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Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
America Has Gotten Coretta Scott King Wrong
A year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the publishing company Holt, Rinehart and Winston released Coretta Scott King's My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. A senior editor at HRW, Charlotte Mayerson, a white woman, had contracted the writer Alden Hatch, also white, for the sizable sum of $15,000 to ghostwrite the book, based on interviews Mayerson had recently completed with Scott King. All of this was 'totally confidential,' as the agreement between Hatch and the publisher spelled out, and the book, like the memoirs of many famous people then and now, was presented simply as her autobiography. I had learned about Hatch in the process of researching Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and political partnership for my own book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South, and was excited to find that some of the transcripts and audio recordings of those interviews had survived in papers Hatch had donated to the University of Florida. As I listened to one of the recordings, something started to bother me. Scott King didn't sound the way she did in My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. The surviving transcripts of the interviews were a chaotic, incomplete mess—but even so, they were quite revealing: The details of Scott King's ideas were different and more substantive, her perspectives fiercer and more contemplative, than what was portrayed in the book. And then I found something that explained why—a folder that contained letters between Hatch and Mayerson. When Mayerson sent Hatch the interviews for him to begin ghostwriting the autobiography, she explicitly instructed Hatch that although Scott King talked a 'vast amount' about herself and her family background, 'it is urgent that the focus of the book be on Martin, not on Coretta.' Despite choosing a white male ghostwriter who did not know Scott King, Mayerson wanted a 'very female, personal, and sentimental story' in a 'tone that is more like the Reader's Digest.' Mayerson's racial blinders shone through—telling Hatch that Scott King had a 'certain cold bloodedness in her attitude toward whites.' When Mayerson questioned her about the death of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white Freedom Summer volunteers killed in Mississippi in 1964, she said she was 'sad that they died,' but 'felt that it was an important event because it made the white community more aware of the problems than any number of Negro deaths would have done.' As I listened to the few recordings and read through the surviving interview transcripts, I noticed how Mayerson interrupted Scott King frequently during the interviews, her incredulity at some of Scott King's answers coming through clearly. Months later, as Hatch started to show Scott King draft chapters of the book, both Coretta and her older sister Edythe raised objections to the book's tone and lack of attention to their family's work. Hatch was dismissive, telling Mayerson, 'I deliberately wrote it with very simple language that I believe would have a special appeal for the critics.' He instructed Mayerson to call in the 'big reserves' to intimidate Coretta to acquiesce. 'I am made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner,' Scott King had observed about the ways she was often represented in public discourse: 'the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be.' This had even been true in her own 'autobiography.' 'I didn't learn my commitment from Martin, we just converged at a certain time.' Although a number of biographers since then have taken note of her politics before she met Martin, she largely disappears as a political actor throughout his life and leadership, until she moves to carry on his legacy after the assassination. Scott King saw the deficit partly as a result of who was doing the telling. At one of the first conferences of King scholars, in 1986, she said to those gathered, 'The next time we have a conference on him, I want to see more women scholars. He allowed me to be myself, and that meant that I always expressed my views.' Theirs was a political and intellectual partnership from the beginning. King married a feminist intellectual freedom fighter with unflinching determination, and he could not have been the leader he was without her. Scott King's activism—her understanding of the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism—started before her marriage, complemented and influenced her husband's work, and extended well beyond his assassination, in 1968. She was the family leader on issues of peace, war, and the economy. Although their relationship hewed to certain gender conventions of the time, particularly because of King's belief that she be the one to stay home and raise the children, it challenged other dominant social mores. Both refused to 'stay in their lane' despite immense pressure; they prioritized a life of struggle over a safe or materially secure family life, she spoke her mind both privately and publicly, and he relied on her thoughts and on her unwavering commitment to keep going. Coretta was more politically active than Martin when they met. She had grown up in a proud farming family in Alabama who owned their own land. The family was harassed and threatened repeatedly. When her father started transporting lumber, a business reserved for white people, whites torched their house to the ground. And when her father refused to sell his business to a white man, whites burned the business too. Those experiences and the pride that her parents instilled in her helped prepare Coretta for what she would encounter as an adult. Growing up, 'I was tough,' and liked to fight, she told Mayerson in 1968—something that didn't make it