Historian Jeanne Theoharis was in Los Angeles, souring old copies of Black newspapers for coverage of the city’s Civil Rights Movement, when she was surprised to find reports on the many visits Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King made there years before the 1965 Watts uprising.
“I’d bought into the idea that it had taken the Watts uprising to jolt King to turn his attention to Northern struggles,” Theoharis notes. “But it simply wasn’t the case.”
The author of a dozen other books on the Civil Rights era – including The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Theoharis spent the next 15 years delving deeper into the archives of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and found King joining local movements to challenge “police brutality, housing and school segregation, job exclusion and union discrimination” in northern cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.
The fruit of this labor by Theoharis, a leading movement historian and activist herself who follows in the footsteps of Howard Zinn, is a seminal book that radically reexamines an intensely studied man and his legacy. “King did not simply turn radical at the end of his life,” Theoharis shows, “a structural analysis of racism and the myriad institutions that supported it animated his and Coretta Scott King’s adult life.”
Through fascinating details drawn from myriad sources – including transcripts of FBI wiretaps – Theoharis critiques the “Southernification of King” as a leader who only appealed to Southern Black people, and shows how the corporate media was a “hostile source” that propped up “myths that flattered Northern white sensibilities.” Until now, these same myths dominated historical accounts of King.
As with the South, Black people who moved “North” – West, North and East – found laws barring discrimination were largely symbolic. When King organized on these issues, he found support, even if this work was often ignored by the major newspapers who readily made space for critics of King like NAACP president Roy Wilkins.
When King organized the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966, he also faced skepticism from his own colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). But he insisted on moving his family to the city’s impoverished West Side, where they experienced how housing and schools in the country’s second largest city at the time were as segregated as in Birmingham, Alabama.
King visited and strategized with other Black Power leaders to build a broadbased, confrontational movement that harnessed black political power, and critiqued colonialism at home and abroad.
King found the Chicago campaign against school segregation – which included a 1963 protest where a young Bernie Sanders was arrested – to be “vibrant, vigorous, and relentless” and later said “if it had been somewhere in the South, change would have ensued.” King also supported radical student boycotts, calling them “one of the most creative nonviolent methods developed to dramatize the intolerable conditions” in city schools, even as local Black congressmen and aldermen tried to discredit them under pressure from Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, who was supported by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
Also in Chicago, King connected with gang leaders for the first annual Turfmasters Conference, contradicting reports they were at odds, and laying the groundwork Fred Hampton later continued with the Black Panthers. Meanwhile, King visited and strategized with other Black Power leaders to build a broadbased, confrontational movement that harnessed black political power, and critiqued colonialism at home and abroad. Amiri Baraka’s wife was so surprised when King stopped by their home in Newark, New Jersey that she said, “If I had known he was coming, I would have baked a cake.” Baraka was inspired in part by King to organize the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, which Scott King addressed along with fellow movement widow, Betty Shabazz.
Theoharis makes sure to document Scott King’s role in the duo’s life of service that connected the struggles of poverty, racism and militarism. A longtime member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she was the only woman to address one of the first big rallies against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam at Madison Square Garden in 1965. A reporter asked King: “Did you educate her?” He responded: “No, she educated me.” Scott King later refused to let “the men,” as she called the SCLC’s leadership, run things after her husband was assassinated, and continued to support the Poor People’s Campaign.
Many King biographers chronicle when King railed against the Vietnam War in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church, but few note his earlier work in New York City or appear to have read his regular column in the Amsterdam News. He worked with Puerto Rican and Jewish activists as well as Black grassroots organizers, and refused to be used by the mayor to quiet them down as they challenged the city’s liberals to recognize how segregation had led to a crisis of “inadequate and inferior education” in the city’s school system.
When King led similar campaigns in Birmingham, he famously saw results. But throughout the North, Theoharis shows how “this multivarious nonviolent movement garnered little change or even acknowledgement” and contributed to the unrest that exploded throughout these same Northern cities in the late-1960s.
Theoharis shows how “this multivarious nonviolent movement garnered little change or even acknowledgement” and contributed to the unrest that exploded throughout these same Northern cities in the late-1960s.
In a February 1966 column for the Chicago Defender titled, “My Dream,” Theoharis quotes King as he “challenged the passive voice that many preferred that masked the patterns of exploitation” and referenced Langston Hughes’ question ‘what happens to a dream deferred?”
King wrote: “[T]hese dreams were not deferred, they were denied and repudiated by vicious though subtle patterns of exploitations. So the dreams do not ‘dry up like raisins in the sun.’ They decay like sun-ripend oranges that are devoured by worms and birds until they fall to the ground making a rotten mess.”
Within a week of King’s 1968 assassination, the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discriminatory housing practices and enabled some Blacks to move into better conditions.
Before being martyred, King had expressed great frustration when asked to respond to the earlier uprisings he had essentially predicted. This landmark book about a role model for so many ensures we see his work to challenge racism, police brutality, poverty and unequal housing as a national effort, not relegated to the South, or the past.
King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
By Jeanne Theoharis
The New Press, March 2025, 400 pages
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