AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We started this week marking what would have been the hundredth birthday of Malcolm X. At the end of this week, we mark the fifth anniversary of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

We’re here for Part 2 of our conversation with historian Jeanne Theoharis, whose new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, is a major reexamination that offers a different picture of both King’s own experiences of police brutality and his sustained critique of police brutality and the criminal legal system in the North, as well as the South.

We thank you so much for staying with us for this Part 2 of our conversation. So, if you could — when people talk about Dr. King, I don’t think they think about this major struggle against police brutality. Talk about your years investigating this, well, doing this reexamination, and what surprised you most, and then take us through a very different trajectory of his life than we’re used to hearing.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. I mean, in many ways, we have Southernized Dr. King. And by Southernizing him, we miss both really key aspects of his own life and the ways that he understands racism and segregation and police brutality, not as like a Southern sickness, but a national cancer.

And partly that begins in his own life, first because, as we know, he goes to Morehouse for college, but then he will do his graduate work, first at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and then at Boston University. And I think many of us know that vaguely, but we don’t think about the young man who was then living in those segregated cities, going to those predominantly white institutions, and the kinds of segregation that he encounters, and also the ways that he encounters the limits of Northern liberalism at home.

And so, he never not knows that, and that’s true of Coretta Scott King, as well — both, the depths of Northern segregation. So, for instance, when he moves to Boston, no one will rent to him because he’s Black. This is also true of Coretta Scott. Coretta Scott will go to Antioch College in Ohio, and then she goes to the New England Conservatory of Music. One of my favorite interviews with her — 

AMY GOODMAN: I didn’t know that.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yeah, and that’s where they meet, in Boston, in segregated Boston. And this interviewer in 1968 says to Coretta, “What was it like starting your relationship in integrated Boston?” And she’s like, “No, it was not. We talked about it all the time. It was this veneer.” So, I think part of it begins in seeing Dr. King’s life, Coretta Scott King’s life, and what it was like to be in their bodies. And so, they experience both Northern racism and segregation and the limits of Northern liberalism, and then, on top of that, to sort of see Dr. King, in his body, around issues of police brutality. So, we sometimes have this very sanitized idea of, like, what it meant for Dr. King to get arrested. And he gets arrested 29 times over the course of his life. No, this is not some sort of celebrity arrest. All sorts of things happened to him.

The first time he’s arrested, which is during the Montgomery bus boycott, he gets pulled over for driving five miles over the speed limit. They don’t give him a ticket. They make him get in the car. They realize it’s that damn King fellow — they probably said something worse than that. And they drive him around, and he’s convinced he’s going to be killed.

In 1958, like we just talked about, he tries to go to a court hearing. They won’t let him in. The police then kind of manhandle him, bring him down to the station, choke him, kick him.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is that famous picture — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: That famous — 

AMY GOODMAN: — and we talked about this in Part 1 — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — of him with his arm in a half-nelson —

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right, like —

AMY GOODMAN: — and the police around him, but they see that a journalist — how did the journalist get in here, by the way, and in the police station and take this picture?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I think he’s just following him. I mean, basically, he sees him at the court. The courthouse is actually right down the street from the police. And so, he’s just following along, and somehow — but then they’re really mad. So, what happens after, they get him in the cell.

In 1960, as we — maybe the most famous arrest of Dr. King happens at an Atlanta sit-in. But when all the other people get released, they dredge up an old charge and, in the middle of the night, transfer Dr. King, in the middle of the night, hands chained to the floor of the car. When he says they’re too tight, they tighten him.

So, Dr. King has a deep and visceral understanding of what the police can do. And then, that deep and visceral understanding then extends not just to people in Birmingham, but to people in New York, to a lot of the work that he does with gang members in Chicago, that that understanding and the ideas of how the police can do what they want with you is not just some abstract fear. Dr. King has lived that.