into the book. Her mother was determined that her daughters would get a good education, and sent them to the Lincoln Normal School, in Marion, Alabama. Coretta and Edythe then became the first Black students in decades to attend Antioch College, in Ohio. Coretta majored in music and education and got involved in numerous civil-rights and anti–Cold War efforts. She was introduced to the Progressive Party, which was created to challenge both the Democrats and Republicans on U.S. segregation and Cold War militarism. In 1948, she supported Henry Wallace for president, and attended the Progressive Party Convention in Philadelphia as a student delegate (one of about 150 African Americans at the convention). Through her Progressive Party activities, she met both the singer Paul Robeson and the activist Bayard Rustin, and heard the playwright and activist Shirley Graham (who would marry W. E. B. Du Bois three years later) give a powerful speech. Seeking to pursue a music career, Coretta moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music. There, through a friend, she met Martin, who was getting his doctorate at Boston University, in January 1952. They talked about racism and capitalism on their first date. Martin was smitten; he'd never met a woman like her. At the end of that date, he told her she had 'all the qualities he wanted in a wife—beauty, personality, character, and intelligence.' She was incredulous, telling him, 'You don't even know me.' But she agreed to another date. She was impressed with his vision and determination to change the country. And Martin was a good listener; he didn't judge. Their romance blossomed. Still, she worried that becoming a minister's wife would make her life small. It took her many months to decide whether to marry him. When they did wed, in June 1953, she refused to wear white and made her imposing father-in-law take 'obey' out of their vows, because it made her feel 'like an indentured servant.' She would keep Scott as her middle name, which she then always used, becoming Coretta Scott King for the rest of her life, unlike many women of her generation. Many journalists and public officials would refuse to recognize that, referring to her only as 'Mrs. Martin Luther King.' Coretta's steadfastness came out early. Seven weeks into the Montgomery bus boycott, on January 30, 1956, the Kings' home was bombed. Both Coretta and their two-month-old baby, Yolanda, were home. Hearing a thump, she moved fast, succeeding in getting them out unscathed. Furious and terrified by the news, both Martin's and Coretta's fathers came to Montgomery to tell them to leave immediately—or, at the very least, to get Coretta and Yolanda out of there. The pressure was immense. 'I knew I wasn't going anywhere,' Coretta recalled in a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine. The next morning at breakfast, Martin was grateful: 'You were the only one who stood with me.' Had she flinched in that moment, as I wrote for this magazine in 2018, the trajectory of the bus boycott and Martin's emerging leadership could have been very different. From that night on, they lived with the understanding that if they continued in the struggle, she too might be killed. Martin had to reckon with the possibility of Coretta's death, just as she had to reckon with his. When he grew frightened, she would remind him that the movement was bigger than they were. In key ways, the Kings were forging a way of family life and leadership different from that of many of their generation and their parents, by rejecting the 'promise of protection' that good men were supposed to provide and prioritizing a life of freedom fighting instead. Martin came to rely on Coretta's unflinching steeliness. The one time she broke down terrified him. In 1960, King was arrested at an Atlanta sit-in; when the others were released, the state dredged up an old traffic charge to keep him, transferring him hundreds of miles in the middle of the night, his hands shackled to the police-car floor. He thought he was going to be killed. Then, when the judge sentenced him to four months' hard labor, Coretta, frightened, exhausted, and six months pregnant, started crying. Martin was shaken: 'Corrie, I've never seen you like this; you have to stand up for me.' In many ways, he relied on her strength. In her own activism, Scott King came to zero in on global peace and anti-colonialism. In 1962, when their third son, Dexter, was not even 2 years old, she joined a Women Strike for Peace delegation for a multination disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to pressure the United States and the Soviet Union to sign a nuclear-test-ban treaty. As Scott King told the press, 'The rights that we had achieved were meaningless unless there was a world to exercise those rights.' The punishing climate of the Cold War—in which people were slandered for their political beliefs, called 'un-American,' and in some cases even fired from their job—led many people, both Black and white, including many activists the Kings knew, to stay away from such global politics. But Scott King pushed forward, the Geneva trip deepening her global commitments. In 1963, she led a march to the United Nations carrying a sign saying Let's Make Our Earth a Nuclear-Free Zone, where a delegation met with UN Secretary-General U Thant. Scott King then left New York City for another Women Strike for Peace action in Washington, D.C., telling the press she was proud to be identified with the peace movement. 