CANR

• King of the North: Martin Luther King's Life of Struggle Outside the South - 2025 The New Press, New York, NY
• Until We're Seen: Autoethnographies of a Pandemic by Students at Its Epicenters (edited by Joseph Entin and eanne Theoharis with Dominick Braswell) - 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA
• Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Julian Bond ; edited by Pamela Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis ; photographs by Danny Lyon ; afterword by Vann R. Newkirk II) - 2020 Beacon Press, Boston, MA
• The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South (edited by Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, with Komozi Woodard) - 2019 New York University Press, New York, NY
• A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History - 2018 Beacon Press, Boston, MA

• Brooklyn College website - https://www.brooklyn.edu/faculty-staff/jeanne-theoharis/

  Jeanne Theoharis
  Dist Professor

  Political Science

  School of Humanities and Social Sciences

  Profile
  Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of thirteen books on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her newest book is King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Her biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award & the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. The book was turned into a documentary directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for Peacock where she served as a consulting producer. The documentary was awarded a Peabody Award and a Television Academy Honor Award. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

  Prof. Theoharis’s expertise: 20th-century African American history, civil rights and Black Power, the contemporary politics of race and gender, social policy, urban studies, post-9/11 racial politics and civil liberties.

  Education
  A.B., Harvard University (Afro-American Studies), 1991

  Ph.D., University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (American Studies), 1996

• African American Intellectual History Society website - https://www.aaihs.org/julian-bonds-time-to-teach-an-interview-with-jeanne-theoharis/

  Julian Bond’s ‘Time to Teach’: An Interview with Jeanne Theoharis

  By Say Burgin March 18, 2021 Comments Off

  This is an interview with blogger Say Burgin and Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or co-author of ten books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, the history of social welfare and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her widely-acclaimed biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the 25 Best Academic Titles of 2013 by Choice. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, Slate, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, the Intercept, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Follow her on Twitter @JeanneTheoharis.

  Say Burgin: Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement was published in January 2021, and it is a collection of Professor Bond’s lectures from his civil rights movement classes, which he taught for decades. Before you knew Julian Bond as a friend and mentor, you were an undergraduate student in his civil rights movement class. What was he like in the classroom?

  Jeanne Theoharis: I took Julian Bond’s class on the civil rights movement when I was a junior in college and it was an extraordinary class—and then had the privilege of being his TA two years later. The class shaped who I am today as a scholar and an activist, and I’ve heard that from so many people who took it. The class very much focused on the how—how the movement gestated, was made, and sustained and also how white supremacy and segregation were gestated, made and sustained. Because of that focus, it wasn’t just about understanding this history in the past – but the present more clearly and how we too could build movements.

  One of his key goals was to dismantle the master narrative that had grown up around the movement that clouded our ability to see it clearly. In wry fashion, he encapsulated this narrative as “Rosa sat down, Martin stood, up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.” In this master narrative, as Bond made clear, injustice is obvious, decent people took action, and the good guys triumphed —and then Black Power came along and ruined everything. Challenging this romanticized and dangerous fable, Professor Bond’s classes sought to give us a much fuller and more accurate sense of the movement’s origins and effects, its many players, and its many opponents. He also aimed to help us think about the uses behind this mythmaking (the nationalism, the rendering of racism as a flaw rather than a constitutive element of the American politics and society). He wanted us to see the ground-shaking challenge to American society and politics the civil rights movement had wrought, its unpopularity at the time, and the tremendous amount of work still to be done. The class gave me the tools to deconstruct the master narrative—which has animated my own scholarship for the past two decades.

  Burgin: So, in this book, we get Professor Bond’s polished lectures. They collectively tell a powerful and detailed story of the Southern movement, and each individual lecture clearly relies on Bond’s reading of the vast movement literature. At times, he’s part of the story he’s telling – amongst student activists in Atlanta organizing sit-ins and pickets in the spring of 1960, for instance – but his memory and his actions aren’t the driving force in these lectures. What does this tell us about who Julian Bond was as both a movement veteran and movement historian?

