{"id":5795,"date":"2025-06-12T10:06:02","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/?p=5795"},"modified":"2025-06-12T10:06:02","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:06:02","slug":"martin-luther-and-coretta-scott-king-outside-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/2025\/06\/12\/martin-luther-and-coretta-scott-king-outside-the-south\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Outside the South"},"content":{"rendered":"

King of the North, Martin Luther King Jr’s Life Struggle outside the South, Jeanne Theoharis, 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A new history of the Kings to correct the impression of previous biographies, news reporting, and northern and national politicians attempt to minimize the north’s Jim Crow wide spread school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination and of the Kings efforts to address these abuses.<\/p>\n

The book documents the Kings extensive time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago trying to get political action to address these problems in a national fight against racism, poverty, and war.<\/p>\n

An important book correcting\u00a0 the general impression that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, war on poverty,\u00a0 Great Society actually accomplished much of anything to address these problems, even in the face of the 1965 LA Watts riots that soon spread throughout the north.<\/p>\n

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The book particularly focused on Chicago where the Kings moved to a west side ghetto to try to fight\u00a0 mayor Daley’s racist machine. This book reports that Daley’s critical support of LBJs 1968 reelection\u00a0 may have prevented LBJ from acting and promoting critical legislation to address these issues in the north, particularly his failure to pass the 1966 Civil Rights Act.<\/p>\n

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In addition to the many local and state and federal politicians who stonewalled attempts to reform the racist policies of these major cities was the equally abysmal coverage of the Kings and events by the major national newspapers from the New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and others. These papers had in place policies limiting their coverage of serious black and Latino movements and actions and marches complete with regular editorials disparaging and villainizing King.<\/p>\n

On Sept 28, 1963 the New York Times<\/em> ran an editorial entitled Strike Against Santa Claus\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>13 days after the KKK bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killing four girls and wounding more than a dozen. The piece slammed the bus boycott plan as “singularly inappropriate”, “dangerous”, and “self defeating”. Such a boycott, the Times<\/em> claimed, would turn Christmas into “a day of hate” and put civil rights activists on the same level as those who did the church bombing”.\u00a0 This from the Times paper of record<\/strong><\/em>!<\/p>\n

The book includes extensive coverage of the efforts of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI to spy on the Kings and the movement, to infiltrate, tap phones, and leak salacious information to the press and to LBJ who received regular FBI briefings on MLK.<\/p>\n

The book emphasized the critical role of Coretta Scott King in supporting, educating, and collaborating with King while at the same time raising the couple’s children (in Atlanta) while balance family wife with extensive work on her own globally in support of nuclear disarmament, the end to wars, and opposition to continued colonizing behavior by the big powers. The book criticizes the lack of women leadership in the movements both international and domestic. Coretta Scott emerges here as a force to be reckoned with.<\/p>\n

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The couple fully understood the constant threats to their lives including the 1963 bombing of their home In Birmingham early in the bus strike. They had extensive discussions about how to protect their children in the event of a death of either or both.<\/p>\n

A book well worth reading to fully understand the extent of racial hatred in the north supported by active political policies including policing to enforce continued subjugation and suppression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

King of the North, Martin Luther King Jr’s Life Struggle outside the South, Jeanne Theoharis, 2025 A new history of the Kings to correct the impression of previous biographies, news reporting, and northern and national politicians attempt to minimize the north’s Jim Crow wide spread school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Outside the South”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}