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

CONTENTS

To Anna and Jack

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.

JAMES BALDWIN, White Mans Guilt, Ebony, 1965

INTRODUCTION

THE RACIAL ISSUE WE CONFRONT IN AMERICA IS NOT A SECTIONAL BUT A national problem. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. So proclaimed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1960. Nearly a half century later, our historiesand our collective memoriesof the civil rights era do not reflect the national scope of racial inequality and the breadth of challenges to it. The near library of books on the black freedom struggle is full of empty shelves. Most histories focus on the South and the epic battles between nonviolent protestors and the defenders of Jim Crow during the 1950s and 1960s. Sweet Land of Liberty turns our attention northward.

Conventional histories of the civil rights movement begin with 1954 and the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, and they culminate in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which together unraveled southern-style racial segregation. They tell a story of tragedy but ultimate triumph. As a result of litigation, legislation, and grassroots activism, the Jim Crow buses, lunch counters, and drinking fountains are artifacts of a vanquished racial order. Southern blacks enjoy the right to vote. Lynchings are rare.

The story of the southern freedom struggle is fundamentally a morality play, one that pits the forces of good (nonviolent protestors) against evil (segregationist politicians, brutal sheriffs, and rednecks). It is a story of suffering and redemption, with larger-than-life martyrs and prophets. Southern civil rights activists literally put their bodies on the line, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to advance the cause of racial equality. Through protest and moral suasiona call to conscienceactivists reinvigorated the American Creed, a belief in the fundamental equality and humanity of all people that is supposedly enshrined in our nations founding documents. Through these activists heroism and uncompromising faith, the civil rights movement cleansed America of its sins.

The commonplace accounts turn northward only in the mid-and late 1960s, when cities exploded in riots and black power advocates burst onto the national scene. Our accounts of this period are bleaker and briefer, focusing on Kings frustrated attempt to bring the movement North to Chicago; the contentious New York City school strikes of 1968; the rise and fall of the Black Panthers; and the infamous battle in the 1970s against court-mandated busing in Boston. The North is the tragic denouement of the otherwise triumphant civil rights struggle.

These histories are as much the product of forgetting as of remembering. To understand the history of civil rightsindeed, to understand modern Americait is essential to bring the North back in. As a battleground in the struggle for racial equality, the North mattered enormously. The Great Migration of blacks from the South, which began with a trickle in the 1890s and accelerated rapidly with the outbreak of World War I, meant that the North was home to millions of African Americans by 1920. Fifty years later, almost half of American blacks lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Yet northern blacks loom in the shadows, absent from the historical stage until the mid-1960s, when they serve as spoilers: rioting, embracing a divisive identity politics, and sparking a white backlash against an alleged consensus in support of racial equality. Northern whitesespecially those who joined the interracial struggle for equalityare also largely missing from these accounts.

The exclusion of the Northor its selective inclusion as a foil to the southern freedom strugglecomes at a cost. It ignores the long and intense history of racial violence and conflict in northern towns and cities. Though the differences between North and South were real, our emphasis on southern exceptionalism has led historians, journalists, and political commentators to overlook the commonalities across regions. The long and well-publicized history of racial atrocities in the South gave northerners a badge of honor, a sense that they were not part of Americas troubled racial history. In his 1944 bestseller, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal remarked on a pervasive sense of innocence among northern whites. It is convenient for Northerners good conscience, wrote Myrdal, to forget about the Negro. Myrdal did not spend much time investigating the North, but he could not miss the yawning gap between white northerners self-understanding and their practices. The social paradox in the North is exactly this, that almost everybody is against discrimination in general but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs.

As the national news media turned their attention to civil rights and black power, white denial turned into defensiveness. With charges of racism hurling past them in the 1960s and early 1970s, northern whites fiercely proclaimed their racial innocence. If I hear the four hundred years of slavery bit one more time, complained a white man to journalist Pete Hamill in 1970, Ill go outta my mind. Michael Novak, who passionately defended white ethnics against sanctimonious civil rights activists, likewise saw the question of race and injustice as a distinctly southern problem. Racists? he asked with incredulity. Our ancestors owned no slaves. Most of us ceased being serfs only in the last two hundred years. Racial inequality was someone elses problemit was not the Norths responsibility.

Racial inequality took different forms on each side of the Mason-Dixon Line in the twentieth century. Most northern communities did not erect signs to mark separate black and white facilities; only some northern schools were segregated by law; and black voters were not systematically disenfranchised in the North. But in both regions, private behavior, market practices, and public policies created and reinforced racial separation and inequality. Northern blacks lived as second-class citizens, unencumbered by the most blatant of southern-style Jim Crow laws but still trapped in an economic, political, and legal regime that seldom recognized them as equals. In nearly every arena, blacks and whites lived separate, unequal lives. Public policy and the market confined blacks to declining neighborhoods; informal Jim Crow excluded them from restaurants, hotels, amusement parks, and swimming pools and relegated them to separate sections of theaters. All but a small number of northern blacks attended racially segregated and inferior schools. As adults, blacks faced formidable obstacles to economic security. They were excluded from whole sectors of the labor market. And, as a result of the combined effects of segregation, discrimination, and substandard education, they remained overrepresented in the ranks of the unemployed and poor.

Impoverishment and exclusion engendered despair. But they also fueled righteous indignation. Throughout the twentieth century, black and white activists (and occasionally Latino and Asian allies, who were a minuscule segment of the regions population until recently) rose to challenge racial inequality in the North. Their struggles defied easy categorization at the timeand still do. Activists used the term civil rights movement more broadly than do many historians, social scientists, and legal commentators. The movementnarrowly definedconsisted of challenges to officially sanctioned, legally enforceable racial segregation. But few activists at the time saw the battle to strike down legally mandated segregation as an end in itself. Rather, it was one part of a larger, multifaceted battle that at its broadest included fights for prohibition against discrimination in the workplace, the opening of housing markets, the provision of quality education, the economic development of impoverished communities, and untrammeled access to the consumer marketplace. The keyword linking these battles was rights.