In "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North", Thomas J. Sugrue addresses a gap in the historiography, writing, “Nearly a half century later, our histories – and our collective memories – of the civil rights era do not reflect the national scope of racial inequality and the breadth of challenges to it” (pg. xii). He argues, “To understand the history of civil rights – indeed, to understand modern America – it is essential to bring the North back in” (pg. xiv). To this end, he “focuses on the moment in modern American history when activists, especially in the North, fought for their rights broadly conceived” (pg. xvii). Despite the large scope of Sugrue’s work, he works within the realm of microhistory, moving from case study to case study to prove his point.
Sugrue describes the push for civil rights activism, writing, “The civil rights impulse had been deeply rooted in the American past, yet it came to the surface in America at one particular moment, the 1940s. And it did so because of a shift in national politics and a simultaneous grassroots struggle from below” (pg. 31). He writes of the role of activism, “Whites would not yield the advantage of their race without a fight. Only the threat – or the actuality – of political disruption would” (pg. 32). Protests in the North paralleled and eclipsed those in the South. Sugrue writes, “Just as King and his allies were opening their nonviolent siege of Birmingham, an extraordinary wave of protests shook Philadelphia” (pg. 292). Elsewhere, “in Rochester, New York, a broad spectrum of civil rightd activists and nationalists, including Malcolm X, joined forces in protesting the city’s police, who had arrested twelve members of the Nation of Islam in January” (pg. 303-304). Sugrue devotes a great deal of attention to segregation in the North, which occurred through legal and extralegal means. Movie theaters used special ticketing and invitation only events to segregate their audiences (pg. 139). In regards to housing, Sugrue argues, “The existence of all-white and all-black neighborhoods was not a fixed, timeless feature of northern life. Rather, rigid housing segregation by race was a relatively new creation” (pg. 209). While certain towns enacted sundown laws, more commonly were neighborhood associations or realtors who limited prospective buyers of homes. Sugrue writes, “Whites often engaged in extralegal actions to enforce restrictive covenants and racially discriminatory lending policies. They fought viciously to keep ‘undesirables’ out of their neighborhoods as blacks migrated northward” (pg. 204). Despite efforts to change peoples’ minds, whites “moved in overwhelming numbers to all-white communities” (pg. 249).
Sugrue’s work blends synthesis with primary research, drawing extensively upon the secondary literature of the civil rights era while incorporating information from various local newspapers, African-American papers, the documents of the Congress for Racial Equality, and more. At times, the book loses its way due to the breadth and scope of the project.
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Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North Hardcover – November 4, 2008
by
Thomas J. Sugrue
(Author)
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The struggle for racial equality in the North has been a footnote in most books about civil rights in America. Now this monumental new work from one of the most brilliant historians of his generation sets the record straight. Sweet Land of Liberty is an epic, revelatory account of the abiding quest for justice in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South.
Thomas Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power.
Appearing throughout these tumultuous tales of bigotry and resistance are the people who propelled progress, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a dedicated churchwoman who in the 1930s became both a member of New York’s black elite and an increasingly radical activist; A. Philip Randolph, who as America teetered on the brink of World War II dared to threaten FDR with a march on Washington to protest discrimination–and got the Fair Employment Practices Committee (“the second Emancipation Proclamation”) as a result; Morris Milgram, a white activist who built the Concord Park housing development, the interracial answer to white Levittown; and Herman Ferguson, a mild-mannered New York teacher whose protest of a Queens construction site led him to become a key player in the militant Malcolm X’s movement.
Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history. Thomas Sugrue has written a narrative bound to become the standard source on this essential subject.
Thomas Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power.
Appearing throughout these tumultuous tales of bigotry and resistance are the people who propelled progress, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a dedicated churchwoman who in the 1930s became both a member of New York’s black elite and an increasingly radical activist; A. Philip Randolph, who as America teetered on the brink of World War II dared to threaten FDR with a march on Washington to protest discrimination–and got the Fair Employment Practices Committee (“the second Emancipation Proclamation”) as a result; Morris Milgram, a white activist who built the Concord Park housing development, the interracial answer to white Levittown; and Herman Ferguson, a mild-mannered New York teacher whose protest of a Queens construction site led him to become a key player in the militant Malcolm X’s movement.
Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history. Thomas Sugrue has written a narrative bound to become the standard source on this essential subject.
