Sweet land of liberty : the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North /

The fight for civil rights in the North was very different from the movement in the South. MENTION the civil rights movement and Birmingham, Selma and Memphis spring to mind. Rarely do we recall Boston, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. But there was a civil rights movement in the North, Thomas J. Sugrue reminds us in "Sweet Land of Liberty," and it is impossible to understand race relations today without pondering what we can learn from it. Sugrue's long and exhaustively researched book brings that movement back to life. No one should underestimate just how thoroughly racist attitudes and practices shaped the lives of residents of Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia in the decades after World War II. Justifying the exclusion of African-Americans from his affordable new suburban housing developments, William Levitt said that he "could not take a chance On admitting Negroes and then not being able to sell his houses." Yet housing was only one of many issues reinforcing an unofficial but powerful color line in the North. Accounts of police brutality, restricted public beaches, segregated schools and racist hiring practices fill page after page of this book. At the same time Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, recounts the struggles of those, many long forgotten, who devoted themselves to promoting racial equality. Sugrue tells so many stories that it is impossible to summarize them all. I found myself particularly taken with his treatment of one theorist and one activist. The theorist is Henry Lee Moon, a journalist and political strategist who worked for the C.I.O. and the N.A.A.C.P. Moon sought a way for black Americans to exercise influence in national politics, and he found it in the concept of "balance of power," the title he gave to his 1948 book. Understanding that African-Americans were losing their allegiance to the party of Lincoln, Moon was able to persuade a number of Democratic Party politicians, up to and including Harry Truman, that black votes could swing close elections their way, eventually undermining the grip that Southern segregationists held on the party. In the 2008 election Democratic segregationists are gone, but Moon's analysis remains; for Democrats, winning the black vote is still the key to winning the electoral vote. That all this was anticipated 60 years ago is quite amazing. Harlem, 1945. The activist brought to life so well is Roxanne Jones. A resident of one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods, Jones, like many of her neighbors, was unable to afford a car, and spent hours each day on buses and trolleys getting to work. Surrounded by people barely able to get by, she devoted her life to organizing protests against the humiliations and inefficiencies of Pennsylvania's welfare system. Eventually she became the first black woman elected to the State Senate, where she advocated legislation designed to improve the lives of the inner-city poor. Her funeral in 1996 drew politicians from both political parties. Today there is a post office named after her in North Philadelphia. Sugrue highlights Moon and Jones for a reason; both implicitly questioned the ideas that dominated the civil rights movement in the South. Inspired by Gunnar Myrdal's "American Dilemma," and led primarily by preachers, the Southern movement had been moral in tone: blacks should strive to lift themselves up, and whites should aim to live up to American ideals of freedom and equality. Such an approach, Sugrue argues, was inappropriate for the North. For one thing, Northern whites were persuaded that so long as they avoided explicitly segregationist laws, their consciences were clean. For another, racial progress in the North was so slow that more dramatic steps were required than nonviolent protest or high-minded sermons. Sugrue says that only through actions threatening the privileges of whites - boycotts, demonstrations, community control of schools could blacks narrow the disparities. Although moved by Sugrue's history, I was unpersuaded by his advocacy. He spends a disproportionate amount of time writing about Marxist extremists and crackpot demagogues, devoting a dozen pages, for example, to the Revolutionary Action Movement, a violence-spouting Maoist sect. Yet he manages only two paragraphs for the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy in Brooklyn, which did so much to fracture the alliance between blacks and Jews. Sugrue's book all too often focuses on the positions that black organizations took with respect to global issues rather than on the domestic conditions that produced urban poverty and segregated schools. In addition, Sugrue pays insufficient attention to the price the Northern civil rights movement paid for its refusal to take morality seriously. Once blacks used the language of empowerment and self-determination, whites were free to do so as well: those Boston Irish-American parents resisting busing appealed to the same themes of community autonomy and rejection of outsiders that black activists did in demanding control of their schools. Lacking a moral compass, more than a handful of Northern civil rights workers became hustlers if not downright criminals. Most important of all, by insisting that everything was a struggle for power, Northern activists all too often treated whites as enemies to be fought rather than allies to be cultivated. Justified or not, black power produced a white backlash. To advance in American society, any minority needs allies. The strategies Sugrue so admires were incapable of producing them. SUGRUE devotes his epilogue to the lessons learned from his history. Rightly noting that much progress has been achieved, he concludes that none of it was "solely or primarily the result of a shift in white attitudes." Causality in this matter is impossible to establish, but I think Sugrue is wrong. White attitudes toward blacks have changed strikingly during the past six decades, and for the better; the mere fact of Barack Obama testifies to that. Imagine how much more might have changed if the Northern civil rights movement had borrowed more of the moral appeal to conscience that inspired civil rights in the South. Alan Wolfe's "Future of Liberalism" will be published next year. No one should underestimate how much thoroughly racist attitudes shaped the lives of people in Northern cities.