And so — and one of the things he’ll talk about, just to be clear, is — and this is — I’m quoting him: “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage about police brutality in the South” — and we might think of Birmingham — “police brutality in the North was tolerated, rationalized and usually denied.” So, this is Dr. King basically saying, also, we have movements, from L.A. to New York and in between, challenging police brutality, and yet they’re being seen very differently by the nation and by the media.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the media. I mean, we know about Birmingham. We saw the hoses, the drenching of, the beating of the kids, the women, the men. And the nation was horrified.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the media’s coverage of King organizing against police abuse, organizing against racism in the North.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I mean, I think we want to remember that most mainstream newspapers — and again, we’re talking about, like, the L.A. Times or The New York Times, the Detroit Free Press — they largely never cover, like, issues of police brutality. So, that was what was so viral about that 1958 photo, and that’s in the South, but to even see a picture of it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is understanding that the media, as it starts to — again, that national media starts to cover rigorously, seriously what’s happening in Birmingham. At the very same time, there are movements happening right here in New York, in Boston, in Detroit, in Chicago, in L.A., and they’re taking a very different tone. Much of the time, they are ignoring, dismissing, red-baiting, calling them unreasonable and outrageous. And they’re calling Dr. King that, as well, I think we want to remember. I think we often have this sense that Dr. King becomes unacceptable in 1967. When you take him out of the South, when you look at him in 1962, calling out police brutality in Los Angeles in 1962 — 

AMY GOODMAN: And why was he there?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So, he’s there — he’s speaking in L.A., and this is two months after the police murder of unarmed Nation of Islam secretary Ron Stokes and the brutalization of other members of the Nation. We associate that with Malcolm. Malcolm has come out to L.A. But King joins that united front movement, as well.

And King is saying there can be no compromise on this issue. He is saying we need to, like, amass political power to be able to effectively get the police chief out. He will talk about police brutality when he returns in 1963. When people are asking him in L.A., “What can we do for Birmingham?” he says, “Fix L.A. You have police brutality. You have school segregation. You have housing segregation.” In fact, he calls L.A. in 1963 “as segregated” as Birmingham. He calls Chicago “as segregated” as Birmingham in 1963.

But that’s often not being covered, or it’s being covered as King as an outside agitator. And so, often, as King will put it, “As long as I was safe in the South” — right? — “they liked these tactics, and they were willing to sort of take this more seriously. When I become unsafe” — right? — “when I’m saying these things here, whether it’s L.A., whether it’s Pittsburgh, whether it’s Philadelphia, then,” he will say, “only the language is polite.” You know, the opposition was firm and unequivocal.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to what you write, in 1963, when King goes to Chicago. And I’m reading from Jean Theoharis’s book, King of the North. Professor Theoharis, you say, “In 1963, King went to Chicago repeatedly to support the growing movement challenging the city’s school and housing segregation, calling the city 'as segregated' as Birmingham. In one article, the Tribune editorial board labeled King 'arrogant' and an 'outsider.' The paper claimed that 'in Chicago, there was little to no segregation' and suggested that King was not welcome in the city anymore.” They wrote, “We don’t need any agitators from the South.”

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: “Just five years earlier, when King’s work seemed contained in the South, an editorial published by The Tribune titled 'Portrait of a Christian' praised King as 'an influential champion of both egalitarian ends and nonviolent means.' But when Dr. King’s call for change was trained on Chicago itself, the _Tribune_’s editorial board took a much different stance.” Now, those are your words — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — in King of the North. I mean, he said he was more afraid in Chicago than any place else in the South.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: And I think —

AMY GOODMAN: And he was shot at.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yeah. And I think part of what we — like, bringing the timeline earlier, because I think we often associate King in Chicago in ’66. And to see all of these years where this growing, huge movement in Chicago, King will say, “If this movement had happened in the South, there would have been change.”

He’s — right, so, part of what you mention — right? — is the constant gaslighting that Northern activists and Dr King are getting when they’re trying to call out the relentless school segregation and housing segregation. You know, by 1963, there’s about a million Black people in Chicago. Schools are so — Black schools are so overcrowded that they’ve brought — they’ve put them on what euphemistically is called “double session days,” which basically means Black students are going to school for half the day, because one group is going in the morning, and one group is going at night — I mean, in the afternoon, so that they are not having to rezone any Black students into white schools.

