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A history of the dynamic post-WWII freedom movement in Chicago that returns the city—and by extension the North—to its rightful place in the civil rights story
From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, Chicago was home to one of the largest, most robust Black freedom movements in the country. Battling segregated beaches and schools, overcrowded slum housing, police brutality, and the lynching of teenager Jerome Huey, their work was cut out for them. Martin Luther King called Chicago “as segregated as Birmingham” and urged the civil rights struggle primarily based in the South to join forces with this years-long movement.
The Chicago freedom struggle undertook creative and audacious actions, challenging the entrenched racism of policymakers and the media in the North, and built an early rainbow coalition. This original people’s history holds critical lessons for how we might carry on the struggle for solidarity and racial justice today.
Praise for King of the North
“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"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."
—Kirkus (starred review)
"An exemplary history that forces readers to reassess their assumptions about America’s racial reckoning."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Just when you thought you knew everything about MLK, Jeanne Theoharis comes along and proves you wrong. Within these gripping pages we meet a public King who is well aware of Northern racism and is concerned with addressing it throughout his public ministry."
—Lerone A. Martin, Martin Luther King Jr., centennial professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
"Theoharis delivers another revelatory, meticulously documented account that revises our fundamental assumptions about American history, with critical implications for our future. This indispensable book is a vital resource for all who seek to ‘make real the promise of democracy.’"
—Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study
"King of the North is a revelation—a much-needed book that shifts and enhances our appreciation of MLK's radical vision."
—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life
"With insightful precision and narrative power, Theoharis shows that the struggle to end Jim Crow was by every measure a national movement. For the first time in a King biography, Coretta Scott King’s active partnership in the struggle is made clear. King of the North is a revelation."
—Barbara Smith, co-founder, the Combahee River Collective
"Fresh, electric, grounded in its research and yet radical in its scope, King of the North is a modern masterpiece."
—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass
"A groundbreaking history. With deep research and brilliant insight Jeanne Theoharis illuminates new parts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s revolutionary legacy that speaks to our disturbing present. A must-read."
—Peniel Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X
- Introduction
- City on the Make: The Modern Segregators (1958–1963)
- “I Knew I Didn’t Belong in the Parking Lot”: A Movement Grows in the Windy City (1960–1964)
- Moving Beyond “Paralysis of Analysis”: The Chicago Freedom Movement Expands (1965)
- The Double-Down: The Kings Move to Chicago (1966)
- Massive White Violence . . . but the Nation Fails to Address Northern Segregation (1966)
- Raining Fury upon Tyrants: The Struggles Continue (1967–1973)