Product details
- ISBN 9798893851083
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2026
- Publisher: The New Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South, but award-winning and New York Times–bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly highlights the book’s “stellar” writing, and reveals that King of the North “makes a persuasive case that Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for racial justice has been significantly misrepresented.”
In this bold retelling, “Theoharis depicts a complex, radical King whose fight against Northern racism alternately inspires and infuriates” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). King emerges here as someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
In a book Democracy Now! calls “a major reexamination of the civil rights leader,” King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today.
Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Her book has been adapted into a documentary of the same name, executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for Peacock where Theoharis served as a consulting producer. Her young adult adaptation with Brandy Colbert, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks for Young People, was included in the Best Books of 2021 by the Chicago Public Library and Kirkus Reviews. 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 and was named one of the best Black history books of 2018 by Black Perspectives. Theoharis’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, Slate, The Atlantic, and many more. She lives in Brooklyn.
