Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today! 

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........

© Truthout