Rewriting the Incomplete Narrative of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Battle for Equality

As Black History Month concludes, the all too often neglected accomplishments of black Americans who helped shape a better, more equal society have been honored. Well-deserved commendation is granted to figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who devoted his life to advocacy against glaring human rights abuses and federal malfeasance. But as we commemorate his efforts, which diminished overt manifestations of extreme, blatant racism, we often tend to subconsciously engage in toxic blame-shifting.

When Dr. King stepped out of his car on August 5, 1966, and took strides toward a crowd of several hundred people, he was met not by supporters, but by a piercing, heavy stone that soared toward his body. Aides shielded his struck-down body from the stream of bricks and bottles that followed. Dr. King was accustomed to this sort of physical violence from furious crowds; the Southern white supremacists he encountered were often aggravated by his advocacy, and they felt inclined to take action. But this time, he was no longer dealing with racist fanatics in the South—he was in Chicago.

Dr. King’s arduous grappling with Southern inequalities, which have long plagued the lives of minorities within America, are frequently cited as examples of his most important campaigns. But as we memorialize him, we often place blame entirely on the South, absolving the North of any responsibility for injustice. Despite our convenient neglect of his Northern struggles, however, he began during his final years of life a battle that remains unfinished today—one against Northern whites who claimed to be liberal and lauded Southern reform, but actually disparaged movements in their own neighborhoods.

Dr. King confronted various inequalities he discovered in both Northern and Southern cities during the 1960s, demanding desegregation and an end to police brutality. Californians were quick to boast their support for Dr. King and victims in the inequality-ridden Jim Crow South, pushing for protests and picketing with signs that demanded justice. They sympathized with victims of hate crimes in Birmingham, Alabama, and students called for the desegregation of Southern institutions. However, Californian support for civil rights came to a screeching halt during Dr. King’s 1964 trip to Los Angeles. He campaigned against Proposition 14, an attempt by citizens and developers to nullify the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which had banned racial housing discrimination. Consequently, he was repeatedly labeled as anti-American and an extremist. When the proposition succeeded, Dr. King received a clear message from white, liberal Californians: segregation was detrimental and should be eradicated—as long as it survived in California.

The press exemplified this hypocritical tendency to claim commitment to equality and activism while also revealing that they preserved segregated institutions and rampant criminal injustice. Newspapers sung the praises of his Southern reforms, but when he tackled the same issues in the North—where racism seemed “subtler”—the media felt less inclined to support reform, denouncing his actions instead. The largest civil rights demonstration of the decade was seen in 1964, with 460,000 New York City students refusing to attend school and demanding a plan for desegregation. The boycott was deemed by The New York Times to be “unreasonable and unjustified.” Furthermore, in a poll conducted by The New York Times that year, 80 percent of New Yorkers insisted that the civil rights movement had “gone too far.”

When confronted with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Northern constituents fought avidly for schools to remain segregated without jeopardizing their federal funding. Protests pushed legislators to secure a loophole in Title IV, Section 401 of the act, which permitted the maintenance of segregated school systems. Northerners pointedly made distinctions between Southern segregation and their own, making allowances for their resistance to change. But these distinctions were rejected by Dr. King repeatedly, as he contended that the “de facto segregation of the North was as injurious as the legal segregation of the South.”

Dr. King was condemned to similar adversity in affairs of police brutality. The brutal police killing of 15-year-old Jimmy Powell in Harlem provoked Dr. King to travel to New York in 1964. In light of the six-day public uprising incited by Powell’s death, Dr. King sought to provide accountability for police brutality, suggesting police supervision by a Civilian Complaint Review Board. However, he was driven out of town by infuriated city leaders and civilians. They picketed with signs boasting phrases such as “Thank God for Chief Parker.” Chief Parker was a Los Angeles police officer resented by civil rights activists for his brutality.

