role in spreading that narrative.

Jonathan Eig: The fact that he got to go back and revisit it and think about how he covered it and how the rest of the world covered it and what we got right and what we got wrong really excited me because I think about that kind of stuff all the time. I think about the stories that I've covered as a journalist that I wish I could go back and do again. And it's usually painful to go back and read my old work because it's not good enough. It's not as good as I want it to be. But that's okay, because, you know, that's how you learn to be a better journalist, I guess. So I just thought that it would be really cool for Yohance and me to to sort of chop it up and to see what we remembered and to maybe figure out why I did such a bad job of covering it the first time around.

Nicole Carroll: And Yohance wanted to talk to Jonathan too. So on a windy fall day in Chicago – naturally – the two journalists met up for a conversation.

Yohance Lacour: I'm Yohance Lacour. And really proud and honored to have won a Pulitzer Prize with my team, the audio team of the Invisible Institute. And I got a call from the Pulitzer folks, and they invited me to have a sit down with Jonathan Eig here, man, who’s also from Chicago, a writer [of] an amazing piece of literature on Martin Luther King, for which he also received a Pulitzer. So here I am, a Pulitzer Prize winner sitting with another Pulitzer Prize winner talking shop.

Jonathan Eig: I don't think there's two other Pulitzer Prize winners sitting down together in Chicago today.

Yohance Lacour: No, no, I don't think so.

Jonathan Eig: That’s cool. And the reason we're really here is because I covered that story too back in 1997. I covered Lenard Clark's story. And when I heard about your podcast, it brought back all kinds of memories.

Nicole Carroll: Sitting at a picnic table in Armour Square Park, Jonathan and Yohance talked about what it means to revisit old stories in order to offer new perspectives, about the importance of collaboration and the role journalism can still play in helping America face and heal from its wrongdoings.

Yohance Lacour: We're looking this way, and that used to be a long row and line of Chicago housing – longest stretch of public housing in the country once stood right here. And among that was the Stateway Gardens, which was a high rise complex. Lenard Clark, who was 13 at the time, lived in. And he winds up in this neighborhood, which which is across the tracks that are also behind us, the tracks and the Dan Ryan [Expressway] and the Dan Ryan was actually constructed so as to separate this neighborhood from Stateway to keep Black folks and especially poor Black folks out of this very racist Irish and Italian neighborhood. But it was also home to, you know, two of our longest standing mayors, Mayor Daley and his son, Mayor Daley. And so when Lenard left his house that day with his bicycle, he had a flat tire and he wanted to get air for his bicycle tire. And the air was free in Bridgeport, but the air cost a quarter in the projects. So he risked his life to come get some air for his tire. And he's with another kid. He’s with a few kids. But he’s with one Black kid that he left the projects with and 2 or 3 Latino kids that had gathered with him to play some football. And right on this street, right here or nearby, he is spotted by a group of young Italian boys while they're driving by and they decide they're going to attack him simply because he's Black and they all got chased. But Lenard didn't get away. And right alongside this pub, right here on the corner, is where they caught him and they stomped him damn near to death. And so the next day, my best friend called me and told me about it. And I'm 23 years old. I'm a self-proclaimed revolutionary and I've got a foot in the streets and a foot in college. And I'm very familiar with, you know, unfortunately, with violence just coming up in Chicago in an era that is, you know, marked by gang culture and white supremacy, obviously, I wanted to do something. So I decided to write about it ‘cause I fashion myself as a writer, among other things.

So obviously you got Lenard Clark who was the victim of this horrible hate crime. Then you got Frank Caruso Jr., who led the gang of what I suspect was six or more Italian young men who beat Lenard Clark, at least chased and helped beat Lenard Clark damn near to death. He was the son of Frank Caruso Sr., who was a Chicago Italian mafia member with ties that literally go back to Al Capone. You got Herbert Martin, who was a Black minister with a pretty powerful voice in this area who was already kind of in bed with the Carusos and the city. And, you know, [the] Carusos basically bought him. And in exchange for that silver, he started to quell stuff and then he wasn’t alone. You know, Black folks were extremely pissed off and riled up when that thing happened. And there were several other Black men, mostly Black men, who were paid off in one way or another to kind of silence their constituents and redirect the framing of this story to racial reconciliation and let's just all get along and this kumbaya story. And then you got Bridgeport. You got this neighborhood and its residents who, like, when this boy was attacked right at this bar I’m pointing at, you know, 150 feet away, Bridgeport residents came out of that bar to protect these young men who had just left this little Black boy for dead. And so it's a big story that spans, you know – we tell the story – looking 25 years back. So, I think those are the main players.

