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Coretta Scott King’s vision shaped MLK’s politics and the broader freedom struggle, says historian Jeanne Theoharis.
By Jesse Hagopian for Truthout
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids schools, states ban honest teaching about race and gender, and public officials invoke Martin Luther King Jr. to call for restraint and “civility,” King’s legacy is being aggressively stripped of its political substance.
Much of the scholarship and public memory of King has long privileged his work in the South, reinforcing the idea that racism was a regional aberration rather than a national system. This narrowing also obscures the intellectual and political partnership at the heart of King’s work, particularly the leadership of Coretta Scott King, whose global vision, antiwar activism, and organizing shaped both King’s politics and the broader freedom struggle.
King’s sustained campaigns in Northern cities reveal how deeply he understood racism as structural — embedded in schools, housing, policing, and liberal governance — and how challenging this structural racism required disruption, organizing, and sustained pressure, rather than moral appeals alone.
Historian and civil rights scholar Jeanne Theoharis challenges this hollowed-out version of King. In her new book, King of the North, she shows that King understood racism as a national crisis and devoted years to fighting school segregation, housing discrimination, police brutality, and liberal resistance in Northern cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. These efforts were often met with hostility from white liberals who supported civil rights in theory while resisting it in practice.
As the author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and A More Beautiful and Terrible History and more, Theoharis is a leading historian of the civil rights movement whose work has reshaped how we understand Black freedom struggles, state repression, and the politics of historical memory. Her latest book offers one of the most rigorous and timely accounts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Northern activism — and what it reveals about structural racism, liberal resistance, and the work required to confront injustice today. In the interview that follows, Theoharis discusses King not only as a gifted orator, but as an organizer committed to disrupting unjust systems. She also speaks about King’s sustained organizing with gangs in Chicago; the central leadership of Coretta Scott King; and why confronting the “silence of our friends” remains essential for movements resisting repression today.
Jesse Hagopian: We’re living through very dangerous times: imperialist wars, ICE agents raiding schools, books and curricula about Black history and LGBTQ+ lives being banned, and right-wing politicians criminalizing honest teaching about structural racism. Many of the same politicians driving this wave of repression cynically quote Dr. King’s words about judging people by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin” — weaponizing his legacy to shut down conversations about racial justice. Given that context, how do you think Dr. King would respond to this current wave of rising authoritarianism, censorship, ICE raids, and repression — and to the movement erupting against it with student walkouts and mass protests?
Jeanne Theoharis: One of the most common misuses of King — both on the MLK Day holiday and throughout the year — comes from people we might call moderates (drawing on King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) who agree with the goals but not the tactics, who prefer order to justice. We see that today in arguments about protesting the “right” way.
King is often invoked to tell young people to quiet down, to stop being disruptive. But looking at King’s actual life shows his deep belief in disruption — because injustice is comfortable.
Injustice isn’t maintained only by violent actors, whether the Klan or ICE agents today, but also by people who benefit from systems of segregation, discrimination, and criminalization.
Even the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a disruptive consumer boycott meant to disrupt the city. King’s nonviolence wasn’t sanitized sit-ins — it included rent strikes, tenant organizing, school boycotts, and forcing injustice into public view.
So yes, I think King would support disruption of the status quo and cheer students walking out to protest repression.
In your new book, King of the North, you show that Dr. King saw racism as a national crisis, not just a southern one. You challenge the familiar story of the civil rights movement as one where heroic southern activists were ultimately aided by enlightened northern liberals. How does looking at King’s work outside the South complicate that narrative — and what does it reveal about who actually stood in the way of racial justice?
When we look at Dr. King outside of the South, we’re forced to see a variety of people who stood in the way of the civil rights movement.
The easy tale we often tell on King Day and in textbooks is that Dr. King and courageous southerners built this movement and, with the help of northern liberals and journalists, ultimately succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And that’s huge.
But that story is comfortable because it centers northern liberal “good guys.” What King of the North forces us to see is that many of those liberals, as King would put it, were not so liberal at home. They might condemn segregation in the South while allowing — or even defending — it in New York, D.C., Chicago, or Seattle.
Looking at King outside the South reminds us how injustice is maintained and shielded. We can think about his phrase “the silence of our friends,” and his insistence that if so-called allies object to tactics rather than injustice itself, they were never truly allies.
You write that despite the avalanche of King biographies, many fail to connect the dots on his work in the North. What do you see as the most significant new contribution your book makes to our understanding of King?