'I can never be free until every black man from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Jackson, Mississippi, is free.' After King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, she saw a heightened responsibility for both of them to the global community, as My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. notes. She spoke out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and became 'the family spokesperson on the peace issues,' though the book gives this part of her life very scant treatment. One reporter pushed King on how he had found such a political companion; had he trained her in this direction? King laughed and then responded, 'It may have been the other way around. When I met her, she was very concerned with all the things we are trying to do now … I wish I could say to satisfy my masculine ego that I led her down this path but I must say we went down together.' Scott King tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1965 to take a stand on Vietnam. At an SCLC retreat in early 1965, she explained how the war drains 'resources from education, housing, health, and other badly needed programs,' making clear to those gathered, 'why do you think we got the Nobel Prize? … Peace and justice are indivisible.' She understood that they had gotten the award, and thus the responsibilities demanded of them around racism, poverty, and militarism. To be a peace activist in 1965 was to be seen as un-American, but Scott King was 'beyond steel,' as a fellow activist noted. In May 1965, bucking Cold War pressure, she addressed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom conference on the topic of 'Peace, Jobs, and Freedom,' and then in June she spoke before a crowd of 18,000 at the Emergency Rally on Vietnam, in Madison Square Garden. For this work, in March 1966, the FBI put her in a category of 'subversives.' In September 1965, after a meeting at the UN, King denounced the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson was furious. Congressmen questioned King's patriotism, and newspapers editorialized against him. Feeling the pressure, in November, he backed out of an address to a D.C. peace rally, but Scott King kept her commitment and spoke. Addressing the 25,000 gathered, she underlined that 'unless America learns to respect the right to freedom and justice for all, then the very things which we hold dear in this country will wither away in the hypocritical ritual of the preservation of national self-interest.' Following her appearance, a reporter asked King if he had educated his wife on these issues. 'She educated me,' he replied. In fall 1966, Scott King joined the steering committee of what became the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. She was leading not just her husband on this issue, but the nation. King would make his historic anti-war speech from Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. In the last six months of his life, King turned to building the Poor People's Campaign. Although many in SCLC balked, Scott King was already on board. The idea for the PPC was that a multiracial army of people from across the nation, drawing from local groups across the country, would descend on D.C. and stay there to force Congress to 'see the poor' and act. Just weeks after King was assassinated, Scott King continued that work, kicking off the PPC from the Memphis balcony where he had been killed. At a Mother's Day march of welfare recipients in D.C. the following week, she highlighted the violence of U.S. political priorities. 'Neglecting schoolchildren is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence … Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of willpower to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.' Scott King's story is a reminder that many of the histories we tell, even of one of the most well-known Black families in history, are deeply inadequate. 'I keep seeing these books that come out, and there are so many inaccuracies,' Scott King herself observed in a 2004 interview. 'And that becomes history if you don't correct it.' America needs the true story of its history, and part of that story was the bold, brilliant advocacy of Coretta Scott King. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
America Has Gotten Coretta Scott King Wrong
A year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the publishing company Holt, Rinehart and Winston released Coretta Scott King's My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. A senior editor at HRW, Charlotte Mayerson, a white woman, had contracted the writer Alden Hatch, also white, for the sizable sum of $15,000 to ghostwrite the book, based on interviews Mayerson had recently completed with Scott King. All of this was 'totally confidential,' as the agreement between Hatch and the publisher spelled out, and the book, like the memoirs of many famous people then and now, was presented simply as her autobiography. I had learned about Hatch in the process of researching Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and political partnership for my own book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South, and was excited to find that some of the transcripts and audio recordings of those interviews had survived in papers Hatch had donated to the University of Florida. As I listened to one of the recordings, something started to bother me. Scott King didn't sound the way she did in My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. The surviving transcripts of the interviews were a chaotic, incomplete mess—but even so, they were quite revealing: The details of Scott King's ideas were different and more substantive, her perspectives fiercer and more contemplative, than what was portrayed in the book. And then I found something that explained why—a folder that contained letters between Hatch and Mayerson. When Mayerson sent Hatch the interviews for him to begin ghostwriting the autobiography, she explicitly instructed Hatch that although Scott King talked a 'vast amount' about herself and her family background, 'it is urgent that the focus of the book be on Martin, not on Coretta.' Despite choosing a white male ghostwriter who did not know Scott King, Mayerson wanted a 'very female, personal, and sentimental