Jonathan Eig: What I love is that you got to do over like you got to look back on it with some perspective as someone who's older, who's lived longer, and also with, you know, historical perspective, what was going on in the world when Lenard Clark got beat up? Why were we so focused on racial reconciliation instead of punishing the people who did the crime? And what can I learn from that as somebody who's still like trying to figure out how to tell stories?

Yohance Lacour: Yeah. So first of all, I didn't go for racial reconciliation, right? But in terms of the collective, you know, in terms of media as a whole in Chicago, it was way too heavily influenced by, you know, the plots and plans of the Caruso family. The racial reconciliation thing was first voiced by Herbert Martin, who was basicallya loudspeaker for the effort to free or, you know, save – rescue – the lead attacker Little Frankie Caruso, Jr. from prosecution and prison.

Jonathan Eig: Right. One of the questions that made me think about when you're talking to us now is um, we don't talk that much about the money piece of it. And obviously, money motivated a lot of people. You know, [the] Carusos handing out money, influenced a lot of people, made them willing to go along – and that feeds the racial reconciliation line. So without the money, do we get this racial reconciliation theme? Are people being motivated in part by greed to support this narrative, which is obviously helpful to the Caruso family in trying to reduce his prison sentence?

Yohance Lacour: Oh, yeah. I think they're motivated wholly by greed because it was when the money started getting passed out that the narrative changed.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: You didn't hear racial reconciliation until people started receiving checks.

Jonathan Eig: And then the media falls for it.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah.

Jonathan Eig: Unaware or overlooking the fact that this line is being fed by money.

Yohance Lacour: Where, where did you first discover the idea of racial reconciliation, if you remember around that case? And why do you think it was so easy for you to follow that thread?

Jonathan Eig: That's a good question. First of all, I'm not a child at this point. I'm 31 years old, maybe, like, I've been around. I've been a reporter for ten years, and yet I still felt like I was naive. I was focused on getting a scoop, on getting a story into the newspaper that other people didn't have. And I was thinking about the fact that I could get an interview with Lenard’s mom, and I could, you know, I got in the hospital in the rehab center where he was in rehab. I was the only reporter who got there. I was, like, focused on scoops, on getting information. And I wasn't thinking. And, and I think this is a typical mistake that I made as a young reporter. And I don't know how you tell a young reporter, like, to learn to think harder right because, like, maybe I just wasn't smart enough or experienced enough yet, but I feel like I was just very often repeating what people said to me. And that allows you to be played because you're not thinking, why are they telling me this? And if I could go back and tell my younger reporter self, like that'd be the question, I'd say you got to stop and think, why is this – why is this – why is Reverend Martin telling you this? Why is he helping you write this story? Why is he feeding you this information? I'm not stopping to think about what it means. And for a white person writing about Black issues, you got to stop and think even more and you got to think about what you don't know, like, where are my blindspots? I have some huge ones. And I think what I wish I had done is, like, I don't think we met when we were reporting on Lenard in ‘97.

Yohance Lacour: No, we didn’t.

Jonathan Eig: I don't even think I knew about the South Street Journal, which is again, another blind spot, right? I'm new in town. Living on the North Side, not the South Side. Maybe I would have come across the paper, maybe I would have seen your story and I would have reached out and said, “Hey, tell me what you're seeing in your reporting.” But often back then, I was competitive and I didn't reach out and ask for help.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah, I get it. I get it. 

Jonathan Eig: I think my intentions are really good. I recognize that there's something important going on here.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah.

