The Harm of the White Moderate: MLK’s Efforts to Expose Northern Racism

As Jeanne Theoharis shows, in their fight for civil rights, Martin and Coretta Scott King underscored how American cities outside the South upheld segregation in more insidious ways.

Posted on July 15, 2026 in Featured Reviews

As part of our efforts to support scholarly work in pursuit of racial justice, Choice regularly reviews important current titles that consider issues of race or racism, devoting additional space to these works through long-form reviews. Doing so, we hope to underscore the urgency of these issues and to highlight promising resources. Given the relevance of this endeavor to TIE‘s mission, we have decided to begin publishing these reviews exclusively under Toward Inclusive Excellence, moving them from the Choice Picks section of Choice360.org. We hope our readers find these reviews useful for developing their personal or institutional collections. The following review considers the book King of the North (2025) by Jeanne Theoharis and appears in the October 2026 issue of Choice.

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King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, by Jeanne Theoharis. New Press, 2025. 400p 9781620979310 $30.00, ISBN 9798893851083 $22.99, ISBN 9781620979419 $30.99

As an American historian, when teaching pre- and post-Civil War survey courses, this reviewer focuses on those who have been and continue to be disadvantaged and marginalized: e.g., Black people, Indigenous communities, immigrants from places other than Northern and Western Europe. Civil rights studies tend to emphasize the southern struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, which either downplays or completely ignores the reality that cities outside the South, for example, Los Angeles or Detroit, were just as segregated as the southern communities of Birmingham or Selma. In the latter locations, de jure segregation held Black Americans back by law; in the former, de facto segregation operated through custom and tradition to be just as debilitating but much harder to erase.

In past undergraduate courses, this reviewer emphasized both struggles to end segregation, believing I was relatively knowledgeable regarding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s northern activities. However, Theoharis (political science, Brooklyn College, CUNY) has dramatically expanded my knowledge. King of the North is a thoroughly readable, comprehensive analysis of both Martin and Coretta Scott King’s work to extend the Declaration of Independence’s promise of liberty to all Americans. The author or coauthor of thirteen previous books, with research interests in African American history, civil rights, and the Black Power movement, Theoharis here explores how the three interconnected plights of racism, economic inequality, and war are both domestic and international problems for people of color. Rather than writing a simple biography of either Martin or Coretta, she focuses on their lives together as students in Boston who, once married, devoted themselves to the struggle for civil rights. In mainstream accounts, and to a lesser extent in the academic community, Martin is often the focus, marginalizing Coretta’s insights and support. However, both figures and their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement are on full display in this volume. 

 Instead of the ‘segregated’ schools of the South, northern schools were ‘racially imbalanced,’ as gerrymandered school districts permitted little to no integration.

In the 1950s and 1960s, schools across the United States were still highly segregated, as is well known. Even in Queens, New York City, where this reviewer grew up, there were very few Black students and almost no teachers of color in elementary school through high school. The Kings saw this as “a national cancer, not a Southern malady,” whereby “the venality of Northern racism and the ever-present threat of violence (economic, social, and physical) often hid under the cloak of liberalism and of the church” (p 62). Case in point: “Black parent-activist Mae Mallory asserted that the Harlem public school her daughter attended was ‘just as “Jim Crow” as the Hazel Street School that [she] attended in Macon, Georgia’” (p. 89). Instead of the “segregated” schools of the South, northern schools were “racially imbalanced,” as gerrymandered school districts permitted little to no integration. Additionally, racist building trades made it virtually impossible for Black and Puerto Rican Americans, who comprised a quarter of the city’s population, to get high-paying union jobs, further compounding the inequality their communities faced. In the 1960s, school officials in northern cities tried to integrate schools by busing students, a move that was met with massive resistance from proponents of neighborhood schools. In fact, Boston’s School Committee Chair Louise Day Hicks became a national figure of resistance to integration. As Theoharis cogently points out, “Bostonians actually had no problem with busing when it was used to maintain segregation” (p 123).

