Review
Historians have thoroughly documented the experiences of those African Americans who lived in the South and worked to repeal Jim Crow laws. However, in this work, Biondi explores what she calls 'the struggle for Negro rights' in New York City, an exploration resulting in a stark reminder of the daily challenges facing blacks who lived in northern cities...With its detailed discussions of the American Labor Party, the Communist Party, Black Nationalism, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., W. E. B. Dubois, Roy Wilkins, and, especially, Paul Robeson, this work should be required reading for all historians interested in the post-WW II experience of African Americans in the urban North. (T. D. Beal
Choice )
In this meticulously researched monograph, Biondi reminds the reader that the struggle for black civil rights was waged in the North before it was joined in the South. She documents the fight against racial discrimination in hiring, police brutality, housing segregation, lack of political representation, and inadequate schools in New York City between 1946 and 1954...Biondi's writing is crisp and direct. She introduces the reader to a host of activists whose efforts deserve to be remembered. Unfortunately, most of the causes they championed remain with us today. (Paul T. Murray
MultiCultural Review )
By examining the fight for equality in New York...Biondi...contribute[s] further to our understanding of race in America, in general, and the nature and course of the civil rights movement, more specifically. (Peter B. Levy
Journal of American Ethnic History )
Martha Biondi...has written a scathing critique of the polities of anti-Communism—not just its often-paranoid fantasies and rights violations. Biondi powerfully argues that the damaging legacy of anti-Communism lies in the ways it crippled a vision for a more just and equal New York City, and, by extension, the nation by destroying the careers of many of its most visionary citizens. Biondi’s
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York joins an emerging body of scholarship that overturns the Southern focus of Civil Rights history. Biondi takes us to New York—the home of the largest black community in the nation and, like its more notorious Southern counterparts, segregated in housing, schools, and most public and private accommodations. Biondi powerfully unravels hard and fast distinctions between Northern and Southern racism. Through an examination of numerous incidences of police brutality against African Americans in postwar NYC, the chapter on Northern lynching is a stark reminder of the state-sanctioned violence that ensured Northern segregation and inequality. (Jeanne Theoharis
Left History )
Review
With stunning research and powerful arguments, Martha Biondi charts a new direction in civil rights history - the northern side of the black freedom struggle. Biondi presents postwar New York as a battleground, no less than the Jim Crow South, for the fight against police brutality and discrimination in employment, housing, retail stores, and places of amusement. Men and women, trade unionists and religious leaders, integrationists and separatists, liberals and the Left come together in this pathbreaking study of America's largest and most cosmopolitan city. (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, editor-in-chief of
The Harvard Guide to African-American History 20040501)