Jonathan Eig: At the time. I was pretty proud of it. And like, at the time I thought I did a good job. Like, I got Lenard’s mom to talk to me and I got some time with them in the hospital. I saw some things that, like none of the other reporters did. That's how I'm thinking about it. I'm not thinking about what's the big cultural impact here? How is – how's this story going to help Frankie Caruso rehabilitate his image? I don't think that ever crossed my mind.

Yohance Lacour: Look, if I were on another planet and I read your article and I only know about, you know, these circumstances, what I can get from articles like yours, I see this really beautiful kind of almost lovely picture of redemption of a young man who made a mistake and kind of admitted it, acknowledged it, was forgiven by his victim. And it's some real – like kumbaya – does feel good.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: I mean, so I can understand why you'd be proud of it. We were both – and I'll say all – victims of [an] ugly system, man, and it was will white supremacy and media meet that narrative and the folks pushing it were trying to make sure people like you pushed it and, yeah, it was going to be easy for y'all to push that right? And it was trying to make sure that, you know, people like me were silenced and weren’t heard. You know, the mayor's office called me back then after I was making noise, right. I hadn't made enough noise for it to reach you and even most of the public here in Chicago, even most of Black Chicago, you know what I mean because it was a small paper with little reach. But the people who care, which were the Daleys and Bridgeport and the police, you know, who are trying to [play] clean up, they knew what I was saying and they reached out to me and offered me a job. And they called me with some bullshit like, “Yeah, we've discovered that, you know, you're a guy with deep ties to the community and, you know, we want to bring you in.” I could smell that a mile away. You know what I mean? I'm like, you know, and looking back, I wish I would have said yeah and been strategic and been a spook sitting by the door. But instead, I was like, “Nah, fuck you. I know what you're doing. I'm not. No, you can’t buy me.” I wish I would have stayed the course. That's if I, you know, if I had to do [it] all over again, that's what I would tell my younger self. Like, this is the nature of the fight, son.

Jonathan Eig: You feel like you failed at that time?

Yohance Lacour: I felt like I gave up. I felt like this system of media and power and wealth and gangsterism in Chicago was too big for journalism to make a dent. And so I'm like, okay, you know what? This shit don't work. I’ll go back to the streets, I’ll get me some money, I'll figure out how to organize. I’ll – you know – I started, I started to kind of develop that attitude that a lot of folks have now, I didn't stop voting and I didn't like, but that kind of attitude, like the system don't work, just it's all about taking care of yourself. You know, it’s a lot of us in my community who are like, you know, fuck the system. Either way, we got to take care of our own. But again, it's both of them. You got to work with the system. And you've got to work in your own communities. And I wish that I wouldn't have given up on journalism. That's what I would have done. That's what I would have done differently.

Jonathan Eig: Well, you didn't give up. You came back and did the story, you know, 30 years later.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it.

Nicole Carroll: While Jonathan proposed the idea to talk to Yohance for this episode, Yohance had just as many questions for Jonathan.

He wanted to talk about Jonathan’s research and writing processes, about what it means to portray a much more complicated version of King than the one the public tends to know.  

And how to keep King’s values and teachings alive when the arc of history doesn't always feel like it's bending toward justice.

Yohance Lacour: I wonder if the same way you were like, Well, why wasn't I questioning why Herbert Martin was feeding me this shit? Why wasn't I questioning their angles? As you started to build with Black scholars and experts and even associates of King with your book. Did you ever feel the need to question any of them and their motives? How did that work?

Jonathan Eig: Yeah, I think I've gotten better about that, just looking around, wondering, you know, why is this person helping me? What message do they want to get out into the world? And, you know, I think for the most part, again, there still could be things I'm missing. But I think people felt like the main motivation was that King's been watered down. I heard a lot of anger and there was a lot of frustration that America has turned him into this very safe figure. And I was being encouraged to challenge that. And I don't know if they would have preferred a Black writer take on the job, but I, I got the impression that they were just happy that somebody was willing to look at the question of why we have – why we have allowed the national holiday and the monument and all the kindergarten lessons about “I Have a Dream” to turn King into a safe figure. You know, Harry Belafonte said to me, “We only like dead radicals in this country.” I heard that same message from a lot of the scholars, too, that they were angry at the way King's image had been co-opted, in part by the white media and by the government. Um, [the] main message, I think, that I was getting from a lot of those scholars is that, you know, we need to challenge that.

