CBH Talk | Jeanne Theoharis and Eddie Glaude Discuss “King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life Struggle Outside the South”
Just when you thought you knew everything about Martin Luther King Jr., historian Jeanne Theoharis proves you wrong. In a radical reframing of King’s life and work, Theoharis’ new book King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South redirects our collective gaze from the racial regime of the South to King’s time in the North, and the people, political campaigns, and repressive circumstances above the Mason–Dixon line.
Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history in her book and subsequent documentary The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present. She also uncovers the depths of Coretta Scott King’s active partnership in the struggle. Theoharis’ feminist analysis sheds new light on their marriage and partnership.
Join Theoharis in conversation with another of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Eddie S. Glaude, author of numerous books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. Together they will provide a powerful reminder that the civil rights movement always involved more than segregation in the South, and speak directly to our struggles over racial inequality today.
Participants
Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or co-author of thirteen books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Her new book King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her New York Times-bestselling biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. It has been adapted into a documentary of the same name, directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for NBC-Peacock, where she served as a consulting producer. The film won a Peabody Award, a Television Academy Honor Award, a Gracie Award for Historical Documentary, and the Eric Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians. 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. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, TIME Magazine, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, the Intercept, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the author of several books, including We are The Leaders We Have Been Looking for, Democracy in Black and the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, winner of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Book Prize. He frequently appears in the media as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline: White House. A native of Moss Point, Mississippi, Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University.