  Theoharis: The book is a rarity of movement-teacher-meets-scholarly-analysis. It’s hard to think of any books like it. First, it’s only possible because he wrote his teaching lectures out in full sentences and polished them over years as he read more, according to his wife (and the co-editor of the book) Pam Horowitz. So we are getting Julian Bond’s master class of the civil rights movement as he taught it for more than two decades. The book is not Julian Bond’s autobiography—he certainly appears in the narrative in moments and many parts are indelibly shaped by his front-row seat as a founding member of SNCC and its Communication Director. But Prof. Bond was also a scholar at heart—so he read everything that came out on the movement and he was constantly updating his lectures to reflect new information or analyses he’d gained. It’s a remarkable synthesis of experience, oral history, and movement scholarship.

  Burgin: Professor Bond’s lectures in this collection are richly detailed, and the cast of civil rights activists that peoples the lectures are introduced and discussed with vivid humanism. What is the lesson Bond offers educators and students by doing this – by slowing down in time and fully fleshing out the community of civil rights activists?

  Theoharis: One of the stories I tell in the introduction is my recollection of some of those first classes in the course I took with him. The lecture on the Montgomery bus boycott lasted for days—and I have to admit, there I sat my twenty-year-old self worried that we’d never make it to the 1960s at this rate. First, he started back in the 1930s and 1940s—with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Montgomery NAACP, giving us a wide cast of characters (NAACP leader E.D. Nixon, Women’s Political Council President JoAnn Robinson, Reverend Vernon Johns who was Dexter Avenue Baptist’s pastor before Martin Luther King, a very young Martin and Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks and so many others). And then when he got to December 1, 1955, he went hour by hour, showing who called whom (Parks called Gray who called Robinson) and who did what to show how they turned Parks’ courageous stand into a boycott. This indelibly shaped how I would come to understand and teach the movement—as a series of choices, of actions, of painstaking organizing, changing course, and persevering. He made clear that the movement was a movement not because of a couple of brilliant leaders but because a host of people made it so. And by seeing this, it was easier to imagine how we could do it again.

  Burgin: As you’ve written elsewhere, Professor Bond highlighted the courage and the efforts of young activists throughout his teaching. What do you think are some of the more powerful moments in his lectures where we can see him doing this?

  Theoharis: The chapters on the sit-ins and the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) are so vivid. Similar to the boycott, we get to see day-by-day how young people imagined, built, and grew these sit-ins, how they made their own organization (SNCC) with the powerful assistance of Ella Baker, how many adults mentored them, how many adults opposed this disruptive activism, and how SNCC would change the nation. We’re inundated with the cliché that young people are the future, but this book shows how much a group of young people frustrated with the inaction of the older generation took action and more action (and were opposed not just by white supremacists but at times by older civil rights leaders) and forced the nation to reckon with its original sin of racism. It also shows how people changed by being in action and how the freedom they imagined expanded and grew.

  Burgin: And what was the pedagogical impetus behind highlighting young people? How did he think younger generations could be changed by seeing themselves in the histories he taught?

  Theoharis: To teach the movement was a way to carry it forward. The point, then, was not to tell us young people what to do—that the activists of old had the right way that needed to be drummed into us. Rather, he sought to challenge the master narrative and the fables that had grown up around the movement and the popular memory of it to ensure that we grasped the complications, joys, and work of building movements and the power of youth leadership. He knew that young people had changed this nation and he wanted us to understand how.

  Burgin: On the surface – in the table of contents, for instance – this book could look like Professor Bond was teaching the classic narrative of the Southern civil rights movement. But the lectures in fact give a very different history. How do they do that?

  Theoharis: In A More Beautiful and Terrible History, I write about the fable of the civil rights movement –an American exceptionalist tale where the Southern movement is rendered courageous but obvious and decent people do the right thing and America inexorably moves toward justice. The first person to teach me to recognize that fable was Julian Bond. His class—this book—shows us how much more there was to the Southern struggle than has made it to the textbooks or the public ways we tend to celebrate the civil rights movement. It is fundamentally a history of the power of organizing, of how it happened—and as such, the cast of characters is extremely wide. There are a lot more heroes—this is not a story about charismatic leaders but about the range of people possessing vision and extraordinary courage who slowly, with great effort and difficulty and sacrifice and vision, changed this country. But it’s also a story of the range of people who stood in the way. Bull Connor and George Wallace aren’t the only villains here. Julian zeroed in on the role of the moderate, the people who remained silent or stayed on the sidelines, and how powerful that was in terms of maintaining Southern Jim Crow.

