The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Seletzky debuts with an intriguing study of her father, Marrell “Mac” McCollough, a police officer and CIA agent who was seen kneeling over Martin Luther King’s body in a famous photograph taken just after the civil rights leader was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968. Seletzky begins with a visceral account of the assassination (“Potent, suffocating odors closed in—burning gunpowder and a sweet cologne overlying sulfurous notes from King’s facial hair depilatory”) then rewinds to her father’s Mississippi Delta childhood, military service, and spur-of-the-moment decision to apply to the Memphis police department in 1967. Recruited by the department’s Domestic Intelligence Bureau, Mac infiltrated the Invaders, a local Black Power group involved with King and others in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. Mac’s conflicting roles as an undercover police officer and a Black man moved by King’s cries for racial progress are at the forefront of Seletzky’s narrative, which includes a fascinating reunion between her father and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was also on the balcony that day. The result is a nuanced and insightful look at the complex spaces African Americans have navigated in the pursuit of racial justice. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Apr.)