Yohance Lacour: So being, you know, who I am. King and his legacy is super sensitive to me. You know, I wanted to go into the book with as open a mind as possible, but we don't have many heroes, Black folks that is. And the general practice of America has been to paint horrible pictures of us as individuals and, you know, inaccurate pictures like you describe one of our heroes. I know that I have my own kind of personal issues that I'm grappling with when it comes to a certain aspect of humanizing them. So, for instance, his flaws, right?

Jonathan Eig: Mhmm.

Yohance Lacour: You know, I'm really curious as to how you balance defanging him, if you will, and letting people know that he wasn't just a soft, peaceful dreamer with also revealing things that, that humanize him in a way as to show just how flawed he could have been.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: When I did this piece on Lenard Clark and we found stuff that no one had heard before or found out, it was exciting. As a journalist, as a reporter, it's exciting to bring new information. So I wonder, how do you compare the excitement in discovering allegations of like horrible sexual abuses to discovering and if you would even build on some of what you discovered that that would you would say defanged him and made him a more radical figure than the one we were already accustomed to.

Jonathan Eig: So, just for people who don't know, who haven't read the book yet, the FBI was listening to King's phone calls and bugging his hotel rooms, right? And he was flawed. And not just with his sex life, but the fact that he, you know, had mental health issues. I was really nervous about putting in his flaws and writing about that. And I was concerned that people wouldn't want to read about their hero's flaws, especially coming from a white guy. I have huge respect, but I felt like it was important to be honest too, and the balance was everything. Like, I did not want to sensationalize it, but I wanted to be honest and I felt like if I wanted the readers to trust me, that I had to be honest. I just felt like if I want you to really understand how this man suffered and how much he sacrificed, you got to know how he was feeling. You got to know what kind of pressure he was under. You got to know the fact also that this is what the FBI was using to try to destroy him. So how are you going to explain the ultimate power play with our government trying to take this man out and using his sex life to do it? And you've got to really be careful of anything that's in a memo.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah. When I read that piece about Martin in his hotel room, you know, egging on rapists, I didn't believe it, especially when it comes with, you know, this is something that won't be released till 2027.

Jonathan Eig: And in this case, it's not even a typed memo. It's a handwritten note in the margin of a memo that says King is listening as a woman is being raped. He's watching this and he's encouraging it and laughing. That's all we have. We don't even know whose handwriting it is. So you've got to be extra skeptical, cynical about that.

Yohance Lacour: You revealed that, you know, all of these FBI folks were like, you know, drinking buddies with Southern segregationists and racists. And I'm sitting there wrestling with it and even feeling something internally about distrusting this information. And I'm, like, I have no reason to feel guilt for distrusting the FBI. I have no reason to feel some weird way about imagining that. Yeah, you wait til 2027 so you can AI it perfectly.

Jonathan Eig: Mhmm.

Yohance Lacour: You know what I mean? Because I know what the FBI has been capable [of] and done. So I wonder how you receive information like that when you heard that or you read what you read, how much credit do you give FBI transcripts as you put them in your work?

Jonathan Eig: I spend a lot of time thinking about that and a lot of time in the book addressing the issue of the FBI, what we know about their motives, how much we should distrust them. The answer is we should distrust them a lot. And that particular incident about the alleged incitement of rape is the hardest single passage that I had to deal with in the book. I thought about it and I consulted friends about it. I consulted other historians about it because I could have gone either way. And I was going back and forth for a while I thought, it just doesn't belong in the book at all. And then I thought, no, it needs to be addressed because it's out there in the world. Other people have written about this already. The New York Times had op-eds about it. People are going to wonder why I'm not even including it. But then finally, what really – and I was still going back and forth – but what really finally got me was I decided to do some more reporting on it. But when we have an FBI memo, that is not a transcript of conversation, that's an agent writing in large part to pass along information, but also in large part to please his boss, J. Edgar Hoover. So you've got to take extra bullshit detector, turn it up too high. So why did I decide to include it in the book? Because I interviewed some Justice Department officials who listened to those tapes, and they said that they did not hear anything that sounded like a rape. So I wanted to put it in so that I could knock it down and say, we're not going to know for sure until ‘27, but we should not believe what you've heard and what you've read in The New York Times and in these other articles without further confirmation. So I thought it was important to put that context in so that readers would know that it's out there. You've heard that King was in the room during this alleged sexual assault, but don't believe it until we get more proof.