Dr. King said that through “showered praise on the heroism of Southern Negroes,” the North was quick to claim support for equality. However, when it came to local matters, “only the language was polite...the rejection was firm and unequivocal,” he said. Northerners were clearly unwilling to rectify their own rampant inequalities. Dr. King noted, “As the nation—Negro and white—trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied.”

These limits on Northern liberalism were highlighted when Dr. King addressed New York’s Urban League in 1960. He argued, “There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North.” Disillusioned with the hypocrisy of Northerners, he said that he dreamt of a liberalism that “rises up with righteous indignation when a Negro is lynched in Mississippi, but will be equally incensed when a Negro is denied the right to live in his neighborhood.” He was certainly well acquainted with fervent, fanatical white supremacists. Yet, he continued, saying that “the white moderate, [which] is more devoted to order than to justice,” was more of an obstacle to reform than “the White Citizens Counselor or the Ku Klux Klanner.”

By​ emphasizing the blatant severity of racism in the South, Northerners were able to justify their own inequalities and claim that reform in their own neighborhoods was unnecessary. When juxtaposed, white liberals believed that their de facto injustice paled in comparison to the de jure inequity of the South. Shifting the blame permitted the widespread focus of attention exclusively on the South—that is, while little effort was expended for reform in other areas across the country.

With the vast amount of progress made in the past few decades by the inspiring civil rights activists whom we have celebrated this month, it can be easy to see glaring inequalities and blame-shifting as mere vestiges of the past. However, we continue to find it easier to scrutinize issues in Southern areas than to address our own injustice. The Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. revealed New York State schools to be the most segregated in the nation in 2014, with wealthier families continuing to fiercely oppose plans for integration. By highlighting problems in the South, we continuously relieve ourselves of responsibility for remedying our own issues.

Thus, our “Southernization” of Dr. King’s legacy is an extension of our desires to keep the necessity for reform at bay. We conveniently forget to mention the adversity he faced in the North because if we did, it would become apparent that the same hypocrisy persists. Our actions today echo those of Dr. King’s contemporary Northern liberals, and reckoning with Dr. King’s reality would force us to think of the present in uncomfortable ways. By pinning both historical and current blame entirely on the South, we comfortably neglect our own duty to secure justice for all.

This Black History Month, every aspect of Dr. King’s struggle should be recognized and honored. Instead of disregarding his struggles with Northern liberals to permit resistance to reform, we should highlight them and take responsibility for the perhaps uncomfortable and extensive changes that still must be implemented.

Mayor Bill de Blasio contends that the severe segregation of schools in our city is simply the product of long-established residential segregation. “We cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City,” he said. Residential segregation is certainly a driving factor of the disparities that exist, and we should implement policies similar to the Department of Education’s 2015 plan to make high-performance, well-funded Upper West Side schools more economically and racially integrated by redrawing the zones of District 3. However, the issue runs deeper than housing and the partitioning of school zones. In fact, 40 percent of New York City kindergarteners do not attend their zoned schools, instead opting to venture into different neighborhoods in search of high-income, well-funded, and intensely sought after schools. Consequently, the students who leave zoned schools are replaced by children of color from low-income neighborhoods—those who simply don’t have the option to leave. Thus, the schools that wealthier students flee from are forced to serve the city’s neediest children with the city’s most inadequate funding. For example, while only 44 percent of students in the district are eligible for free lunch, all students who attend P.S. 287 are poor enough to qualify. Regardless of the schools’ racial demographics, if resources were distributed more evenly among schools in various neighborhoods, families of means would be less incentivized to flee from their zoned schools. This, accompanied by the rezoning of school districts to curb the effects of long-standing residential segregation, would be the first step in reversing the deeply entrenched racial inequalities that Northern liberals refused to take.

For decades, maintaining the status quo has taken precedence over securing justice. But the seeds of Dr. King’s legacy remain to be sown, and only by finishing the battle he never had the opportunity to do so may we properly commemorate it.