story' in a 'tone that is more like the Reader's Digest.' Mayerson's racial blinders shone through—telling Hatch that Scott King had a 'certain cold bloodedness in her attitude toward whites.' When Mayerson questioned her about the death of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white Freedom Summer volunteers killed in Mississippi in 1964, she said she was 'sad that they died,' but 'felt that it was an important event because it made the white community more aware of the problems than any number of Negro deaths would have done.' As I listened to the few recordings and read through the surviving interview transcripts, I noticed how Mayerson interrupted Scott King frequently during the interviews, her incredulity at some of Scott King's answers coming through clearly. Months later, as Hatch started to show Scott King draft chapters of the book, both Coretta and her older sister Edythe raised objections to the book's tone and lack of attention to their family's work. Hatch was dismissive, telling Mayerson, 'I deliberately wrote it with very simple language that I believe would have a special appeal for the critics.' He instructed Mayerson to call in the 'big reserves' to intimidate Coretta to acquiesce. 'I am made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner,' Scott King had observed about the ways she was often represented in public discourse: 'the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be.' This had even been true in her own 'autobiography.' 'I didn't learn my commitment from Martin, we just converged at a certain time.' Although a number of biographers since then have taken note of her politics before she met Martin, she largely disappears as a political actor throughout his life and leadership, until she moves to carry on his legacy after the assassination. Scott King saw the deficit partly as a result of who was doing the telling. At one of the first conferences of King scholars, in 1986, she said to those gathered, 'The next time we have a conference on him, I want to see more women scholars. He allowed me to be myself, and that meant that I always expressed my views.' Theirs was a political and intellectual partnership from the beginning. King married a feminist intellectual freedom fighter with unflinching determination, and he could not have been the leader he was without her. Scott King's activism—her understanding of the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism—started before her marriage, complemented and influenced her husband's work, and extended well beyond his assassination, in 1968. She was the family leader on issues of peace, war, and the economy. Although their relationship hewed to certain gender conventions of the time, particularly because of King's belief that she be the one to stay home and raise the children, it challenged other dominant social mores. Both refused to 'stay in their lane' despite immense pressure; they prioritized a life of struggle over a safe or materially secure family life, she spoke her mind both privately and publicly, and he relied on her thoughts and on her unwavering commitment to keep going. Coretta was more politically active than Martin when they met. She had grown up in a proud farming family in Alabama who owned their own land. The family was harassed and threatened repeatedly. When her father started transporting lumber, a business reserved for white people, whites torched their house to the ground. And when her father refused to sell his business to a white man, whites burned the business too. Those experiences and the pride that her parents instilled in her helped prepare Coretta for what she would encounter as an adult. Growing up, 'I was tough,' and liked to fight, she told Mayerson in 1968—something that didn't make it into the book. Her mother was determined that her daughters would get a good education, and sent them to the Lincoln Normal School, in Marion, Alabama. Coretta and Edythe then became the first Black students in decades to attend Antioch College, in Ohio. Coretta majored in music and education and got involved in numerous civil-rights and anti–Cold War efforts. She was introduced to the Progressive Party, which was created to challenge both the Democrats and Republicans on U.S. segregation and Cold War militarism. In 1948, she supported Henry Wallace for president, and attended the Progressive Party Convention in Philadelphia as a student delegate (one of about 150 African Americans at the convention). Through her Progressive Party activities, she met both the singer Paul Robeson and the activist Bayard Rustin, and heard the playwright and activist Shirley Graham (who would marry W. E. B. Du Bois three years later) give a powerful speech. Seeking to pursue a music career, Coretta moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music. There, through a friend, she met Martin, who was getting his doctorate at Boston University, in January 1952. They talked about racism and capitalism on their first date. Martin was smitten; he'd never met a woman like her. At the end of that date, he told her she had 'all the qualities he wanted in a wife—beauty, personality, character, and intelligence.' She was incredulous, telling him, 'You don't even know me.' But she agreed to another date. She was impressed with his vision and determination to change the country. And Martin was a good listener; he didn't judge. Their romance blossomed. Still, she worried that becoming a minister's wife would make her life small. It took her many months to decide whether to marry him. When they did wed, in June 1953, she refused to wear white and made her imposing father-in-law take 'obey' out of their vows, because it made her feel 'like an indentured servant.' She would keep Scott as her middle name, which she then always used, becoming Coretta Scott King for the rest of her life, unlike many women of her generation. Many journalists and public officials would refuse to recognize that, referring to her only as 'Mrs. Martin Luther King.' Coretta's steadfastness came out early. Seven weeks into the Montgomery bus boycott, on January 30, 1956, the Kings' home was bombed. Both Coretta and their two-month-old baby, Yolanda, were home. Hearing a thump, she moved fast, succeeding in getting them out unscathed. Furious and terrified by the news, both Martin's and Coretta's fathers came to Montgomery to tell them to leave immediately—or, at the very least, to get Coretta and Yolanda out of there. The pressure was immense. 