Yohance Lacour: Given what you – everything you just shared about FBI and surveillance and, and their motives. What do you think that means for us moving forward for Black folks, for folks, you know, pushing for freedom and pushing for the dismantling of white supremacy, be they Black, white or other? What what do you take from that?

Jonathan Eig: Well, one of the big takeaways for me working on this book is that I came away with a much deeper understanding and appreciation of why Black people don't trust law. Like, look at what they did to King. And the interesting thing to me was that King obviously knew it, knew he was being surveilled, but King continued to feel like the government was the only thing that could really help change America. Like, he really believed that the only way to help enough people, to end some of the practices and some of the systemic racism, and you know really work on fighting poverty and improving schools was through the federal government. So he believes in the same force that is blatantly trying to undermine his work, encouraging him to commit suicide, plotting to replace him with a, you know, a hand-picked successor. So where does that leave us today? Like, do we still believe that the government can be a force for good? Or do we give up and, and just, you know, fight the system without – I don't know, like, it’s a tough one.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah, Yeah, it is. I – obviously, it was the potential of the government that he believed in.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah. But King saw the Supreme Court end segregated bussing in Montgomery. He saw the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act get passed because of the work he did and his partnership with LBJ, the same guy who's, you know, dishing dirt behind his back. So it wasn't just potential for him.

Yohance Lacour: Oh, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. So I think that's proof that we can't give up.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: And also, man, thank you for sharing your newfound, I'll say, discovery of how deep Black mistrust of government and law goes. There are a lot of us when we are as distrustful of American government and law enforcement, as you understand now, uh, we deal with the idea that we are conspiracy theorists. And I think it's way more nuanced than that. ‘Cause that's a lot different than saying, you know, the Earth is flat. And so I wonder I wonder what you make of that conspiracy theory label when it comes to Black folks who distrust American government and law enforcement, and I feel like we need more folks that white people can hear and trust to tell them exactly what you’re saying so as to and certain Black folks who are removed you know and detached from what’s going on on the ground to to kind of start to sway that opinion and and start to open up to the idea that maybe there is something going on here.

Jonathan Eig: Well, a lot of people ask me, you know, why I don't spend a lot of time in the book on the conspiracy theories around King's assassination. And in part, it's because the simple answer that I wanted people to cry at the end of the book, and I didn't want them to have to, like, deal with another hundred pages of conspiracy theories. But the bigger point is that is it a conspiracy when the government was trying to get him killed? Whether or not they hired somebody or arranged for James Earl Ray or someone else to pull the trigger, they intentionally created the conditions in which some racist white man would think that it was a good idea, that he was doing his patriotic duty to assassinate Martin Luther King. There's no question the FBI did that. That's not my opinion. That's a fact. They put out memos saying that we got to get rid of this guy and we have to make sure that everybody in America sees him as a threat. And our government, the same government that celebrates him with the national holiday, did that. So, I'm never going to be able to prove whether there was an actual conspiracy behind the assassination. But I think that's less important than the point that we created a white supremacist structure and law enforcement apparatus that saw King as a threat and wanted him gone.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah, why you think so many people need a smoking gun? To hold these [types] of forces as responsible for them as they should.

Jonathan Eig: Maybe we want the smoking gun because we can't have the smoking gun. And it makes us feel better about ourselves. Like, oh, our government didn't do that. Our government wouldn't assassinate a moral leader, a preacher, a good man, a man of God. Well, our government did that. You don't have to have a smoking gun to believe that our racist policies killed Dr. King.

Yohance Lacour: Nah, I appreciate that, man. Question, another question I had, are you – do you believe in God? Are you a Christian?

