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MLK IN THE NORTH: THE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER UNDERSTOOD THAT RACISM AND
SEGREGATION WERE NATIONAL PROBLEMS  
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Jeanne Theoharis
April 4, 2025
Teen Vogue
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_ Dr. King was arrested 29 times and assaulted by the police on many
occasions. _

, Bettmann

 

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There is a familiar story of Martin Luther King. It’s about the
South — about segregated buses and lunch counters, police dogs and
fire hoses, courageous struggle and long overdue federal action with
the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In this familiar story, just a week after the Voting Rights Act,
people in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts rise up
[[link removed]] — and King
realized the problems Black people faced in the North. But that story
misses as much as it reveals. King came to LA more than 15
times _before_ the Watts uprising to support movements challenging
police brutality, school and housing segregation
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the city. Alongside marchers from Montgomery to Selma, he crisscrossed
the nation supporting protests from the Northeast to the West Coast.
Why don’t we know this?

In many ways, “southernizing” King is comfortable, cordoning off
the movement in the past to settled issues like bus segregation. Yet
King understood that racism, segregation, and police brutality were a
national condition, not a regional issue. Many of his contemporaries
refused to see this. While many Northern politicians and journalists
praised and welcomed King, they often refused to acknowledge, let
alone remedy, the deep injustices in their own cities. They treated
Northern civil rights activists as unreasonable troublemakers creating
a problem where there wasn’t one.

Looking at King outside the South — which I do in my new
book, _King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle
Outside the South_ [[link removed]] —
reveals aspects of his work that have previously been ignored or
distorted. Below are 10 facets of Martin Luther King’s life and
politics to understand where we are as a nation today.

1.Martin Luther King understood that segregation was a national
cancer, not a Southern sickness

While attending Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, a 21-year-old
King visited
[[link removed]] Mary’s
Place in New Jersey. He was kicked out of a bar at gunpoint with
friends when the owner refused to serve them. But their racial
discrimination suit went nowhere when three white students who had
initially come forward refused to testify to the discrimination for
fear it would damage their own reputations. When he moved to Boston
for his Ph.D., he had trouble finding an apartment because most
landlords wouldn’t rent to Black people. Coretta Scott King attended
Antioch College but was forbidden from student teaching in Yellow
Springs because she was Black.

2. Coretta Scott King was Martin Luther King’s political partner and
the “family leader” around global issues

_Coretta Scott King (R), wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther
King Jr., joins Women Strike for Peace founder Dagmar Wilson in a
march on the United Nations Plaza. The walk and the ceremony following
it were in celebration of the second anniversary of the women's
disarmament group.  Bettmann_

As a college student, Coretta Scott King had supported the Progressive
Party’s third-party challenge for the presidency, meeting Paul
Robeson and Bayard Rustin. In fact, she was more of an activist than
Martin when they met. In 1962, she went to Geneva with Women’s
Strike for Peace to press for a nuclear test ban treaty between the US
and USSR and then in 1963 led a march to the UN on nuclear
disarmament. This was scary, controversial work and most Americans,
Black and white, condemned it. When Martin won the Nobel Prize, she
saw a broader global responsibility and began speaking out against US
involvement in Vietnam, years before he did, and pushed him to do the
same. “We entered this war in support of colonialism,” she
explained in an interview with the _Atlanta Journal Constitution_.
“We equated our interests with a corrupt and dictatorial regime…we
shunned efforts by the United Nations to stop the war…with the
boastful but misguided notion that we have some mission to be the
moral savior of the world. Yet most of the world disagrees with this
policy.”

3. MLK had deep personal experience with police brutality and made
common cause with Black people around the country because of it.

Dr. King’s experiences of police harassment begin during the
Montgomery Bus Boycott when officers pulled him over ostensibly for
going five miles over the speed limit; instead of giving him a ticket,
police took him for a joy ride. He thought they were going to kill
him, until they finally took him to jail. Over the years, police
slammed him down on a counter, wrenching his arm painfully behind his
back, choked him, kicked him, shackled and chained him to a police car
floor for hours, and picked him up by his pants to shove him into a
police van. King knew what police could do to Black people and he had
to fight his fear in each police encounter he had (he was arrested 29
times).

4. King decried the police killing of an unarmed teenager in Harlem in
1964 and was sued by the NYC police officer who did it

In the summer of 1964, a Harlem teenager named Jimmy Powell was shot
by an off-duty police officer, Thomas Gilligan, outside his summer
school. This sparked a six-day uprising. Alongside many New York
activists, King had been highlighting police brutality in Harlem for
years. When King called Powell’s killing “murder”, Gilligan sued
King along with other civil rights leaders for damage to his
reputation. King called for brutal cops to be fired. He pushed for the
creation of civilian complaint review boards with real power to
oversee police departments and the ability of the Department of
Justice to bring injunctive suits against police departments that
deprived people’s civil rights.

