The King of the North: A Discussion with Jeanne Theoharis

This week Dr. Hettie V. Williams is in conversation with Dr. Jeanne Theoharis about the Civil Rights Movement in the North. Williams is professor of history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University and the current director of the African Diaspora Studies Program at Monmouth. Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Lettia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is a renowned scholar of the Black freedom struggle in U.S. history and society. In this conversation, we focus primarily on the latest book by Theoharis King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside of the South (The New Press, 2025) that argues King’s northern campaigns were fundamentally instrumental in shaping his larger quest for equity and justice across the nation. King spent substantial time in the North first as a student then as a mature activist in places such as New Jersey, New York, and in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. Theoharis in fact advances the thesis in King of the North that locales such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were “at the heart of his campaign for racial justice.” This groundbreaking book disrupts our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in a myriad of ways. Click here to order a copy of The King of the North #MLK #CivilRightsMovement #SocialJustice