Jonathan Eig: I'm Jewish. But I believe in God, yeah.

Yohance Lacour: You’re Jewish. Okay. Because his relationship with God, his spiritual relationship, which is more unique than, you know, any person's Blackness or whiteness, right? Was clearly like a huge factor in how he moved. And so, you know, I'm reading so much of it. And I'm and it's resonating with me because I have a I lean on my relationship – my spiritual relationship – for much of how I move. And it made me wonder. How well do you identify with all of this story being a white man? How much do you consider the difference? What do you do about what you're considering? I started to wonder the same things about spirituality.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah, I was really moved by King's spirituality. I mean, I – it changed me, really, to see how deeply he believed and to see how his actions were rooted in his faith. And I'm coming at this as someone who believes in God, but I'm also coming at it from the Jewish perspective. So I don't have any personal experience with the Christian church, certainly not with the Black Baptist Church. So I'm trying to learn that. And mostly, though, I'm just trying to convey that it's just crystal clear to me that this is at the core of everything he does. And I feel like it's a huge part of the book. And whether I got it right or whether I had my own blindspots again, that kept me from missing some of the nuance. But I had a lot of help on that department because I knew that I was weak, especially weak, on the area of religion. And I had a lot of people reading it for me and giving me feedback and coaching me through that. And I did more for this book than I've ever done in terms of having backup, having readers, you know, really go at it hard with me and try to teach me what I was missing.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah. What do you think about his call for reparations, man? With that and the relevance of that today? Because that, that hit me.

Jonathan Eig: You know, he was a, he was a preacher, right? And he was always saying that his activism grew from his ministry. And what he's saying – and this is true for my faith as well as the Christian faith – like, you have to atone for your sins before you can move on. You cannot ask for an apology until you show your sorrow, until you change your behavior and until you atone for your sins. That's reparations. So when King talks about that and he talked about it over and over, he's not thinking about it just in terms of the practical matters. He's not just thinking about it in terms of money. He's thinking about how do we heal our souls? How do we heal the soul of the nation? How do we heal the souls of the world? You have to start by making true atonement. And that's what reparations means. He said, you know, don't tell me that we can't put a dollar value on it. Don't tell me we can't put a price on it. Lawyers and juries do that all the time. You know, you slip and fall in a grocery store. We're going to put a dollar value on your pain and suffering. So it doesn't mean that it accurately captures every penny of how much you suffered. But we do our best. We take a shot at it. We put a number on it and we move on. And we know that justice has been done. So we can do that for slavery, too. We can do that for Jim Crow. We can do that for everything and King talked about it all the time.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah. So there’s an amazing woman, Robin Ruth Simmons out of Evanston, who got some of the first reparations legislation in America passed right up here in Evanston.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: You know her? You familiar?

Jonathan Eig: Yeah. Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: Amazing, right? And, and you know, she has told me that a lot of the battle is getting, you know, kind of like moderate white folks to understand that this will actually be a benefit to you and not like we're not taking nothing from you. We're not going to make your life harder. Truth be told, this all makes for a better life for us all. Why can't white people see that? And how do you think we make them see it?

Jonathan Eig: I think there's so much resentment. You know, look at all the resentment around, social services that like it's a handout. It's not a handout, it's being good neighbors. It’s caring about each other, right? But it's become racialized and it's become politicized. And you see politicians using this stuff – both sides, you know, Republican and Democrat – using this stuff to appeal to voters, saying we're not going to help those poor immigrants, affirmative action is wrong, right? And they even invoke Dr. King to say he'd be opposed to affirmative action because he said, you know, “We should be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.” And that's just, you know, it's a lie. And it’s a misuse, it’s an abuse of King's legacy. We've got to change the narrative. And I think it's a win for everybody if we start thinking about the common good and not just us versus them.

