Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Hardcover)

by Thomas J. Sugrue (Author)
Key Phrases: open housers, open housing activists, public accommoda tions, New York, Jim Crow, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley It is true, as Thomas J. Sugrue says at the outset of Sweet Land of Liberty, that histories of the civil rights movement and the era in which it was at its zenith tend to focus on the South, where segregation was de jure rather than de facto and where white resistance to African American claims was sclerotic and violent. It is equally true that though in the rest of the country blacks enjoyed in name the same rights as whites, in reality their lives were circumscribed by prejudice every bit as mean and oppressive as in the South: "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." Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1963, not long before the historic March on Washington, "We must come to see that the de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South." He was right, of course, and in the last years of his life he confronted dispiriting evidence, especially in Chicago, of just how deeply rooted discrimination was in the North and how intransigent were those whites who practiced it. But Sugrue is quite wrong to claim, as he does, that Sweet Land of Liberty breaks new ground. Yes, it brings together an impressive amount of material, and it lures out of the shadows a number of men and women who labored valiantly to force the North -- especially its largest cities -- to live up to the promises in its noble laws and pious words. This is useful and welcome, but no one who has paid reasonably close attention to civil-rights history of the past century will find much of importance here that has not been recorded previously, and -- it gives me no pleasure to say so -- readers coming to Sweet Land of Liberty in hopes of enlightenment will be discouraged by the book's stupendous length, plodding chronological narrative and pedestrian prose. Sugrue, of the University of Pennsylvania's history department, is a deservedly respected scholar of civil rights with a particular focus on the big cities of the North, but if this book is an attempt to reach a broader readership -- as it certainly appears to be -- its prospects of doing so do not seem especially bright. The period about which Sugrue writes -- from the tentative rise of civil-rights organizations in the early decades of the 20th century right through to today's arguments over affirmative action and "diversity" -- is rich in incredible drama, yet there's absolutely no sense of that in Sweet Land of Liberty. Dutifully, earnestly -- and not a little self-importantly -- it lumbers along from chapter to chapter, touching all the bases but never bringing anything to life. This may have something to do with being the fruit of what is by now standard big-time academic practice -- assembled by an uber professor presiding over a flock of scurrying graduate students -- in which the accumulation of massive research assumes greater importance than constructing a narrative that real people out in the real world might actually want to read. The great migration of blacks from the rural South to the big cities of the North, a subject well covered by Nicholas Lemann in The Promised Land (1991), was an immense challenge to the North, which by and large failed it miserably. The influx to the cities of ill-educated, desperate yet hopeful Southern blacks was a problem, to be sure, but it was also an opportunity. A few Northern whites recognized the possibilities offered by this new labor supply, but mostly -- except during World War II, when there were jobs for everyone -- blacks were denied access to good jobs, good education and good housing. Sugrue goes into all of this, and into the early efforts by black leaders -- most important among them A. Philip Randolph, who in the early 1940s was "the most visible black activist in the United States" -- toward "orienting the struggle for civil rights as a question of power -- economic and political." Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, were the most prominent figures of the Northern civil-rights movement from the 1940s until well into the 1960s. They were admirable men up against staggering odds -- indifferent government at all levels, hostile employers and landlords, a mostly unwelcoming white community -- whose only white allies were some labor unions and various leftists and radicals whose value to the cause was undermined by communist and socialist connections. The most useful part of Sweet Land of Liberty deals with the North (and, less comprehensively, the Midwest and West) between the Depression and the late 1950s. Well before the rise of civil-rights activism in the South -- which dates to the Brown school decision and the Montgomery bus strike in the mid-1950s -- Northern blacks were organizing in various ways. Two people's stories are especially interesting: Anna Arnold Hedgeman -- "Pious and proper, she was the embodiment of the black churchwoman, sometimes prone to self-righteousness but deeply committed to leading a life of faith in service of social change" -- and Henry Lee Moon, "a journalist, labor organizer, government official, and longtime NAACP activist who became one of the most influential black political strategists of his time," especially during the 1930s and 1940s. In everything from jobs to public accommodations to housing, they were up against a wall of complacency: "In the North . . . public officials claimed that the separation of races was just a fact of life, not mandated by law or controlled by the state. Whites could deny responsibility for racial segregation, for their choices about where to live and where to send their children to school were individualized and ostensibly race-neutral. The logical conclusion of this line of reasoning was that it was the natural order of things that the vast majority of whites lived in all-white communities and that blacks were confined to segregated neighborhoods and mostly minority schools. Like lived with like, birds of a feather flocked together. No one was at fault." In such an environment it is scarcely surprising that "what activists and pundits alike began calling the 'Negro Revolt of 1963' " took place. It was, Sugrue writes, "like most rebellions, . . . the fusion of hope, frustration, and solidarity." Malcolm X was new on the scene, with his "acerbic denunciations of white supremacy" and his gospel "of black economic and political separatism," but hope was still in the air. "Rebellion depends on frustration at the status quo but a belief in the possibility of change." The voices were louder and the rhetoric angrier, but a sympathetic national government was in power, especially after Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency in November 1963, and white opinion was turning somewhat more supportive after the outrages in Birmingham and elsewhere in the South. You know the rest of the story: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the rise of black power and then the Black Panthers, the succession of "long hot summers" of the 1960s as the cities exploded in frustration and fury, the "shift to electoral politics as the primary strategy of black empowerment" and the subsequent rise of black officialdom in cities and towns of all sizes, the debate over affirmative action. Much of it is a story in progress, all of which we can see right here in Washington: a prosperous black professional class that shows us how far we have come, desperate black neighborhoods that show us how far we have to go. It's all here in Sweet Land of Liberty, which is neither the first nor the last word on the subject.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (November 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679643036
• ISBN-13: 978-0679643036
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #83,939 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read to understand modern America, November 21, 2008

