King of the North: Martin Luther King’s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — outside Dixie — was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.

In this bold retelling, King emerges as someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who — despite his flaws — depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work — a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present. [Adapted from publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781620979310 | New Press

Endorsements

With insightful precision and narrative power, Theoharis shows that the struggle to end Jim Crow was by every measure a national movement. For the first time in a King biography, Coretta Scott King’s active partnership in the struggle is made clear. King of the North is a revelation. — Barbara Smith

Theoharis delivers another revelatory, meticulously documented account that revises our fundamental assumptions about American history, with critical implications for our future. This indispensable book is a vital resource for all who seek to ‘make real the promise of democracy.’ — Alondra Nelson

This stirring reexamination of MLK’s legacy argues that his work has been drastically misremembered and misrepresented by history in order to preserve a simplistic vision of the civil rights movement as concerned only with Southern racism. Instead, King’s critiques of Northern racism were extensive and long-running, as Theoharis extensively documents. It’s a stunning revisionist account of King’s life and politics.    — Publishers’ Weekly