  Another lesson that has stayed with me is how hard it was to do what they did and how so many people didn’t and couldn’t. He showed us the three people on the bus that day seated next to Rosa Parks who got up when the driver asked and a bus full of people who said nothing. He showed us the many churches (Black and white) that closed their doors to the movement; he showed us the red-baiting that rendered movement activists like himself as possible traitors. I think we like to imagine that if we had lived 60 years ago, we would have been in SNCC. Professor Bond made it possible to imagine how we could have been—or could forge our own path today– but also made clear how many people weren’t.

• Wikipedia -

  Jeanne Theoharis

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (October 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  Jeanne Theoharis

  Occupation Professor of Political Science and History
  Nationality American
  Alma mater Harvard University,
  University of Michigan
  Genre non-fiction
  Notable awards NAACP Image Award,
  Peabody Award
  Parents Athan Theoharis (father)[1]
  Relatives Liz Theoharis (sister)[2]
  Jeanne Theoharis is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY).[3] She is also a Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.[4]

  Early life
  Jeanne Theoharis was born to activist Nancy Artinian and professor Athan Theoharis. She was raised in Fox Point, Wisconsin a village in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin near the campus of Marquette University where her father taught. She has two siblings Liz Theoharis co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, and George Theoharis a professor of education, at Syracuse University.[5]

  Career
  Jeanne Theoharis graduated from Harvard College in 1991 with dual concentrations in Afro-American, and Women's Studies.[6] She then went on to pursue a PhD, at the University of Michigan in American Culture.[7][8] Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York (CUNY). In her work as a political science professor she specializes in contemporary politics of race and gender, social policy, urban studies and 20th century African American history.[9] Theoharis is also the author of numerous books and articles on the Black freedom struggle, including the NAACP Image award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and A More Beautiful and Terrible History, which won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Prize in Nonfiction. Theoharis' book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks was adapted into an award-winning documentary directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O'Brien for NBC-Peacock, where she served as a consulting producer. The documentary won a Peabody Award and a Television Academy Honor Award.

  In 2013, Theoharis co-created, a roundtable discussion program entitled Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Sarah Lawrence professor Komozi Woodard, and Lehman College professor Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine. The series features a roundtable of scholars and writers on the first Thursday of each month speaking on a topic in Black history, usually centered around a new book(s) in the field.[10]

  Theoharis has also worked as a faculty coleader in the Narrating Change, Changing Narratives research group of the 2014-2016 Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.[11]

  Theoharis speaks in 2020
  Works
  Essays
  Theoharis, Jeanne, 2016. "MLK Would never shut down a freeway and 6 other myths about the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter", The Root, July 15.
  Theoharis, Jeanne, Burgin, Say, 2015. "Rosa Parks wasn't Meek, Passive or Naive--and 7 Other Things You Probably Didn't Learn in School", The Nation, December 1.
  Marchevsky, Alejandra, and Jeanne Theoharis, 2006. Not working: Latina immigrants, low-wage jobs, and the failure of welfare reform. NYU Press.
  Marchevsky, Alejandra, Theoharis, Jeanne, 2016. "Why It Matters That Hillary Clinton Championed Welfare Reform", The Nation, March 1.
  Coauthored: "Charlottesville belies racism’s deep roots in the North".[12]
  The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Beacon Press. 29 January 2013. ISBN 978-0-8070-5048-4.[13]
  Books
  Theoharis, J. (2025). King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. The New Press. [1]
  Theoharis, J. (2013). The rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Beacon Press.
  Noel S. Anderson; Jeanne Theoharis; Gaston Alonso; Celina Su (1 May 2009). Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education. NYU Press. pp. 69–. ISBN 978-0-8147-8320-7.
  Theoharis, J. (2018). A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-7587-6. Retrieved 2018-02-05.
  Brian Purnell; Jeanne Theoharis; with Komozi Woodard (2019). The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South. NYU Press. ISBN 9781479820337.
  Editor
  Jeanne Theoharis; Komozi Woodard, eds. (1 January 2005). Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-8285-9.
  Jeanne Theoharis; Komozi Woodard, eds. (1 November 2009). Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-3230-4.
  Jeanne F. Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 9780312294687
  Awards and honors
  2013 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks[14]
  2014 NAACP Image Award, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks[15][16]
  2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, A More Beautiful and Terrible History; The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History[17]
  2022 Peabody Award, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (documentary)[18]
  2023: Television Academy Honors, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (documentary)[19]