5. King had an abolitionist impulse

In 1958, while signing books in Harlem, Martin Luther King was stabbed
in the chest with a letter opener by an African American woman
suffering from paranoid delusions who believed King was a Communist
agent out for her. He had to have a two-and-a-half hour surgery
removing part of his ribs and sternum to get the letter opener out and
save his life. When he woke up, he told Coretta that the woman should
not be put in prison, but instead needed medical help. She agreed. The
point was not to ignore the violence but to treat its cause.

6. King developed a breathing disability and suffered from bouts of
insomnia and depression

The stabbing left him with breathing difficulty, including a penchant
for bouts of hiccups sometimes lasting for hours or days. This was
likely due to stress, insomnia and perhaps impact to his phrenic nerve
that controls the diaphragm, which goes right through the place he was
stabbed. The injustice that MLK saw stuck with him, taking a deep toll
on his spirit and his body. He had to be hospitalized on at least four
occasions for exhaustion.

7. Martin Luther King was a listener and learner

Many people around the country, from friends to gang members to
Coretta Scott King herself, describe Martin Luther King Jr. as a
listener. But we are so used to seeing photos of him at the podium
that this crucial aspect of his character has fallen out of our
understanding of him. The head of the Blackstone Rangers gang, Jeff
Fort, described how King regularly met with gang leaders in Chicago
during 1966. Fort says King would listen intently, never interrupting
and often calling them “Doc” (like he did with fellow ministers).
When they were nervous and talked too fast, King would tell them to
slow down; he had time and wanted to hear what they had to say.

8. Dr. King saw the leadership potential of a vast array of young
people including gang members

He spent hundreds of hours in Chicago talking, listening and working
with gang members and forging bonds of mutual respect. “You
couldn’t help but fall in love with him,” Lawrence Johnson, leader
of the Vice Lords gang, explained. King engaged them in serious
discussion of the political economy of the city, police brutality,
segregation and urban renewal and what could be done to change it.

8. The mainstream media disparaged his efforts outside the South

By the 1960s, newspapers like the _New York Times_ and _Los Angeles
Times_ were covering Southern movements with clarity and rigor. Yet
these publications minimized segregation at home and portrayed
activists (including King) who challenged it as troublemakers and
potential Communists, creating a problem where there wasn’t one.
King himself criticized the press in 1963, saying, “Our minds are
constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices and
false facts.” These newspapers ran more positive, substantive
coverage around his efforts in the South than the North. In 1963, for
example, Dr. King joined the call from New York artists and radicals
for a nationwide boycott of Christmas shopping to highlight the racial
climate across the country that had produced the Birmingham church
bombing
[[link removed]].
The _Times_ editorial board slammed the boycott as “singularly
inappropriate,” “dangerous,” and “self defeating” — even
claiming it put King and other civil rights activists “on the same
level as those who did the church bombing.” When Black New Yorkers
(with King’s support) held a city-wide school boycott on February 3,
1964 to protest the city’s continuing school segregation,
the _Times_ lambasted the protest as a “violent, illegal approach
of adult-encouraged truancy” and “unreasonable and unjustified.”

9. Domestic Colonialism was the way King understood the position of
Black people in US cities

By the mid 1960s, King described the condition of Black people in
major cities like Chicago, LA and NYC as “domestic colonialism.”
He highlighted the profit and power derived from Black misery and
ghettoization, and how the vast majority of jobs in Black communities
— from teachers to sanitation — went to non-Black people.
Describing how the courts and police act as “enforcers” to
maintain this system, he highlighted the practice of elevating Black
faces to high places to thwart Black cries for justice as
“plantation” politics.

10. King believed in the necessity of disruption and called out
Northern allies who “preferred order to justice”

His vision of nonviolence included school boycotts, rent strikes, and
other forms of economic disobedience
[[link removed]] and
direct action intended to disrupt city and business life . He was
criticized for it by Black moderates as well as whites, who repeatedly
called these tactics “unreasonable” and “un-American.” King
observed that many Northern liberals (including political leaders,
residents, and journalists) came to praise bold tactics in the South
while condemning them at home. But he saw they were necessary to
disrupt the comforts of injustice. “If our direct action programs
alienate so-called friends… they never were really our friends.”

So when people today criticize young activists — from Black Lives
Matter protesters to climate change organizers to students
demonstrating against the war in Gaza — and tell them to “be more
like King,” they don’t realize what they’re actually calling
for.

[xxxxxx MODERATOR: RELATED - COUNTERPUNCH RADIO MLK JR.'S LIFE OF
STRUGGLE OUTSIDE THE SOUTH W/ JEANNE THEOHARIS
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_JEANNE THEOHARIS is the author of the award-winning The Rebellious
Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
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Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks for Young People
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Brandy Colbert.  The book was recently turned into a documentary
directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced
by Soledad O’Brien, which is now streaming on Peacock
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curriculum
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use around the film and book._

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* Martin Luther King
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* U.S. history
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* Racism
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