Yohance Lacour: Yeah you know, and and I think this is why it's important to return to stories, because quite often we’ll discover that they’ve either been told inaccurately, something has been omitted. And lastly, or finally, for me, we grow as a culture and as a nation, as a society, as people, and our thoughts on things evolve. So it's important to keep things in proper context, right? And if we don't with the flow of so much information in the world, you know, good information, bad information – otherwise, it's easy to forget.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah, I think that's really great. And I think that it's one of the problems we have in this country. The way we teach history is that we don't think of it as being something that needs to be updated all the time. We teach history like it's a bunch of dates and names that you have to memorize, but it's changing and it changes all the time based on who we are and where we are as a country. So, you know, you look at all the great, like, documentaries that were made about O.J. or you look at how the Seventies, you know, are now far enough behind us that we can put some of that stuff in context. Look at what Watergate meant to our country and the distrust of government. Let's look at that again now. And I think that's a big part of what we do [as] journalists. Sometimes we get to do the first draft and that's it. And maybe we don't do a very good job of it, but we can try and do a second draft too, which is what made your podcast so terrific is that it's that really wasn't told right by guys like me covering it, so let's look at it again and let's see what we got wrong. And also look at it from, from where we are today. And same thing for Martin Luther King. You know, it had been years since the last biography. Like he looks different now, let's do it again. And there'll be another, you know, King biography, you know, whatever 20 years from now, too, because he’ll look different then. And part of what we can do is – with these stories – is put them out in the world and inspire others. Sometimes they're going to come along and because they're mad that I didn't do it right and they want to do it better. Great!

Yohance Lacour: That's brilliant. And, you know, the only thing I would like to see changed is that the woman or the man who picks up your story or my story and decides to retell it because they're mad. We didn’t – don’t be mad at us.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: Just build – let's get it together. There's been too much conversation about daily journalism versus, you know, larger look-back journalism, if you will. But we need every daily journalist to do, you know, to have some integrity and tell the story as best they can today. So that when you look back, you have all of that to draw from and put in perspective. We got to work with each other. It's not this or that, it’s both of ‘em.

Jonathan Eig: That's right. And I think that’s something else I didn't really appreciate as a young journalist. I always felt like you can't show your work to anybody because you might – um, [the] competition, might find out what you're doing and I've overcome that fear. And, like, for me to take on a biography of Martin Luther King, I'm going to need help. And that's the first thing I did, is I reached out to all of these Black scholars and all these people who knew King. And I said, if I do this, I realize, you know, I've got some huge mountains to overcome. Will you help me? And they're not just checking for facts. They're checking for like, hey, you don't really understand this. Or have you thought about the fact that you're mostly talking about the men in this chapter and the women aren't getting enough attention, right? All kinds of – you just want to be challenged as much as possible. I'll tell you a good story about that. So, first chapter of the book I originally wrote, this scene where Martin Luther King Sr. is going into town with his father, Jim King, to sell cotton in Stockbridge, Georgia and they get ripped off by the white man who owns their land. And King's father, Martin Luther King Sr. gets beat up by his dad for, like, giving some lip to the land owner. And it was a pretty good scene. I thought, a reasonably good way to start the book. And I shared it with Lewis Baldwin, the theologian, and he said, you know, I started a chapter in one of my books with that same scene. It's a good scene, and I've always regretted – this is Lewis Baldwin saying – I always regretted that I didn't think to focus more on King's grandmother instead of his grandfather, because think about it, Jim King turns to violence, turns to alcohol, gives up his faith in God but Delia King remains faithful, remains a believer, and I think she's the more important spiritual ancestor to Martin Luther King. Maybe you could find a way to begin your book with her instead of her husband. And as soon as he said it, I thought, you are so right. Like that's the way to go, and I ended up finding this story that Daddy King told Martin Luther King Sr. told about his mother beating up this white mill owner and that's what I began my book with instead.

Yohance Lacour: I loved it, by the way.

Jonathan Eig: It was – and I would not have thought of that in a million years if I hadn't shared my chapters and asked for criticism.

Yohance Lacour: Speaking to that point, I thank you for for mentioning the brother who's pointing out how little attention you gave women in whatever chapters you're talking about, because it was the women on our team, Dana, Sara Geis, Erisa Apantaku, they, you know, pointed out to me, look, we created the mood board, no women in it. It was a very masculine story but yet there were some incredible women with [voices] in the podcast that wouldn't have been there had I not had the, you know, the blessing and luxury of having these brilliant women on the team. So, yeah, teamwork, it really makes the scheme work.