For instance, while funding from northern contributions enabled the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which brought international attention to the abuses being perpetrated in the South, it hid similar inequalities north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Northern white moderates clearly preferred order to justice, and their complicity allowed segregation and economic inequality to go unnoticed. For instance, while funding from northern contributions enabled the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which brought international attention to the abuses being perpetrated in the South, it hid similar inequalities north of the Mason-Dixon line. Even this reviewer, as a young taxi driver in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, did not connect the racial incongruity I saw there (driving wealthy white men from their large suburban homes to the train, and picking up poorer Black women to work in those same homes) to the segregated South. The Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young girls preparing for the Sunday service, made the front pages of northern newspapers, but the death of an eleven-month-old baby eaten by rats in a Chicago slum was not deemed newsworthy. With other graduate students, this reviewer debated whether to go to Selma to take part in demonstrations against segregation but never considered picketing the Boston Department of Education. Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, many Americans did not make this connection between racism, economic inequality, and (later) war until much later.

From 1955 when the Montgomery Bus Boycott thrust the young Dr. King, then just a Baptist preacher, into a leadership position, until April 1968, when an assassin’s bullet ended his life in Memphis, Tennessee, where he supported the city’s poorly paid Black sanitation workers on strike (many needed food stamps to feed their families), press coverage seemed not to make the connection between racism, economic inequality, and violence. Despite the desperately low pay and horribly dangerous working conditions the sanitation workers had to contend with—two workers had been crushed to death by trash compacters—the news focused not on their plight, which Dr. King had traveled there to protest, but on the hunt for Dr. King’s killer and his speech from the evening before, which seemed to foretell his death.

Multiple civil rights leaders and organizations held conflicting philosophies regarding the best approach to achieving equal rights. Too often, the media exaggerated tensions and divides that simply did not exist between them. Popular belief holds that Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not agree, viewing Malcolm as more militant and Dr. King as more passive. Another example is the firebrand Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and the young radicals of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who referred to Dr. King derisively as “da Lawd.” In fact, Malcolm had gone to Selma to support both SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) voting rights campaign. Nevertheless, civil rights supporter Harry Belafonte and Coretta Scott King both saw the connections between these organizations and individuals that the press missed.

Even though ‘King had gone to Watts to meet with people, to listen to their grievances and be with them in this time of need,’ Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty ‘accused King of advocating Black “lawlessness”‘

p.171

Unfortunately, throughout the civil rights era, the press, government officials, and the general public often misrepresented the Kings’ work. Dr. King visited Los Angeles multiple times before the violence of the Watts riots erupted in 1965. “Warning about the potential for uprisings” (p. 165), California Governor Pat Brown told the press after the riot that while he respected Dr. King, he didn’t think it was “the time for civil rights demonstrations” (p. 169). Even though “King had gone to Watts to meet with people, to listen to their grievances and be with them in this time of need,” Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty “accused King of advocating Black ‘lawlessness’” (p.171).

In a similar situation, which began before the Watts riot, the Chicago Freedom Movement faced the same intransigence from the press (including The New York Times), government officials at all levels, and the white community. Dr. King’s well-defined proposals to confront northern racism fell on deaf ears. Following multiple riots in the late 1960s, which largely spared Black-owned businesses and establishments, President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the Kerner Commission, which issued its report in 1968, declaring: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal,” exactly what the Kings wanted to avoid. This study by Theoharis underscores that segregation was a nationwide phenomenon, and the key to integration lay in the Kings’ expansive vision of equality.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America

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Duncan R. Jamieson is professor of history at Ashland University. He has a PhD in American intellectual history from Michigan State University.

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Be sure to also check out Choice’s archive of featured reviews. We publish a new one every month. A few related ones are:

	Mark Christian’s review of The Scholar and the Struggle (2020): “Recovering a Civil Rights Intellectual from Obscurity: A Vital Biography of L. D. Reddick“
	Amy Yeboah Quarkume’s review of The Movement (2021): “The Quest for Equality Is Ongoing: Holt Reveals a More Nuanced Civil Rights Movement“
	Philip Rubio’s review of Walk with Me (2021): “The Indomitable Fannie Lou Hamer: A New Biography Chronicles Her Lifelong Struggle for Justice“

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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