MLK in the North: The Civil Rights Leader Understood That Racism and Segregation Were National Problems
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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 — 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 in 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 — 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 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. 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 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.
[Portside moderator: related - CounterPunch Radio MLK Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South w/ Jeanne Theoharis]
Jeanne Theoharis is the author of the award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks for Young People with 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 with a curriculum to use around the film and book.
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