Jonathan Eig: Mhmm.

Yohance Lacour: That just speaks to how important it is for folks just to fucking work together.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: This is what America conditions us to do, bro.

Jonathan Eig: Mhmm.

Yohance Lacour: America conditions us to hold shit to our chest. We’re so competitive. I don’t, you know, I can't let you in because you might take from me. So my hands are always clenched.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: That's an important lesson for just everybody in this place to learn, no matter what they do. You know, this idea, this me-me-me, I-I-I individualist shit is not it, bro.

Jonathan Eig: Yeah.

Yohance Lacour: When we won the Pulitzer, that was wild, man. So our executive director, Andrew Fam, he sends around an email to everybody, we should come and watch the, you know, the announcements. I'm, like, nah, you know what I mean, because it's like, what's the odds we win? Then he calls me. He was like, “Yeah, you know, I got your email. I don't know if you – I'm not sure you heard me. You know, I got a call from New York. I just really think it would be a really good idea for you to be here.”

Jonathan Eig: Oh, man, he knew.

Yohance Lacour: And so the rest of the team is getting the same notes over like, all right, let's go. So I'm going in kind of prepared to be, you know, feel the disappointment I was trying to avoid by seeing somebody else win our category. You know, I wouldn't look at the screen and the screen showed the artwork before you could actually hear the mention. So I'm looking down and the whole room erupts seconds before I hear it. And I can't describe the feeling. It was disbelief and joy and pride and humbling and redemptive and life changing, man. And I – that's a moment I will never fucking forget.

Jonathan Eig: [laughs] I don't have a team. I was sitting home alone on the couch and Michael Eric Dyson, who has become a buddy, had been saying like for a year, you're going to win the Pulitzer. He was saying it in public. He was saying it, like, on stage. We did a couple of events together saying, “Watch out, this guy's going to win a Pulitzer Prize.” So he calls and he says, “When are they announcing the Pulitzers?” I said, “It’s tomorrow.” He said, “Call me when you win.” I said, “Shut up!” [laughs] You know, what are the odds that I'm going to win a Pulitzer? But he had, he and a couple other people were like, [putting] it in my head. So I figured I’ll watch the live stream, like, I'll watch it on YouTube and uh try not to get my hopes up too much just because Dyson's been bugging me all year. David Garrow. too, actually, like, called me the day before and he won the Pulitzer for a King book, like, years ago. He said, “You know, I think you're the favorite.” I was like, “Shut up.” So I'm home alone on the couch watching on my laptop. And then they called my name and I just started screaming. I, like, literally, jumped off the couch screaming, like, where is everybody? [laughter] Uh, my wife. I didn't know where she was. My kids were in school, so I just started texting people and then my phone started ringing. But I've been a journalist since I was 16 years old. And, you know, the Pulitzers, the Pulitzer. It's the biggest thing. I called my parents. I was in tears, you know, like it was beyond anything –it was – it felt better than I ever could have imagined. It's and it still does. Like, every day, that really happened?  

Yohance Lacour: Just picturing what you just said and just picturing this guy, with all of this work and everything you've done sitting in your place alone, watching on a laptop with that, just that's the story, bro. That's a scene. That is a fucking scene, man. Congratulations, man.  

Jonathan Eig: Thanks. You too.

Yohance Lacour: Right on, man. Thank you.

Nicole Carroll: That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road.

Thank you to our guests Yohance Lacour and Jonathan Eig.

Yohance’s 2024 Pulitzer-winning podcast is called You Didn’t See Nothin.

And Jonathan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is called King: A Life.

For more details about this work and the work of all Pulitzer winners please visit our website at www.pulitzer.org. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll.

Our senior producer is Justine Daum.

Natalie Peart is our associate producer.

Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. Our editor for this episode is Josh Gwynn.

The head of sound & engineering at Pineapple Street is Raj Makhija.

This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz, with additional audio engineering by Pedro Alvira.

Music licensing by APM and Epidemic Sound

Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. Bari Finkel and Marjorie Miller are our executive producers.