• All Things Considered - https://www.npr.org/2018/02/04/582676198/in-a-more-beautiful-and-terrible-history-fuel-for-the-fight-ahead

  In 'A More Beautiful And Terrible History,' Fuel For The Fight Ahead
  February 4, 20185:08 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered

  Michel Martin

  5-Minute Listen
  Transcript
  A More Beautiful and Terrible History
  A More Beautiful and Terrible History
  The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
  By Jeanne Theoharis

  It's February, which means it's Black History Month, the time designated by Congress to focus on the contributions of African Americans to this country. Often that focus will turn to a celebration of the civil rights movement, and its many heroes and heroines: Rosa Parks, John Lewis and of course the Rev. Martin Luther King. What could be wrong with that?

  According to historian Jeanne Theoharis, what's wrong with it is that the story is too often told in a way that neutralizes the past and makes it irrelevant to the present — in a word, whitewashing. She lays out her thesis in her latest book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.

  Theoharis says she was inspired by "going around the country ... and feeling how hungry people were, both for more substantive histories of the civil rights movement, but also to help make sense of why we get the fables, why we get the versions we get."

  Interview Highlights
  On the problem with how we're retelling the civil rights movement

  To me, this history should humble us. And I think the way it is used and the way it's kind of taken up in our national, sort of, public discourse, is quite the opposite. It is used to make us feel good about ourselves, to make us feel good about our progress, as opposed to kind of take stock of what it took, of how hard it was, of how many people did not do the right thing, of how hard it is to do the right thing, and of how much farther we have to go. Because I think, oftentimes, people like King and Parks, the civil rights movement — it's held up with a happy ending, right? It's painful, it's dramatic, but then we have the happy ending of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And it's clean.

  Sponsor Message

  And I think what a fuller history of the civil rights movement actually shows us, is there were certainly victories, there were certainly milestones that we are now again fighting to try to uphold. But there was much more work to be done, and people like Parks and King were adamant about that. Civil rights activists have taken on a huge place in the American consciousness, which would not be a problem necessarily if we actually knew who these people were, right? If we actually had a sense of the breadth of what they stood for and what they are asking of us today.

  On how this filtered version of history obscures a deeper truth

  Well, we see the civil rights movement, and we see these heroes invoked at particular moments. So I think about when Rosa Parks dies in October of 2005, she becomes the first woman, the first civilian, to lie in honor in the nation's capital. But I think we cannot separate that from less than two month's earlier — Hurricane Katrina — there's growing public outrage about the kind of racial and social injustices that were laid bare during the storm, and federal inaction.

  On the beautiful part of Beautiful and Terrible

  I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the civil rights struggle outside the South, talking about northern activism. And I think part of what's beautiful about that is people's tenacity. It's how courageous people were, it's how steadfast black mothers were over decades in Boston in fighting for school desegregation, over decades in New York in fighting for school desegregation, over decades in Los Angeles fighting for school desegregation. And I think getting to see that is also kind of more moving, more inspiring. It gives us strength; it gives us bread and butter for the fight ahead.

  Sponsor Message

  Elizabeth Baker and Natalie Winston produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Sydnee Monday and Petra Mayer adapted it for the Web.

• Democracy Now - https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/23/we_southernized_dr_king_historian_jeanne

  “We Southernized Dr. King”: Historian Jeanne Theoharis on MLK’s Struggle Against Racism in the North
  Web ExclusiveMay 23, 2025
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  Topics
  Martin Luther King
  Books
  Author Interviews
  Civil Rights
  Racism
  Police Brutality
  Guests
  Jeanne Theoharis
  distinguished professor at Brooklyn College.
  Historian Jeanne Theoharis joins us for an in-depth discussion about her new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South. After more than a decade of research, she offers a major reexamination of his experiences and activism confronting police brutality, alongside his wife Coretta Scott King. In Part 2 of our interview, she describes his work in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, including long meetings with gang leaders to reduce violence, like the Turfmasters Summit in Chicago to address what he called “domestic colonialism.” King often addressed how police and courts were used as “enforcers,” and stopped using the phrase “law and order,” instead calling for “law and justice.” Theoharis also critiques the role of the media in portraying King's organizing against police abuse and racism in the North as “reckless,” when they previously praised his work in the South.