So, this is — I think sometimes we have this sense of segregation in the North being sort of haphazard, or it just happens. No, it is school policy, and they’re making decisions after decisions. And King is calling that out alongside an incredible and growing movement. And that’s — the story actually gets complicated in terms of other places that we — we often romanticize the role of the media in the civil rights movement, missing what they do outside of the South. I think we often romanticize Lyndon Johnson, as well.

So, let me tell you a story. As you probably know, one of the big provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is that it ties federal funding to desegregating schools. So, guess what. Chicago parents think that should apply to them, too. So, Black parents and civil rights advocates in Chicago basically file a complaint with what is then called HEW, Housing, Education and Welfare, what would be the Department of Ed, basically saying, “Our schools are segregated,” right? And HEW investigates, and they find that they have standing. And they ask the Chicago Board of Ed for things like class sizes, or where do you place teachers? And the Chicago Board of Ed basically says, “We don’t have to give you that information” — to the federal government. And so, HEW, the deputy director, on October 1st, 1965, makes the decision to hold $32 million of federal funds to Chicago schools because they’re in noncompliance. They’re segregated. White Chicago goes insane. King telegrams Johnson, “This is amazing.” But white Chicago goes insane. The Trib, I mean, the editorials are crazy. And Mayor Daley gets on a plane and confronts Lyndon Johnson in New York. And less than a week later, Lyndon Johnson calls the deputy director of HEW into his office and reverses it. And basically, the president of the United States ends any kind of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act against Northern school districts like Chicago.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about his work with gangs in Chicago. The Turfmasters Summit?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I know. I know. So, in 1965, King and the SCLC make the decision to basically double down with this movement already in Chicago. And part of the reason they decide on Chicago is because of what a robust movement it is, the kinds of creative nonviolence being used. And so they make the decision to sort of go to Chicago. And that happens in April. And why I’m telling you this is because there’s — again, one of the other myths is this kind of turn after Watts, they discover it. No, they’ve made the decision before Watts rises up, which is in August.

OK, so, the key — the two key issues that they are kind of working on are schools, as we mentioned, and housing, that housing in Chicago, we have two huge ghettos, again, because of the relentlessness of segregation. We have what we would call sundown towns and neighborhoods in Chicago, which basically means Black people can work there, but they’re not safe at night. I would bet you know the name Emmett Till. Emmett Till is the young man lynched, the Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi. But I wonder how many of us listening know the name Jerome Huey. Jerome Huey is a 17-year-old who, in 1966, Chicago teenager, goes for an interview in Cicero, which is a neighborhood in Chicago, and he’s waiting for the bus after, and he’s basically beaten to death by, like, four young white men. And so, this is a Northern lynching 11 years after Emmett Till.

So, I think one of the other things, which you mentioned before, is the ways that we often don’t see. We have these very, very visceral images of violence in the South, and we have this idea that there wasn’t this kind of racial violence in the North. But in fact, the racial violence in the North is also covered differently, cast differently. So, yeah, 11 years after Emmett Till, another Chicago teenager is lynched. And that will spur those open housing marches over the summer of 1966.

But even before that, King makes the decision in January, a few months before that, to move to Chicago, to live in a West Side sort of slum apartment, to be close to — I mean, in many ways, in a religious way, to be close to people, in an organizing way. The very first night they move in, in January, he’s in Vice Lords territory. The head of the Vice Lords come by just to kind of show their power.

But a very different thing happens, which is that this begins a whole process of talking and arguing and sitting around. The head of the Vice Lords, a young man by the name of Lawrence Johnson, will say it was — you know, it was hard not to fall in love with him. That didn’t mean they always agreed. But there was this — one more thing: One of the things that many of these young men — so, Lawrence Johnson, Jeff Fort, who is the head of the Blackstone Rangers — say about Dr. King was what a good listener he was. And I think that’s also an aspect of him that we don’t know, that he would sit with them, that he would talk with them. And I think many of us, if you knew that he did gang work, you imagined it like, oh, it’s some sort of like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, like “Just say no. Pull your pants up.” No, these are substantive conversations about what people are experiencing. He wanted to hear what they were experiencing, what their families were experiencing, what was happening in their neighborhoods, because he saw them as experts of their neighborhoods. He saw them as leaders of their neighborhoods. He saw them as courageous.

