Civil Rights, the Northern Story

Malik Miah

King of the North
Martin Luther King‘s Life of Struggle Outside the South
By Jeanne Theoharis
The New Press, 2025, 400 pages, $22.99 paperbaack.

THIS MUST-READ biography sheds new light on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. The author, Jeanne Theoharis, previously wrote the New York Times bestselling The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York.

In King of the North she describes King’s battles against northern segregation, racism and police brutality, as an effort that had its origins in his experiences as a graduate student in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

A second theme of the book is the dynamic role of women in the movement, spotlighting Coretta Scott, King’s partner and wife. Both understood that the movement is much bigger than themselves, meaning that either one could be killed in the struggle, and ready for that possibility.

Their activities stood in sharp contrast to most minister families in the South who blasted racism but urged followers to accommodate to that reality and not challenge it with direct civil disobedience as King did.

The recent Pulitzer Prize winning author Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, said of the King of the North:

“King of the North is a revelation — a much-needed book that shifts and enhances our appreciation of MLK’s radical vision.”

As author Jeanne Theoharis explains, most Black activists and media journalists had a different view of the movement as it advanced than white northern politicians (and white journalists), who praised King’s civil rights battles in the South, but fell silent or became combative when King turned his attention to the systemic racism and oppression in the North.

King faced some of the most vicious violence in Chicago and its near suburb, Cicero.

In Chicago, Democratic boss and mayor Richard J. Daley did everything in his power to stop civil rights progress in the city. Daley defended his white South Side neighbors who “threw rocks, eggs, and firecrackers” at civil rights marchers as “fine people, hard-working people.”

Media Whitewash

Mainstream news outlets during King’s lifetime had few if any Black journalists. In 1963, according to data from major media outlets, fewer than one percent of journalists were Black. They wrote for Black publications like The Chicago Defender. Whites often ignored their reporting.

King also wrote a column for many years, his first appearing in 1955 under the headline “Stride Toward Freedom.” He continued writing columns for publications including The Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News.

The mainstream media actively refuted King’s accusations of northern racism, creating a documentary history that has shaped and distorted King’s legacy ever since.

The media, especially the editors, white­washed King’s legacy. They created an incomplete story of his view of the North. To get the full story of the movement one must, as the author did, read the Black press.

King’s Challenge

Theoharis describes her book as a political biography. That includes her highlighting the feminism of Coretta Scott. She explains that Coretta’s role and views are generally not told in the many King biographies and documentaries.

Theohanis summarizes her views in the “Preface: Only the language was polite”:

“This is a story of a King who challenged white Northerners to walk the walk and address the segregation and inequality rife in their own cities.

“It is a story of a King who well understood the gaslighting and tokenism, as well as the demonizing of local activists, as key white liberal resistance tactics.

“It is a story of a King who saw police brutality [police arrested him 29 times] as a systemic problem, challenged legalized housing and school segregation, and highlighted the profit made from segregation and immiseration.

“It is a story of how King came of age in graduate school in the segregated North and fought alongside a phalanx of Northern Black activists from the late 1950s onward to highlight this structural racism with little systemic change or federal intervention resulting.

”It is in short, a story of a King who saw — from the outset of his activism — the necessity of the Black freedom struggle in every corner of the United States.”

Chronicle of Struggle

The book covers key periods of King’s 13 years of struggle. Act 1: 1947-1950, Act II: 1958-1965, Act III: 1965-1966, Act IV: 1965-1968, and “Epilogue: Be careful what you wish for.”

These sections discuss many of King’s historic battles that are more well known, from the Montgomery bus boycott where he emerged as a leader, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1965 Selma march and most significantly his April 4, 1967 antiwar speech on Vietnam, for which most old guard civil rights leaders criticized King because the Lyndon Johnson government had signed civil rights laws.

King’s views on Black Power, political representation and uplifting Black workers are also discussed. He never believed that the new civil rights laws alone would bring full equality and freedom. He advocated affirmative action programs.