I began this research nearly two decades ago while working on the civil rights movement in Los Angeles before Watts. I kept finding King in LA talking about police brutality, school segregation, and housing discrimination — and I realized this wasn’t the story we’re usually told.
We’re often told King “discovers” northern racism after the Watts rebellion of 1965, but that’s simply untrue.
I think of the book like a kaleidoscope: You turn it slightly and the entire picture changes. The book begins with Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott both going to school outside the South.
King’s own experiences with segregation in the North — and the way supposed allies retreated when injustice was close to home — shaped everything.
In 1950, while King was at Crozer Seminary, he and friends were refused service at a New Jersey bar despite a new anti-discrimination law. When they considered legal action, white law students who had been served refused to testify because it might hurt their futures.
Meanwhile, Coretta Scott was at Antioch College, one of the most liberal campuses in the country. When the town of Yellow Springs refused to allow Black student teachers, Antioch sided with the town. Her classmates — who protested many issues — would not stand with her.
Both of them learned early that northern segregation was real, and that allies often disappeared when confronting it.
King never “discovers” northern racism later. That’s why, in his first book on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he insists that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere — and that northerners must confront injustice where they live.
The second thing the book shows is how King understood leadership — not just leading from the front, but showing up for other people’s struggles. Between 1958 and 1965, he traveled 6 million miles supporting local campaigns against police brutality, school segregation, and urban renewal.
And the third major contribution I make in the book is about Coretta Scott King.
Yes! Your portrait of Coretta is incredibly moving. Can you talk about how King of the North repositions her — not just as King’s partner, but as a leader in her own right, someone who deeply shaped King’s worldview, and also carried their shared vision forward after his assassination?
Thanks for putting it that way, because I think Coretta Scott King is often remembered as only King’s helpmate. Some books portray her as an activist before she met Martin, then as sidelined during their marriage, and only emerging with her own voice after his assassination. That narrative is deeply misleading.
She was more politically engaged than Martin when they met. She had already met Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson. She had organized with the Progressive Party and attended its 1948 convention, which challenged segregation, economic injustice, and Cold War militarism — the “triple evils” we associate with King’s final year.
On their first date, they talked about racism and capitalism. Like any good first date, right? He’s smitten. He’s never met a woman like her. At the end of their first date, he tells her, You have everything I want in a wife — you’re beautiful, you’re principled, you’re brilliant. And she responds, You don’t even know me.
Looking closely at their early courtship shows that he has to bring his A-game with her. Some of the lines he’s used to relying on simply don’t work — she shuts them down, calling them “intellectual jive.”
There’s a beautiful passage at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved about having a “friend of your mind,” and I think that’s what they find in each other: a shared political commitment, but also a shared religious and moral grounding.
Coretta was deeply Christian, but critical of church hypocrisy. King respected that. She was not a passive figure; she shaped his theology and politics as much as figures like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman.
When they get married, in 1953 — not 1973, not 1993 — she did not wear white. She did not wear a long dress. And she gets her very imposing father-in-law to take “obey” out of their vows, because it makes her feel like an “indentured servant,” — and those are her words.
This was the partner King wanted.
Her global vision shaped the movement. She joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, organized against nuclear weapons, and traveled internationally for peace work.
After King won the Nobel Prize, she saw it as a global responsibility. She pushed him to oppose the Vietnam War — and she went public against the war before he did, at great personal risk.
From 1965 on, she is publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam. That places her in a very small minority at the time — something we often forget because of how large the antiwar movement becomes by the late 1960s and early 1970s. To oppose the war in 1965 meant being labeled un-American and subjected to FBI surveillance.
In many ways, she is one of the early leaders of the antiwar movement. She speaks at one of the first major rallies at Madison Square Garden in June 1965 — the only woman on the program — and later that year speaks again in Washington, D.C. When a reporter asks Martin whether he educated her on Vietnam, he responds, “She educated me.”
She later reflects on how Martin’s star burned so brightly that her work was often overlooked or attributed to him. But those who knew her described her as “beyond steel” in her ability to withstand both the political pressure and the personal costs of taking such a public stand.
Another thing you document is King’s sustained organizing with gangs in Chicago — work he was doing before Fred Hampton’s efforts to unite gangs — which may surprise many readers because it runs so counter to the sanitized, respectability-focused version of King we’re often taught. What drew King into that work, and what did he see in those young men that others — including city leaders and the media — refused to see?
The very first night when they moved to Chicago, six members of the Vice Lords come by because the Kings are living in Vice Lords territory. At first, it’s exactly what you might expect — you’re on our turf.
