This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report.

I'm Amy Goodman.

We started this week marking what would have been the 100th birthday of Malcolm X.

At the end of this week, we mark the fifth anniversary of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

We're here for part two of our conversation with historian Gene Theo Harris,

whose new book, King of the North, Martin Luther King Jr.'s life of struggle outside the South

is a major reexamination

that offers a different picture of both King's own experiences of police brutality

and his sustained critique of police brutality in the criminal legal system in the North as well

as the south.

We thank you so much for staying with us for this part two of our conversation.

So if you could, when people talk about Dr. King, I don't think they think about this major

struggle against police brutality.

Talk about your years investigating this, well, doing this re-examination and what

surprised you most and then take us through a very different trajectory of his life than we're

used to hearing. Right. I mean, in many ways, we have southernized Dr. King, and by southernizing him, we miss both really key aspects of his

own life and the ways that he understands racism and segregation and police brutality, not as

like a southern sickness, but a national cancer. And partly that begins in his own life. First, because, as we know,

he goes to Morehouse for college, but then he will do his graduate work, first at Crozier

Seminary in Pennsylvania, and then at Boston University. And I think many of us know that vaguely,

but we don't think about the young man who is then

living in those segregated cities, going to those predominantly white institutions, and the kinds

...