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateNovember 4, 2008
- Dimensions6.42 x 1.76 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100679643036
- ISBN-13978-0679643036
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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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"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 exhaustively researched book brings that movement back to life." --New York Times Book Review
"The election of Barack Obama... calls into question the rigid dichotomies that have defined the American conflict over inequality. Thomas Sugrue's evocative and richly documented new book, Sweet Land of Liberty, is well timed because it addresses the most blinding and fundamental of these dichotomies, that between the southern land of slavery and Jim Crow and the ill-defined rest of the country....The book covers more fresh ground than any history of race has in many years. " --Newsday
“With telling detail and crystalline prose, Sugrue has explained the rise, course of, and difficulties inherent in the freedom struggles of black Americans in the North…. Every American historian needs to read it, and so do policymakers.” --Christianity Today, Book-of-the-Week (11/3/2008)
“Groundbreaking…. unparalleled scope and fresh focus.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Sweeping, well-documented history of the struggle for racial equality above the Mason-Dixon Line.”–Kirkus
"How can an administration elected through an appeal to racial transcendence understand—and combat—the tenacity of racialized injustice? ...Thomas Sugrue’s book might be the timeliest place to start." --New York Observer
"The struggle for civil rights in the North, often overshadowed, gets a comprehensive review...Sugrue's scholarship is most impressive in his analysis of the social, economic, and political currents that swirled around the activists." --Boston Globe
"Sugrue’s book is something to be celebrated. We all know the injustice that pervaded the South and the struggles of Civil Rights movement to overcome it. But many of us don’t know that many similar obstacles still had to be overcome in the North. Sugrue humanizes the history he tells, using individuals’ narratives to remind us of an important truth: “the struggle for racial equality in the North continues.”--Harvard Crimson
"Sweet Land of Liberty... is to be praised for how it highlights the richness, complexity, and endurance of a long black freedom struggle north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It skillfully guides the reader through many twists and turns over nearly a century of civil rights history. It is a profoundly important book that reminds us that the Civil Rights struggle was a national, not simply a regional phenomenon." --ehistory
"Historian Thomas J. Sugrue writes incisively about racial discrimination in the North...richly detailed." --Wilson Quarterly
"In Sweet Land of Liberty, Sugrue supplies a sweeping and searching re-interpretation of the black freedom struggle north of the Mason-Dixon line from the 1920s to the present."
--Tulsa World
“Sugrue’s chronicle covers a pivotal era in American history in a comprehensive sweep.”
–-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Book-Pick-of-the-Week” (11/3/2008)
“The most important work of American history published this year.” –Religion in American History Blogspot
“With telling detail and crystalline prose, Sugrue has explained the rise, course of, and difficulties inherent in the freedom struggles of black Americans in the North…. Every American historian needs to read it, and so do policymakers.”-- eHistory
“Brims with insights broadening and deepening understanding of the black-white mold of modern America….Essential for collections on U.S. history, social movements, race relations, or civil rights.” –Library Journal
"Although dozens of books have been written about the struggle for civil rights in the South, this is one of the first documented histories of the fight that occurred north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The author, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, sifted through government reports, civil rights group records, the work of black journalists and even the personal accounts of ordinary people to document how our political and social institutions created and maintained racial separation and racial privilege. Covering a span from the 1920s through the present, this unconventional and groundbreaking book examines 80 of the most defining years of America's past. This landmark study is elegantly written and nothing less than a stunning achievement."
--Tuscon Citizen
“Sweet Land of Liberty is a revelatory, daring, and ambitious book that overturns the conventional histories of America’s struggle for civil rights. In this powerful narrative, Thomas Sugrue draws compelling vignettes of the forgotten women and men who fought against the odds for racial justice in the North. He persuasively argues that what happened on the streets, churches, and courtrooms of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles is every bit as important for understanding modern America as the oft-told histories of the Southern freedom struggle. This is one of those rare books that completely reorients our understanding of the past.”
–Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor, Harvard University
“Thomas Sugrue's crisply written and massively sourced book delivers the northern half of the civil rights story with an authority that should make 'Sweet Land of Liberty' indispensable.”
–David Levering Lewis, author of a biography of the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois
"With this landmark study, Thomas Sugrue has accomplished the extraordinary: he’s transformed the history of the civil rights movement, shifting it from the south to the north, from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, to Harlem, Levittown, and the mean streets of Detroit. In the process, he’s stripped away the comforting sense shared by so many Americans that the struggle for racial justice is complete, the victory won. If ever a book deserved to be essential reading, this is it."
- Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Thomas Sugrue's, Sweet Land of Liberty is one of the most important works on modern American history to appear in recent memory. It challenges and transforms what we think, not only about the struggle for civil rights, but more broadly about the entire course of American social and political development. It is one of those books that truly changes our historical perspective."
- Steve Hahn, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.
"Richly researched, elegantly written, and monumental in scope, Sweet Land of Liberty offers a riveting portrait of racial change in the most putatively free and equal part of the United States. In shifting attention to northern streets and confrontations, this painful yet stirring narrative eloquently enlarges the scope of American history, compellingly extends our understanding of social movements, and thoughtfully reminds us that deep and just change does not come easily."
- Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University.