I mean, one of the other things that many people in SCLC said was that in some —

AMY GOODMAN: SCLC being the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Leadership Conference, who in Chicago — that Black people in Chicago, in some ways, were more scared, because there were so many levers of power that the mayor had to make your life miserable, if you protested, if you took stands against the mayor. He could take your housing. He could fine you. He could fine your business. He could — 

So, part of also why Dr. King is turning to gangs is because these young men are courageous and leaders. And so he spends hundreds of hours. And then, by the summer, part of what he’s doing is he’s cultivating that leadership in terms of these issues around doing rent strikes, doing tenant organizing. I think we don’t often understand that when King is talking nonviolence, the arsenal — right? — is things like rent strikes. It’s like school boycotts. It is blocking traffic. But again, we keep him in a kind of dusty Southern town, and we miss this other aspect.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talked about him moving. He moved his family — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — to Chicago.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Well, he doesn’t move his kids, because — guess what. Remember I just told you about, like — so, Chicago schools are not desegregating, but they managed to get their two oldest into a desegregating school in Atlanta. So, something — so, that was possible in Atlanta in 1965.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow!

JEANNE THEOHARIS: It was not possible in Chicago.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, where was Coretta?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So, she went back and forth. And he went — and he also was going back and forth, because he was still preaching typically on Sundays.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you, Coretta Scott King, the role that she played? And she, a leader herself, which is not very much conveyed.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes. I mean, I think we have to understand that Coretta Scott King was more of an activist than Martin Luther King when they met. She had — as I mentioned, she goes to Antioch. She grew up in a very proud political family. Her dad, they owned land. Her dad also began a lumber business. Whites, where they lived in Alabama, hated this. They burned their house. They burned their business. So, she grows up with a kind of steely reserve that we’re going to see just flower. Then she goes to Antioch. And at Antioch, which is one of the most liberal colleges in the nation at this point, she’s —

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: In Ohio. But she and her sister are the first Black students at Antioch in decades. But there, she gets involved in a number of sort of political groups, in the NAACP, but also in the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party in 1948 is running a third-party challenge against the Democrats and Republicans, both on issues domestically around segregation and on issues sort of challenging Cold War militarism. So, Coretta Scott King meets Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson long before she meets Martin Luther King.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow!

JEANNE THEOHARIS: They meet through a friend. Again, she’s at the New England Conservatory of Music. He’s at BU. They meet through a friend. On their first date, they talk about racism and capitalism, right? Like all good first dates. At the end, he is smitten, right? He’s never met someone like her. He says to her, basically, “You have all the qualities that I want in a wife. You’re brilliant. You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You’re perceptive.” She’s like, “You don’t know me.” He’s going to have to bring his A game for her.

And so, I think one of the things we’ve missed is this is a political partnership. They are political companions. Again, the Progressive Party — ideas that we associate with, again, that last year, of the kind of triple evils of racism, poverty and war, Coretta has already from her Progressive Party. She’s a student delegate to the Progressive Party convention in 1948, one of 150 African Americans there, right? So, she’s — these issues, she’s bringing this to their relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: She’s also global.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She’s global. So, in the early 1960s, she begins to get it. She joins the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom even in the '50s, and then she's getting active around issues of nuclear weapons. In 1962, she joins a Women Strike for Peace delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, basically trying to pressure the United States and the Soviet Union for a nuclear test ban treaty. They march on the U.N. in 1963.

And then, 1964, Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel Prize, and she talks about what she sees as both the joy of that and the burden of that, because, to her, they now have a different responsibility to the world. And she begins to be very clear that that means they have to come out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And she’s out in ’65 and relentless. As we know, Dr. King comes out in ’65 a little bit, gets criticized, pulls back. Again, at home, of course, they both were, but she is —

AMY GOODMAN: He gives his famous speech —

JEANNE THEOHARIS: April 1967.

AMY GOODMAN: — on April 4th, 1967 — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: 4th, 1967.

