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A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book

From an award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian, King of the North provides a groundbreaking reexamination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful but often overlooked campaigns beyond the American South. While popular memory celebrates King primarily for dismantling Jim Crow segregation in Dixie, Jeanne Theoharis skillfully demonstrates how King’s activism and fight for racial justice extended significantly into the North and West, through key efforts in cities such as Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Drawing upon thorough research and careful scholarship, this book highlights King’s relentless dedication to combatting school segregation, housing discrimination, police brutality, and job inequality across the nation. Theoharis reveals the intense opposition and hostility King faced during these campaigns from white liberals, the media, and even the federal government itself.

This fresh portrayal presents King not only as the influential leader of a powerful movement, but also as someone actively supportive of others’ struggles, who deeply listened and learned from his allies. It depicts him as a dynamic speaker positioned within broader community actions, as a minister closely working alongside impoverished communities, and as a Black man who himself endured police brutality. Theoharis also highlights how King’s partner, Coretta Scott King, served as an essential intellectual and political advisor guiding his work.

Just as she successfully restored Rosa Parks’s integral role within modern American history, Jeanne Theoharis expands and deepens our understanding of King’s broader vision, one that remains crucial and unresolved today. King of the North pushes us to reconsider King’s legacy beyond simplistic, sanitized narratives, making clear the ongoing urgency of his quest for racial justice, equality, and peace.