  Transcript
  This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
  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.

Theoharis, Jeanne A MORE BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE HISTORY Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 1, 30 ISBN: 978-0-8070-7587-6

A hard-hitting revisionist history of civil rights activism.

Theoharis (Political Science/Brooklyn Coll.; The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, 2013, etc.) argues persuasively that the reality of the civil rights movement has become a benign national fable, invoked by public officials and liberals to assert their "enlightened bona fides" and by critics of activist groups such as Black Lives Matter in an effort to silence them. Central to this fable are distorted images of Rosa Parks, depicted as a quiet, meek woman, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose achievements are attributed to his "loving, nonviolent approach." As activist Julian Bond once put it, "the narrative of the movement has been reduced to 'Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.' " Theoharis strongly believes that turning the civil rights movement into "museum history" promotes the false idea of "an exceptional America moving past its own racism." She also points out that racism is not limited to the South; she shows how the "polite racism" of the North "framed resistance to desegregation in the language of 'neighborhood schools,' 'taxpayer's rights,' and 'forced busing.' " Denying personal animosity toward blacks, Northerners revealed racism in "silence, coded language, and the demonization of dissent." Theoharis takes the media to task for their coverage of uprisings in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York; reporters, she writes, failed to investigate the "racial inequities embedded in their city's schools, policing, or municipal structures" and presented the violence as a stunning surprise rather than the culmination "of a protracted struggle." Similarly, she criticizes the movie Detroit (2017) for "completely erasing the history of Black life and activism in the city" before the killings depicted. She also criticizes Barack Obama, who as candidate and president warned black men not to use racism as an excuse for personal failure, thereby diverting focus from civil rights organizing to "inward self-help." Chronicling the efforts of many activists, the author underscores her message that reform requires courage and hard work.

An impassioned call for continued efforts for change.

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"Theoharis, Jeanne: A MORE BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE HISTORY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514267824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dcf24a59. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

* A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

Jeanne Theoharis. Beacon, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8070-7587-6

Theoharis (The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks), professor of political science at Brooklyn College, illuminates how the conventional wisdom about America's civil rights story erases much of the movement's radicalism and abounds in comforting cliches. She points out that by the mid-1980s the civil rights movement had become "a way for the nation to feel good about its progress." Theoharis discusses how focusing on Southern desegregation ignores the physically and emotionally violent controversies that accompanied attempts at greater integration in supposedly liberal Northern cities such as Boston; similarly, depicting white Southerners as racist rednecks obscures the more genteel forms of discrimination practiced by people motivated by "indifference, fear, and personal comfort." Rosa Parks is famous for having refused to give up her seat on a bus, but she and her fellow activists organized around much broader issues of social justice, many of which remain to be sufficiently addressed. Citizens and politicians of the 21st century revere Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as heroes, yet many criticize Black Lives Matter activists as unworthy of their memory. Theoharis's lucid and insightful study challenges that view, proffering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movement's legacy, and showing how much remains to be done. (Feb.)

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"A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 52, 18 Dec. 2017, p. 120. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A520578926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2fc63b2. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

By Jeanne Theoharis

Beacon Press. 253 pp. $27.95

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"A More Beautiful and Terrible History" is a critique of what its author derides as the ascendant fable of the civil rights movement - the black protests that challenged the racial status quo between the 1950s and the 1970s. Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis contends that influential shapers of public memory have attempted with considerable success to whitewash and truncate recollections of the movement. The culprits include academics, journalists and politicians. What they have done, she charges, is depict a movement devoid of unsettling militance, with narrow aims that were accomplished on account of an attentive citizenry that only needed to glimpse injustice in order to respond nobly. The fable, she argues, is complacently triumphalist, offering a distorted mirror that misleadingly celebrates observers.

She makes her argument tellingly, offering example after revealing example. She notes, for instance, the trajectory of President Ronald Reagan's stance toward the most prominent episode of civil rights movement iconography - the creation of a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Initially Reagan opposed the King holiday. Then, when pressure for it became overwhelming, he adopted a strategy of co-optation. When he signed the King holiday legislation, he asserted that "we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it" - as if King's aspirations had been attained. She notes a troublingly similar exaggerated sunniness in Barack Obama's remarks, starting with his campaign for the presidency in 2007, when he declared at the historic Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., that the movement generation "took us 90 percent of the way there" - a perceived propinquity to the racial promised land that Theoharis rightly finds preposterous.