By	Melissa L. (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

Sweet Land of Liberty is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read. The author is like a detective who has uncovered a whole world that we have completely forgotten. This book finally gives the northern history its due. I was especially interested in the author's mini-biographies of grassroots civil rights activists like Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Roxanne Jones. Most of them aren't household names, but they should be. Their stories are moving and powerful and bring the history to life. I couldn't put Sweet Land of Liberty down. This is a must-read book to understand the current state of race relations and civil rights in America.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A panoramic history, November 30, 2008

By	ProfessionalParent (Big City USA) - See all my reviews

Sweet Land of Liberty is a sweeping history of civil rights in the modern United States. This book challenges the conventional wisdom by moving past the well-told histories of the Jim Crow in South. Thomas Sugrue weaves together the life histories of important grassroots activists like Anna Hedgeman, Henry Lee Moon, Morris Milgram, Cecil Moore, and Roxanne Jones, national political figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and civil rights groups big and small. There are lots of surprises in these pages. Southern historians focus on the sit-ins of 1960, but Sugrue shows that segregated restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and pools were commonplace in the North all the way through the 1940s and 1950s. The book's most powerful chapter focuses on 1963, the year when all of the currents of civil rights and black power exploded on the streets of Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and even New Rochelle and Englewood. Sweet Land of Liberty also sweeps away the old histories by finding common links between civil rights and black power activists and bringing the story right up to the end of the 20th century. If you want to understand how and why Barack Obama was elected and what in race relations we have overcome and what we have not, Sweet Land of Liberty is essential reading.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A history of political reality, December 16, 2008

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Slavery was a Southern phenomenon, and the civil rights movement, in its most public aspect, focused on the South, a myopic viewpoint that ignored the very real battles that were being fought in the North. There is also a common myth that civil rights as a whole ceased to be a movement of any consequence after the 1960s. SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY addresses both misconceptions.

The author of this extensively researched history is Thomas J. Sugrue, whose first book, THE ORIGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History, the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Labor History, and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Book. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected THE ORIGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS as one of its 100 most influential books of the preceding century. Sugrue's academic career has been punctuated with activism, the combination making him well qualified to deal even-handedly with this subject matter. What he has written here is a history of political reality.

It is true that organization and activism came earlier to the North, where during the Great Depression and on through the aftermath of World War II, "devout churchwomen, lawyers, laborers, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists and Communists marched together on picket lines, lobbied public officials and joined in lawsuits against segregated housing and schools." The toil of Northern change agents fostered and informed the tactics used in the South, and the Southern initiatives and successes enheartened Northern activists. In the North, people of color were more likely to be able to attend public events and shop in the same stores with whites, but infamous unwritten "Jim Crow laws" prevented all blacks in the U.S. from, for example, being able to stay overnight while traveling in any but a few locations known through the elaborate cultural grapevine. Among these venues were the YMCAs in Northern cities where Christian principle had won out over racial bias, though not without the push of concerned citizens, including many strong, dedicated churchwomen of both races. These small victories were an inspiration to Southern blacks who either migrated North hoping for a brighter future or joined the battle at home in the 1960s.

But the right to watch a movie was hardly a satisfaction to masses of people living in poverty and losing out on the great dream of all Americans --- the right to an equal and excellent education. That right, it seemed, could not be made a reality despite all the legislation designed to guarantee it. The key to securing equality in public education lay in securing equality in housing. This was a drama that is still being played out in America. Gerrymandering had its nefarious role in underpinning de facto school segregation. Black neighborhoods could be written off the map, a racist tactic practiced on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. School busing was one of many strategies to circumvent the phenomena of gerrymandering, ghetto-ization and "white flight," all of which left African American families in the dust and their children in schools as inferior as those of the years of legal segregation.

The book sings the unsung, people like Roxanne Jones, a southern migrant to Philadelphia, who, abandoned by her alcoholic husband, was challenged by the issues facing African American women in the projects. "Public housing never lived up to its promise. Cheap construction caused all sorts of problems...the corridors were dimly lit and dangerous. The lawns surrounding the towers were muddy and trash strewn." Unmarried mothers were under constant surveillance by welfare workers and increasingly marginalized by lack of employment, unfair credit practices and lack of representation within the systems that regulated their economic existence. Jones organized others and spearheaded initiatives to raise welfare rates (in the early 1970s, "a family of four barely survived on the average annual payment of $3,600). As Sugrue puts it, "Jones did not see litigation and community organizing as antithetical" and had no hesitation to lead protests, once getting arrested for throwing a shoe through a window of the Pennsylvania state capitol.

As Sugrue is careful to point out, whites in general have had more resources of social capital to bring to bear than their black fellow citizens. Withdrawal from mixed or marginal neighborhoods, or gentrification of historic areas forcing poor inhabitants out, has become new factors affecting the quality of schools and the livability of cities and towns. True integration in America is still a rarity.

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY comes to us at a telling time in our nation's history when many of the struggles highlighted in its pages are still being fought in subtle ways as we face the hopeful future. It will be read by thoughtful students of our racial history. Perhaps by remembering the past, we will not be condemned to repeat it.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott