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

This stellar biography from political scientist Theoharis (Julian Bond’s Time to Teach) makes a persuasive case that Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for racial justice has been significantly misrepresented, with his “lifelong challenge to Northern inequality... largely hidden in plain sight.” Drawing on 15 years of research, including interviews with those who knew King, Theoharis reexamines his life with an emphasis on his thinking about and experiences of Northern racism in the 1940s and ’50s—including hypocritical treatment he received at his liberal Pennsylvania seminary and housing discrimination he faced in Boston—building up to his 1965 statement that the “de facto segregation of the North is a new form of slavery covered up with the niceties of complexity.” Theoharis counters the accepted narrative that King’s activism against Northern racism only manifested itself after the 1965 Watts uprising, detailing King’s prominent role in 1963 protests against segregated schools in L.A., New York, and Detroit, and his labeling of Chicago’s “systemic and relentless” segregation as akin to that of Birmingham, Ala. Arguing that King’s persistent highlighting of “the limits of Northern liberalism” has been suppressed in favor of “the comfortable fable of a King who changes the South... with a cast of Northern good guys,” Theoharis unsettlingly demonstrates that “many of these same good guys were actively denying challenges at home by Northern Black activists and King in those very same years.” The result is an exemplary history that forces readers to reassess their assumptions about America’s racial reckoning. (Mar.)