Even those specifically charged with educating the public about King's life have repeatedly avoided the very forthrightness that is part of what made him so outstanding. Objecting to various aspects of the King memorial in Washington, Theoharis notes that "fourteen quotes are inscribed on it. Not one of them uses the word 'racism' or 'segregation' or 'racial inequality.' Not one."

Noting that President Trump gave a piece of granite from the King memorial to Pope Francis, Theoharis asserts that such homages do little to productively honor the memory of the movement. To the contrary, "these often bipartisan acts of memorialization whitewash the history ... becoming a veil to obscure enduring racial inequality, a tool to chastise contemporary protest, and a shield to charges of indifference and inaction."

Repeatedly, Theoharis reveals facts or recollects statements that are instructive, albeit painful to consider. Emphasizing the extent to which King was disparaged while alive, she notes that in 1966 a Gallup poll found that 72 percent of white Americans had an unfavorable opinion of the civil rights leader. Stressing the extent to which political authorities in the 1960s denied the obvious reality of deep and pervasive societal racism, she quotes Gov. Edmund Brown declaring in 1965 (just as the Watts section of Los Angeles was literally going up in smoke) that "California is a state where there is no racial discrimination." Insisting that racial prejudice was a nationwide malady and not a pathology limited to the Jim Crow South, she quotes William O'Connor, the incoming head of the Boston School Committee. "We have no inferior education in our schools," O'Connor declared, abjuring any suggestion that evident racial biases and unfair allocations of resources had anything to do with glaring differences in the educational milieus experienced by white and black pupils in the public schools. "What we've been getting is an inferior type of student," by which he meant, of course, inferior black students.

Theoharis' systematic debunking is a useful antidote to sentimental narratives that are, as she persuasively argues, all too smug, all too easy, all too lacking in the conflict and dread, tragedy and defeat that suffused the most consequential American reform effort of the 20th century.

But Theoharis' account is also problematic. Ideological rigidities prevent it from illuminating more fully the messy complexity of the movement's history, legacy and lessons. She denounces wholesale internal culturalist explanations for African-American difficulties, as if such diagnoses are in principle erroneous and reactionary. Yet in the deservedly iconic "Letter From Birmingham City Jail," one encounters King sternly lecturing complacent "Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-regard and a sense of 'somebodiness' that they have adjusted to segregation." Was King, too, guilty of the "polite racism" that Theoharis attributes to others who highlight the significance of cultural and psychological maladaptations to external challenges?

Theoharis implicitly urges students of the second reconstruction to review it anew, unbound by inherited inhibitions. But with respect to certain subjects, she is conspicuously silent. She keeps to herself, for instance, whether she believes that her heroes in the Black Power wing of the movement ever committed any strategic or moral errors. Decrying the derogatory reputation that burdens the memory of the Black Panther Party, she maintains that it ought to get credit for wholesome but frequently overlooked initiatives such as its provision of medical care and free breakfast programs for children. Given her demand for realism, one might have thought that she would also confront the fact that the Black Panthers repeatedly referred to police as "pigs" and discuss what lessons ought to be drawn from the consequences of the Panthers' rhetorical strategies.

Theoharis rails against conservative and liberal depictions of the civil rights movement and in the course of doing so offers many useful criticisms. One wonders, though, whether she fundamentally opposes mythologizing or merely the mythologizing of intellectuals to her ideological right. She observes that the "recounting of national histories is never separate from present-day politics." Does she mean that all histories are thus merely projections of present-day politics? I hope not. But the way she advances her argument sometimes suggests a conflation of historical analysis with political exhortation. I wish that she would heed her own call for realism. Responding appropriately would mean upending fables of all sorts.

