cerise’s Reviews > King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South > Status Update

He observed how the white moderate who “preferred order to justice” might pose a greater danger than the KKK. Then he extolled, “the question is bit whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremists we sill be ….Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

“For many white Americans in the North there is little comprehension of the grossness of police behavior and its widespread practice” - Martin Luther King Jr. in the Nation 1964

“King didn’t see the problem of police as a few bad apples but a structural one in northern Black ghetto where police and the courts act as ‘enforcers’”

“Black people and their allies built to myriad of creative, long-standing nonviolent direct action movements from LA to Detroit… but they were ignored, dismissed or demonized by most white northerners in the federal government. Thus rising black militancy in many cities cannot be separated from the years of white obstructionism and intransigence that proceeded it.