AMY GOODMAN: — a year to the day before he was assassinated —

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — why he opposed the war in Vietnam, at Riverside Church here.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: But many of — 

AMY GOODMAN: But she’s speaking years before.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Years before. And many of the themes that we associate with that speech — right? — issues of sort of the U.S. as a colonial power, issues of what it does to kind of domestic priorities at home, issues of kind of what it does to the United States’ reputation globally — all of these are themes that we see in Coretta Scott King’s speeches years earlier. In 1965, there’s a big — one of the first big rallies against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam at Madison Square Garden. She’s the only woman who speaks. A reporter asks him afterwards, “Did you educate her?” And he says, “No, she educated me.”

So, I think we also need to see that she’s leading on some issues, he’s leading on some issues. But again, Dr. King couldn’t have done what he did without her. She is beyond steel, many people, many friends will describe her as, and equally committed, equally fierce, and again, with this global vision.

AMY GOODMAN: So, before we end, I want to talk about another woman with you, and you can also relate it to your new book, King of the North. And that’s the other — one of the other books you wrote, and that is the story of Rosa Parks — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. The documentary by the same name, you also worked on. Talk about her. She moves to Detroit, too.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Right? She moves north. But also, she’s willing to try tactics she has no idea if they’re going to work.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes. I mean, I think when we — I mean, this is a very difficult moment in this country, in this world. And I think one of the things that I really take from Rosa Parks, and that I also take from, you know, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, is the ability to try things that you have no idea are going to work, and to try them over and over and over, and to have people tell you, “You’re being unreasonable. You’re being reckless. You’re being un-American. You’re being, you know, too much. You’re being a troublemaker,” and all the kinds of pressures that, you know, we talked — we just talked about all of the police brutality, King. With Rosa Parks, she loses her job during the Montgomery bus boycott. It takes a decade for the Parks family to return to the income that they have in 1955. And they were working-class people. They lived in the Cleveland Court projects, right? So, the kind of cost.

But I think the greatest gift they give us, and that somebody like Rosa Parks gives us, is the ability to act without knowing that it’s going to work. That I think so often the ways that the civil rights movement is shown to us, is taught to us, is somehow that you know, that you know your bravery will be rewarded. When she talks about her bus stand — right? — this is after two decades of activism, of activism where she felt crazy, where she felt so demoralized and depressed, and all our efforts seemed in vain — right? — doing thing after thing after thing.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Rosa Parks famously taking on the issue of the raping of Black women.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Absolutely, coming out against both the ways the criminal justice system overprosecuted Black men and then underprotected Black people, right? So both sides of the kind of criminal justice system. And so, the ability to keep doing things because of the importance to say you don’t like it, to say you dissent. When she makes her famous bus stand, she will talk about how she both didn’t know if she would get —

AMY GOODMAN: When she refuses to sit down in the back of the bus.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right, she refuses to move. Right? And she says both she didn’t know if she would get off the bus alive, because one of her neighbors, a Black veteran named Hilliard Brooks, in 1950, he doesn’t get off the bus alive.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow!

JEANNE THEOHARIS: But at the same time, she talks about her arrest that day being “annoying.” And partly, she says that word “annoying,” because here she’s gotten arrested. She’s planning — she has organized a youth group for the NAACP. And this is where she’s putting her hopes, because they’re more radical than her peers. She thinks her peers are too complacent. And so, she’s like, “Oh my god! I’ve gotten myself arrested, and I have all this stuff to do tonight.” And I think what we see in that is there’s no — she does not know that night, in any way, that this is the beginning of something huge. This is a history-changing moment. She’s annoyed because she thinks she has more important work to be doing at home for her youth workshop.

So, I think that what that shows us and what that gives us for this moment we’re in is this ability not to know and to step forward and to stand fast and to double down, because I think this is the other thing that the Kings do and that we can see in Dr. King’s work, both in the South and in the North, is the double down, is the — when faced with pressure, you don’t retreat. In fact, you go harder.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there, but people shouldn’t leave it there. You should pick up the book, the new book by Jeanne Theoharis called King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Jeanne Theoharis is a historian and professor of political science at Brooklyn College, author of 13 books about the civil rights movement and the fight for racial justice in the United States. Her other work includes the award-winning book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. And she also served as consulting producer for the documentary of the same name. Jeanne Theoharis, along with Brandy Colbert, also published a young adult version of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks in 2021. Maybe we’ll see a young adult version of King of the North?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I’m thinking so.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, to see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.