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

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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.

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

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.

Far too often the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States focuses on the south and ends with the passage of the Civil Rights acts under the Johnson Administration. This book does a great job of showing that the North was in many cases as much of a battle ground for the civil rights movement than the south was. While many of the discriminatory laws were not codified like they were in the south, racism was as much of an institution in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York as anywhere else. Also, the north had the growing suburbs which always were opposed to any minority moving into their presence.

If you are interested in an eye opening examination of how the war to defeat racism was really an American fight, then I strong recommend you read Sweet Land of Liberty. It is certainly about the forgotten fight for civil rights.

Few Americans, especially Northern whites, know the story of African Americans seeking equality and justice in the North. Most believe civil rights was a Southern phenomenon. But from the 1920s onward, African Americans in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities struggled for access to restaurant dining, hotels, schools, housing and jobs against a white-dominated system that for years blocked every effort. Thomas Sugre tells their stories with insight and understanding, in a very readable manner.I found Sweet Land of Liberty to be one of the better books on American race relations that I have read, and I have read many as a former professor of American history.