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Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein professor of law at Harvard Law School.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
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Kennedy, Randall. "Book World: Countering the distorted fable of the civil rights movement." Washington Post, 2 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526066734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c53ed44d. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Julian Bond, edited by Pamela Horowitz and JeanneTheoharis. Beacon, $32.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8070-3320-3

This revelatory collection of classroom lectures by UVA history professor and Georgia state senator Bond (1940-2015) shines a spotlight on lesser-known aspects of the civil rights movement. Expertly edited by Horowitz, Bond's wife, and Brooklyn College political science professor Theoharis (A More Beautiful andTerrible History), his former teaching assistant, the pieces challenge the "master narrative" of the movement: "Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day." Bond details how thousands of young, poor, and working-class protestors applied the pressure that led to school integration and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, among other milestones, and notes that liberal white politicians, including John and Robert Kennedy, resisted the movement in its earliest days. Bond also pays tribute to numerous grassroots leaders, many of them women; reveals affinities between the civil rights, Black Power, and antiapartheid movements; and details disagreements between SNCC, the NAACP, and other civil rights organizations. Elegant photos by SNCC photographer Danny Lyon and an extensive bibliography compiled by Bond complement the eye-opening history. The result is a worthy contribution to the historical record and an inspirational guide for today's social justice activists. (Jan.)

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"Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 46, 16 Nov. 2020, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649683403/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cafdbe52. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South

Jeanne Theoharis.

New Press, $30.99 (400p)

ISBN 978-1-62097-931-0

THIS STELLAR BIOGRAPHY from political scientist Theoharis (Julian Bond's Time to Teach) makes a persuasive case that Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign for racial justice has been significantly misrepresented, with his "lifelong challenge to Northern inequality... largely hidden in plain sight." Drawing on 15 years of research, including interviews with those who knew King, Theoharis reexamines his life with an emphasis on his thinking about and experiences of Northern racism in the 1940s and '50s--including hypocritical treatment he received at his liberal Pennsylvania seminary and housing discrimination he faced in Boston--building up to his 1965 statement that the "de facto segregation of the North is a new form of slavery covered up with the niceties of complexity." Theoharis counters the accepted narrative that King's activism against Northern racism only manifested itself after the 1965 Watts uprising, detailing King's prominent role in 1963 protests against segregated schools in L.A., New York, and Detroit, and his labeling of Chicago's "systemic and relentless" segregation as akin to that of Birmingham, Ala. Arguing that King's persistent highlighting of "the limits of Northern liberalism" has been suppressed in favor of "the comfortable fable of a King who changes the South... with a cast of Northern good guys," Theoharis unsettlingly demonstrates that "many of these same good guys were actively denying challenges at home by Northern Black activists and King in those very same years." The result is an exemplary history that forces readers to reassess their assumptions about America's racial reckoning. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 13 Jan. 2025, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828299915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=215f4948. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

Theoharis, Jeanne KING OF THE NORTH The New Press (NonFiction None) $30.99 3, 25 ISBN: 9781620979310

MLK above the Mason-Dixon line.

For decades, biographers have focused on Martin Luther King Jr.'s successful leadership in the South while suggesting that his Northern activism failed because it lacked direction and local support. Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, upends this narrative by painstakingly documenting King's relentless and impassioned battles against Northern discrimination and police brutality, an effort that had its origins in his experiences as a graduate student in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Author ofThe Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2013), Theoharis also presents a fully developed picture of Coretta Scott King's activism, both in tandem and apart from her husband, whom she met as a student in Boston. Neither of the Kings forgot the racism they encountered as students in the North, and they worked with local organizers to address it throughout their lives. Yet time and time again the same white Northern politicians who praised King's civil rights work in the South either fell silent or became combative when King turned his attention to the systemic racism of the North. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley did everything in his power to stop civil rights progress in the city and defended his white neighbors who "threw rocks, eggs, and firecrackers" at civil rights marchers as "fine people, hard-working people." TheNew York Times,Los Angeles Times,Chicago Tribune, and other mainstream news outlets often ignored or actively refuted King's accusations of Northern racism, creating a documentary history that has shaped King's legacy ever since. By looking beyond these sources, Theoharis depicts a complex, radical King whose fight against Northern racism alternately inspires and infuriates.

A powerful must-read that sheds new light on King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Theoharis, Jeanne: KING OF THE NORTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f977d77. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

"Theoharis, Jeanne: A MORE BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE HISTORY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514267824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dcf24a59. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025. "A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 52, 18 Dec. 2017, p. 120. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A520578926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2fc63b2. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025. Kennedy, Randall. "Book World: Countering the distorted fable of the civil rights movement." Washington Post, 2 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526066734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c53ed44d. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025. "Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 46, 16 Nov. 2020, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649683403/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cafdbe52. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025. "King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 13 Jan. 2025, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828299915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=215f4948. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025. "Theoharis, Jeanne: KING OF THE NORTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f977d77. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

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