In 1984, when he was 35, Glenn Loury made Martin Luther King’s widow cry. A young black professor at Harvard, he was addressing a meeting of African-American political leaders in Washington, and as he spoke, he could see that Coretta Scott King had tears in her eyes. Casting his mind back to that moment, he writes in “Late Admissions”—his memoir—that the tears welled up and rolled down her cheeks. She wept from distress brought about by his assertion that the crisis in black America was self-inflicted, not caused by white racism. Blacks, he said, had failed to seize “opportunities newly available to us.” Her resentment of this upstart iconoclast was shared by others in the room, who believed that he was betraying “his people” and serving as a “mascot” for racists. Mr. Loury, for his part, “took delight in throwing the hypocrisies of the Negro Cognoscenti back in their faces.”
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