King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis while supporting striking sanitation workers. There were no doubt powerful racist and government forces based in the North, not just in the South, pleased to get this leader removed — just as they were happy in 1965 to see Malcolm X assassinated as he was telling the truth about racism and capitalism.

Their Formative Early Years

In the Jim Crow South, King could only attend Black schools and colleges. He attended Moorehouse College in Atlanta, then moved north to attend the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

Coretta, born in Alabama, attended liberal Antioch College in Ohio. While in college she supported the Progressive Party’s third-party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948. She was an independent-minded woman whose family in Alabama stood up to white violence. She learned firsthand about white liberalism (and its limits) as her white friends opposed racism in words but limited what they would do.

When the two met in Boston — where King attended Boston University for his doctorate and Coretta Scott attended the New England Conservatory of Music — she was more politically progressive than Martin.

As students In the North, they learned how the politics of racism were different than in the South, but equally vicious. Neither of the Kings forgot the racism they encountered in the North, and they worked with local organizers to address it throughout their lives. Many of their views were rooted in their fights against Jim Crow North, where the practices of segregation and racism were as intense as in Jim Crow South.

Most biographers make it sound like they didn’t really understand northern Black anger until the 1960s urban rebellions. But King visited many northern cities in the 1950s to raise money for the newly created Southern Christian Leadership Conference and joined local leaders in protests.

The North As It Was

King’s first protest in the North, as described in Act 1, was in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In 1945, New Jersey passed a statewide anti-discrimination law. Yet it was rarely enforced, as King and his Black friends learned.

White owners would not serve them. When they had white college friends go to the establishment, they were served.

When King took the case to court under the new law, the white friends under pressure from family decided not to testify, and the case had to be dropped. Whites of good will could not be depended upon, King learned.

Boston was one of the most segregated cities in the North. White liberals there as in other cities hailed the fight in the South but refused to make it possible to end policies of segregation in the city.

Black students could not rent apartments anywhere near the campus. Most had to go and live in the Black community. Martin and Coretta had similar experiences.

King had lived with southern racism in Atlanta. But he experienced racism in the North differently long before leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56.

He took many trips, including Watts in Los Angeles, Harlem in New York, Detroit, and many other cities before the civil rights laws were passed.

The Kings also traveled abroad to Ghana in 1957 and India in 1959. He understood the fight for Black freedom in the same context as the fight against colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Then and Now

In her epilogue Theoharis writes:

“Like many activists today, he insisted that disruption and direct action were necessary to expose the urgency of injustice, that you don’t blame the doctor for pointing out the cancer.

“He saw the power of young people’s courage to pull adults into the struggle. He was resolute and steadfast, outraged, and impatient, and deeply moved by people’s suffering.

“He lambasted those who asked why Black people were so angry. Black people had the right and reasons to be angry. Why weren’t they angry too?”

Whites in general, especially in the North, never saw the urgency faced by African Americans. In the South, many if not most whites saw Blacks as inferior no matter their abilities and qualifications.

Northern whites could applaud King for his stance in the South but draw back from his drive to integrate white schools and neighborhoods where King and other civil rights leaders faced vicious racism in northern cities. This failure of white liberals, rooted in white economic advantages, is sometimes called “white skin privilege.”

The Jim Crow North was not based on “whites only“ laws, but on other discriminatory laws and policies that kept Blacks from buying homes outside their communities (ghettoes) or getting better jobs or attending elite colleges.

Malcolm X, who was born in the North, like other northern Blacks knew this well. He rejected the view that integration was the solution. He said the issue was not just white supremacy but the capitalist system.

The ruling class today rejects a return to the apartheid structure of the Jim Crow South. But Trump’s far-right agenda seeks to return to the northern type of discrimination through denial of diversity, equity and inclusion that Blacks won through the civil rights revolution.

The current generation of antiracist Black activists face a political reality like the 1960s. It took mass resistance then; it will be needed today. A new leadership will emerge learning from King to take on the far-right racist agenda.

King died young at 39 while on the center stage of life. He was a true revolutionary not only for Black freedom but for the working class. King of the North shows the full picture of Martin’s and Coretta’s partnering leadership.

May-June 2026, ATC 242