'I knew I wasn't going anywhere,' Coretta recalled in a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine. The next morning at breakfast, Martin was grateful: 'You were the only one who stood with me.' Had she flinched in that moment, as I wrote for this magazine in 2018, the trajectory of the bus boycott and Martin's emerging leadership could have been very different. From that night on, they lived with the understanding that if they continued in the struggle, she too might be killed. Martin had to reckon with the possibility of Coretta's death, just as she had to reckon with his. When he grew frightened, she would remind him that the movement was bigger than they were. In key ways, the Kings were forging a way of family life and leadership different from that of many of their generation and their parents, by rejecting the 'promise of protection' that good men were supposed to provide and prioritizing a life of freedom fighting instead. Martin came to rely on Coretta's unflinching steeliness. The one time she broke down terrified him. In 1960, King was arrested at an Atlanta sit-in; when the others were released, the state dredged up an old traffic charge to keep him, transferring him hundreds of miles in the middle of the night, his hands shackled to the police-car floor. He thought he was going to be killed. Then, when the judge sentenced him to four months' hard labor, Coretta, frightened, exhausted, and six months pregnant, started crying. Martin was shaken: 'Corrie, I've never seen you like this; you have to stand up for me.' In many ways, he relied on her strength. In her own activism, Scott King came to zero in on global peace and anti-colonialism. In 1962, when their third son, Dexter, was not even 2 years old, she joined a Women Strike for Peace delegation for a multination disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to pressure the United States and the Soviet Union to sign a nuclear-test-ban treaty. As Scott King told the press, 'The rights that we had achieved were meaningless unless there was a world to exercise those rights.' The punishing climate of the Cold War—in which people were slandered for their political beliefs, called 'un-American,' and in some cases even fired from their job—led many people, both Black and white, including many activists the Kings knew, to stay away from such global politics. But Scott King pushed forward, the Geneva trip deepening her global commitments. In 1963, she led a march to the United Nations carrying a sign saying Let's Make Our Earth a Nuclear-Free Zone, where a delegation met with UN Secretary-General U Thant. Scott King then left New York City for another Women Strike for Peace action in Washington, D.C., telling the press she was proud to be identified with the peace movement. 'I can never be free until every black man from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Jackson, Mississippi, is free.' After King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, she saw a heightened responsibility for both of them to the global community, as My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. notes. She spoke out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and became 'the family spokesperson on the peace issues,' though the book gives this part of her life very scant treatment. One reporter pushed King on how he had found such a political companion; had he trained her in this direction? King laughed and then responded, 'It may have been the other way around. When I met her, she was very concerned with all the things we are trying to do now … I wish I could say to satisfy my masculine ego that I led her down this path but I must say we went down together.' Scott King tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1965 to take a stand on Vietnam. At an SCLC retreat in early 1965, she explained how the war drains 'resources from education, housing, health, and other badly needed programs,' making clear to those gathered, 'why do you think we got the Nobel Prize? … Peace and justice are indivisible.' She understood that they had gotten the award, and thus the responsibilities demanded of them around racism, poverty, and militarism. To be a peace activist in 1965 was to be seen as un-American, but Scott King was 'beyond steel,' as a fellow activist noted. In May 1965, bucking Cold War pressure, she addressed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom conference on the topic of 'Peace, Jobs, and Freedom,' and then in June she spoke before a crowd of 18,000 at the Emergency Rally on Vietnam, in Madison Square Garden. For this work, in March 1966, the FBI put her in a category of 'subversives.' In September 1965, after a meeting at the UN, King denounced the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson was furious. Congressmen questioned King's patriotism, and newspapers editorialized against him. Feeling the pressure, in November, he backed out of an address to a D.C. peace rally, but Scott King kept her commitment and spoke. Addressing the 25,000 gathered, she underlined that 'unless America learns to respect the right to freedom and justice for all, then the very things which we hold dear in this country will wither away in the hypocritical ritual of the preservation of national self-interest.' Following her appearance, a reporter asked King if he had educated his wife on these issues. 