But they keep coming back. Lawrence Johnson, the head of the Vice Lords, later says that you couldn’t help but fall in love with King. They talked, they argued, they spent hours together strategizing and thinking. King saw these young men as key community resources and as potential leaders.
That really gives us a different way of understanding King, who is so often reduced to a kind of respectability-politics finger-wagger. Looking at these interactions — and at the fact that he was working not only with the Vice Lords but with gangs across the city, including the Blackstone Rangers on the South Side — we see a King who listened. He didn’t interrupt.
He was trying to reduce violence between gangs, but he was also helping redirect their energy toward confronting educational inequality, urban renewal, and the slum housing conditions affecting their families. This is happening before Fred Hampton’s efforts to unite gangs — to stop them from killing each other and to turn their collective power against white supremacy.
Hampton himself credits King as part of how he arrives at that approach. Just out of high school, Hampton joins the open-housing marches that summer. The multiracial, race- and class-based gang organizing that we associate with him begins earlier.
As gangs become more political, police repression intensifies. In Chicago in the late 1960s, gang violence goes down, but police repression goes up. The kind of chilling effect we associate with Fred Hampton’s assassination can already be seen in how the Chicago Police and the FBI respond to the politicization of gangs — particularly as they forge truces and begin organizing collectively. That political turn is seen as far more threatening.
In King of the North, you challenge the common myth that segregation was only a southern problem, asking, “What if the 1964 Civil Rights Act had actually been enforced against northern school districts?” You show how King’s activism in Chicago and other northern cities — especially around school and housing segregation — was met with fierce resistance and often dismissed or downplayed by the media. Can you talk about how segregation was maintained in the North, and what kind of resistance King faced when he confronted it?
By the mid-1960s, Chicago was one-third Black. The city responded by deepening segregation. Black residents were compressed into overcrowded neighborhoods, and schools followed suit.
Chicago used “double-session days,” cutting school days in half for tens of thousands of Black students rather than integrating schools. When that wasn’t enough, the district spent millions on trailers — “Willis Wagons” — to avoid desegregation.
These schools were overcrowded, under-resourced, and deteriorating.
In October 1965, the assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Francis Keppel, decided to withhold $32 million in federal funds from Chicago Public Schools because the district was in probable noncompliance with the Civil Rights Act. White Chicago erupted. Members of Congress who had voted for the Act insisted, This is not what we meant.
Mayor Daley was furious. He boarded a plane to New York, where President Johnson was meeting with the Pope, and confronted him directly. Less than a week later, Johnson ordered HEW to reverse course and release the funds. In effect, the president of the United States halted the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act against Chicago’s schools.
I don’t usually like counterfactuals, but had the federal government held the line and forced Chicago to comply, it’s possible that cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. — places that still experience deep segregation today — might have been compelled to follow as well.
Much of your work has focused on the politics of memory — how we remember Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement more broadly. What did you learn from researching this book and what do you hope people take from King’s legacy — not just King as an orator, but as an organizer?
King connected with people across the country around police brutality. He had experienced police brutality himself, and he spoke with Chicago gang members and with people in Harlem about it. He understood police violence not as isolated incidents, but as a structural problem.
By the mid-1960s, King was describing cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago through the lens of domestic colonialism, arguing that police and courts functioned as enforcers to keep Black communities in line. That language matters. When we see that King, we see someone who speaks directly to our moment — someone who clearly understood forces that are still with us today.
For many years, like a lot of scholars and organizers, I’ve talked about the misuses of King and the misuses of the holiday. But this research also showed me how much there was still to learn about him. Even as we’ve challenged some myths, others have remained — especially the tendency to southernize him, to see him only at the front of marches rather than supporting movements, listening, and being changed by the people around him. It also reshaped how I understand who King recognized as leaders, and the diversity of people he saw as central to the struggle.
King consistently focused on structure. One of my favorite moments is when a well-meaning liberal white woman suggests that Black people should just clean up their neighborhoods. King responds, that’s the job of sanitation. No amount of individual effort, he insists, can substitute for equitable public infrastructure.
Finally, King was clear that the deliberate manipulation of history is central to the maintenance of injustice. That brings us back to where we began — today’s attempts to ban certain histories or restrict what can be taught. King understood that telling some histories while erasing others has long been a way injustice sustains itself.
Telling an honest history, then, helps us not only better see the past, but also where we are — and where we need to go.
Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of the book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. You can follow him at IAmAnEducator.com, Instagram, Bluesky or Substack.
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