According to Sugrue (The Origins of the Urban Crises), most histories of the civil rights movement "focus on the South and the epic battles between nonviolent protestors and the defenders of Jim Crow during the 1950s and 1960s." The author's groundbreaking account covers a wider time frame and turns the focus northward to "the states with the largest black populations outside the south." Sugrue highlights seminal people, books and organizations in his tightly focused study that restores many largely forgotten Northern activists as integral participants in the civil rights movement--such as Philadelphia pastor Leon Sullivan; Roxanne Jones of the "welfare rights movement" and first black woman elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate; and James Forman, advocate for reparations. The National Negro Congress, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the National Black Political Convention share history with the NAACP and the Urban League, as Sugrue traces the phoenixlike risings from the ashes of old organizations into new. Dense with "boycotts, pickets, agitation, riots, lobbying, litigation, and legislation," the book is heavily detailed but consistently readable with unparalleled scope and fresh focus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The commonplace focus on the Civil Rights Movement as a morality play set in the 1950s and 1960s South neglects the North as a crucial battleground in the struggle for racial equality, argues Bancroft Prize-winning University of Pennsylvania historian Sugrue (The Origins of the Urban Crisis). In his three-part, 14-chapter narrative, he shows that black exclusion, poverty, and racial violence permeated America on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Focusing on an array of individual activists and grassroots organizations that collectively advanced equality in the states having the largest black populations outside the South from the 1920s through the Great Migration and on, Sugrue produces a political history with strong socioeconomic themes, weaving together local, national, and international developments. And he carries his analysis into the so-called post-civil rights era since the 1980s. Diagramming the dimensions of the continuing black crisis, he plumbs fragile gains and deepening racial divides. This splendid read brims with insights broadening and deepening understanding of the black-white mold of modern America. Highly recommended and essential for collections on U.S. history, social movements, race relations, or civil rights.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Sweeping, well-documented history of the struggle for racial equality above the Mason-Dixon line. Bancroft Prizewinner Sugrue (History and Sociology/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 1996, etc.) argues that in the North, practices in the workplace, education, public accommodations and housing were as effective as "Whites Only" signs in keeping blacks and whites separated. The civil-rights struggle there was just as fierce, he continues, and is as significant to an understanding of the present as the oft-told Southern story. Identifying racial injustice as a political problem of unequal power relationships, he examines the ways in which institutions have created and maintained racial separation and racial privilege. Drawing on the contemporary writings of black journalists, government investigative reports and the records of local, regional and national civil-rights groups, the author focuses on New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, the states with the largest black populations outside the South. He examines the impact of massive African-American migration in the 1920s from the rural South to Northern cities, then turns to the fight in the '30s and '40s for economic security by interracial coalitions of black militants and small numbers of religious activists and secular leftists. A second wave of migration to Northern industrial centers launched by World War II ultimately changed the racial composition of many cities and sparked grassroots battles over housing, schools and public accommodations. Sugrue provides unforgettable stories of black encounters with segregated hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, beaches and amusement parks, as well as moving accounts of grassroots resistance to unequal schooling and restricted housing. He enlivens this complex history of political movements and shifting coalitions with personal stories: the middle-class advocate of "uplift and respectability" who evolved into a militant; the college student whose request for a movie ticket eventually opened RKO theaters to black patrons; the New York school teacher who headed a movement demanding jobs for black construction workers. Scholarly yet accessible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.