'She educated me,' he replied. In fall 1966, Scott King joined the steering committee of what became the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. She was leading not just her husband on this issue, but the nation. King would make his historic anti-war speech from Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. In the last six months of his life, King turned to building the Poor People's Campaign. Although many in SCLC balked, Scott King was already on board. The idea for the PPC was that a multiracial army of people from across the nation, drawing from local groups across the country, would descend on D.C. and stay there to force Congress to 'see the poor' and act. Just weeks after King was assassinated, Scott King continued that work, kicking off the PPC from the Memphis balcony where he had been killed. At a Mother's Day march of welfare recipients in D.C. the following week, she highlighted the violence of U.S. political priorities. 'Neglecting schoolchildren is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence … Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of willpower to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.' Scott King's story is a reminder that many of the histories we tell, even of one of the most well-known Black families in history, are deeply inadequate. 'I keep seeing these books that come out, and there are so many inaccuracies,' Scott King herself observed in a 2004 interview. 'And that becomes history if you don't correct it.' America needs the true story of its history, and part of that story was the bold, brilliant advocacy of Coretta Scott King.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MLK in the North: The Civil Rights Leader Understood That Racism and Segregation Were National Problems
Bettmann Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take There is a familiar story of Martin Luther King. It's about the South — about segregated buses and lunch counters, police dogs and fire hoses, courageous struggle and long overdue federal action with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In this familiar story, just a week after the Voting Rights Act, people in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts rise up — and King realized the problems Black people faced in the North. But that story misses as much as it reveals. King came to LA more than 15 times before the Watts uprising to support movements challenging police brutality, school and housing segregation in the city. Alongside marchers from Montgomery to Selma, he crisscrossed the nation supporting protests from the Northeast to the West Coast. Why don't we know this? In many ways, 'southernizing' King is comfortable, cordoning off the movement in the past to settled issues like bus segregation. Yet King understood that racism, segregation, and police brutality were a national condition, not a regional issue. Many of his contemporaries refused to see this. While many Northern politicians and journalists praised and welcomed King, they often refused to acknowledge, let alone remedy, the deep injustices in their own cities. They treated Northern civil rights activists as unreasonable troublemakers creating a problem where there wasn't one. Looking at King outside the South — which I do in my new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South — reveals aspects of his work that have previously been ignored or distorted. Below are 10 facets of Martin Luther King's life and politics to understand where we are as a nation today. While attending Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, a 21-year-old King visited Mary's Place in New Jersey. He was kicked out of a bar at gunpoint with friends when the owner refused to serve them. But their racial discrimination suit went nowhere when three white students who had initially come forward refused to testify to the discrimination for fear it would damage their own reputations. When he moved to Boston for his Ph.D., he had trouble finding an apartment because most landlords wouldn't rent to Black people. Coretta Scott King attended Antioch College but was forbidden from student teaching in Yellow Springs because she was Black. As a college student, Coretta Scott King had supported the Progressive Party's third-party challenge for the presidency, meeting Paul Robeson and Bayard Rustin. In fact, she was more of an activist than Martin when they met. In 1962, she went to Geneva with Women's Strike for Peace to press for a nuclear test ban treaty between the US and USSR and then in 1963 led a march to the UN on nuclear disarmament. This was scary, controversial work and most Americans, Black and white, condemned it. When Martin won the Nobel Prize, she saw a broader global responsibility and began speaking out against US involvement in Vietnam, years before he did, and pushed him to do the same. 'We entered this war in support of colonialism,' she explained in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. 'We equated our interests with a corrupt and dictatorial regime…we shunned efforts by the United Nations to stop the war…with the boastful but misguided notion that we have some mission to be the moral savior of the world. Yet most of the world disagrees with this policy.' Dr. King's experiences of police harassment begin during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when officers pulled him over ostensibly for going five miles over the speed limit; instead of giving him a ticket, police took him for a joy ride. He thought they were going to kill him, until they finally took him to jail. Over the years, police slammed him down on a counter, wrenching his arm painfully behind his back, choked him, kicked him, shackled and chained him to a police car floor for hours, and picked him up by his pants to shove him into a police van. King knew what police could do to Black people and he had to fight his fear in each police encounter he had (he was arrested 29 times). In the summer of 1964, a Harlem teenager named Jimmy Powell was shot by an off-duty police officer, Thomas Gilligan, outside his summer school. This sparked a six-day uprising. Alongside many New York activists, King had been highlighting police brutality in Harlem for years. When King called Powell's killing 'murder', Gilligan sued King along with other civil rights leaders for damage to his reputation. King called for brutal cops to be fired. He pushed for the creation of civilian complaint review boards with real power to oversee police departments and the ability of the Department of Justice to bring injunctive suits against police departments that deprived people's civil rights. In 1958, while signing books in Harlem, Martin Luther King was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by an African American woman suffering from paranoid delusions who believed King was a Communist agent out for her. He had to have a two-and-a-half hour surgery removing part of his ribs and sternum to get the letter opener out and save his life. When he woke up, he told Coretta that the woman should not be put in prison, but instead needed medical help. She agreed. The point was not to ignore the violence but to treat its cause. The stabbing left him with breathing difficulty, including a penchant for bouts of hiccups sometimes lasting for hours or days. This was likely due to stress, insomnia and perhaps impact to his phrenic nerve that controls the diaphragm, which goes right through the place he was stabbed. The injustice that MLK saw stuck with him, taking a deep toll on his spirit and his body. He had to be hospitalized on at least four occasions for exhaustion. Many people around the country, from friends to gang members to Coretta Scott King herself, describe Martin Luther King Jr. as a listener. But we are so used to seeing photos of him at the podium that this crucial aspect of his character has fallen out of our understanding of him. The head of the Blackstone Rangers gang, Jeff Fort, described how King regularly met with gang leaders in Chicago during 1966. Fort says King would listen intently, never interrupting and often calling them 'Doc' (like he did with fellow ministers). When they were nervous and talked too fast, King would tell them to slow down; he had time and wanted to hear what they had to say. He spent hundreds of hours in Chicago talking, listening and working with gang members and forging bonds of mutual respect. 'You couldn't help but fall in love with him,' Lawrence Johnson, leader of the Vice Lords gang, explained. King engaged them in serious discussion of the political economy of the city, police brutality, segregation and urban renewal and what could be done to change it. By the 1960s, newspapers like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times were covering Southern movements with clarity and rigor. Yet these publications minimized segregation at home and portrayed activists (including King) who challenged it as troublemakers and potential Communists, creating a problem where there wasn't one. King himself criticized the press in 1963, saying, 'Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices and false facts.' These newspapers ran more positive, substantive coverage around his efforts in the South than the North. In 1963, for example, Dr. King joined the call from New York artists and radicals for a nationwide boycott of Christmas shopping to highlight the racial climate across the country that had produced the Birmingham church bombing. The Times editorial board slammed the boycott as 'singularly inappropriate,' 'dangerous,' and 'self defeating' — even claiming it put King and other civil rights activists 'on the same level as those who did the church bombing.' When Black New Yorkers (with King's support) held a city-wide school boycott on February 3, 1964 to protest the city's continuing school segregation, the Times lambasted the protest as a 'violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy' and 'unreasonable and unjustified.' By the mid 1960s, King described the condition of Black people in major cities like Chicago, LA and NYC as 'domestic colonialism.' He highlighted the profit and power derived from Black misery and ghettoization, and how the vast majority of jobs in Black communities — from teachers to sanitation — went to non-Black people. Describing how the courts and police act as 'enforcers' to maintain this system, he highlighted the practice of elevating Black faces to high places to thwart Black cries for justice as 'plantation' politics. His vision of nonviolence included school boycotts, rent strikes, and other forms of economic disobedience and direct action intended to disrupt city and business life . He was criticized for it by Black moderates as well as whites, who repeatedly called these tactics 'unreasonable' and 'un-American.' King observed that many Northern liberals (including political leaders, residents, and journalists) came to praise bold tactics in the South while condemning them at home. But he saw they were necessary to disrupt the comforts of injustice. 'If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends… they never were really our friends.' So when people today criticize young activists — from Black Lives Matter protesters to climate change organizers to students demonstrating against the war in Gaza — and tell them to 'be more like King,' they don't realize what they're actually calling for. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage? 6 of the Most Famous Cults in U.S. History This Deadly Georgia Lake Holds Secrets About U.S. History Helen Keller's Legacy Has Been Sanitized Why We're Still So Obsessed With the Salem Witch Trials