"The election of Barack Obama... calls into question the rigid dichotomies that have defined the American conflict over inequality. Thomas Sugrue's evocative and richly documented new book, Sweet Land of Liberty, is well timed because it addresses the most blinding and fundamental of these dichotomies, that between the southern land of slavery and Jim Crow and the ill-defined rest of the country....The book covers more fresh ground than any history of race has in many years. " --Newsday
“With telling detail and crystalline prose, Sugrue has explained the rise, course of, and difficulties inherent in the freedom struggles of black Americans in the North…. Every American historian needs to read it, and so do policymakers.” --Christianity Today, Book-of-the-Week (11/3/2008)
“Groundbreaking…. unparalleled scope and fresh focus.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Sweeping, well-documented history of the struggle for racial equality above the Mason-Dixon Line.”–Kirkus
"How can an administration elected through an appeal to racial transcendence understand—and combat—the tenacity of racialized injustice? ...Thomas Sugrue’s book might be the timeliest place to start." --New York Observer
"The struggle for civil rights in the North, often overshadowed, gets a comprehensive review...Sugrue's scholarship is most impressive in his analysis of the social, economic, and political currents that swirled around the activists." --Boston Globe
"Sugrue’s book is something to be celebrated. We all know the injustice that pervaded the South and the struggles of Civil Rights movement to overcome it. But many of us don’t know that many similar obstacles still had to be overcome in the North. Sugrue humanizes the history he tells, using individuals’ narratives to remind us of an important truth: “the struggle for racial equality in the North continues.”--Harvard Crimson
"Sweet Land of Liberty... is to be praised for how it highlights the richness, complexity, and endurance of a long black freedom struggle north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It skillfully guides the reader through many twists and turns over nearly a century of civil rights history. It is a profoundly important book that reminds us that the Civil Rights struggle was a national, not simply a regional phenomenon." --ehistory
"Historian Thomas J. Sugrue writes incisively about racial discrimination in the North...richly detailed." --Wilson Quarterly
"In Sweet Land of Liberty, Sugrue supplies a sweeping and searching re-interpretation of the black freedom struggle north of the Mason-Dixon line from the 1920s to the present."
--Tulsa World
“Sugrue’s chronicle covers a pivotal era in American history in a comprehensive sweep.”
–-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Book-Pick-of-the-Week” (11/3/2008)
“The most important work of American history published this year.” –Religion in American History Blogspot
“With telling detail and crystalline prose, Sugrue has explained the rise, course of, and difficulties inherent in the freedom struggles of black Americans in the North…. Every American historian needs to read it, and so do policymakers.”-- eHistory
“Brims with insights broadening and deepening understanding of the black-white mold of modern America….Essential for collections on U.S. history, social movements, race relations, or civil rights.” –Library Journal
"Although dozens of books have been written about the struggle for civil rights in the South, this is one of the first documented histories of the fight that occurred north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The author, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, sifted through government reports, civil rights group records, the work of black journalists and even the personal accounts of ordinary people to document how our political and social institutions created and maintained racial separation and racial privilege. Covering a span from the 1920s through the present, this unconventional and groundbreaking book examines 80 of the most defining years of America's past. This landmark study is elegantly written and nothing less than a stunning achievement."
--Tuscon Citizen
“Sweet Land of Liberty is a revelatory, daring, and ambitious book that overturns the conventional histories of America’s struggle for civil rights. In this powerful narrative, Thomas Sugrue draws compelling vignettes of the forgotten women and men who fought against the odds for racial justice in the North. He persuasively argues that what happened on the streets, churches, and courtrooms of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles is every bit as important for understanding modern America as the oft-told histories of the Southern freedom struggle. This is one of those rare books that completely reorients our understanding of the past.”
–Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor, Harvard University
“Thomas Sugrue's crisply written and massively sourced book delivers the northern half of the civil rights story with an authority that should make 'Sweet Land of Liberty' indispensable.”
–David Levering Lewis, author of a biography of the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois
"With this landmark study, Thomas Sugrue has accomplished the extraordinary: he’s transformed the history of the civil rights movement, shifting it from the south to the north, from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, to Harlem, Levittown, and the mean streets of Detroit. In the process, he’s stripped away the comforting sense shared by so many Americans that the struggle for racial justice is complete, the victory won. If ever a book deserved to be essential reading, this is it."
- Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Thomas Sugrue's, Sweet Land of Liberty is one of the most important works on modern American history to appear in recent memory. It challenges and transforms what we think, not only about the struggle for civil rights, but more broadly about the entire course of American social and political development. It is one of those books that truly changes our historical perspective."
- Steve Hahn, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.
"Richly researched, elegantly written, and monumental in scope, Sweet Land of Liberty offers a riveting portrait of racial change in the most putatively free and equal part of the United States. In shifting attention to northern streets and confrontations, this painful yet stirring narrative eloquently enlarges the scope of American history, compellingly extends our understanding of social movements, and thoughtfully reminds us that deep and just change does not come easily."
- Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University.
About the Author
Thomas J. Sugrue is a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology. Sugrue’s first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, and the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Urban History. He has also published essays and reviews in The Washington Post, The Nation, London Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Detroit Free Press.
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.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
“Sweet Land of Liberty”
And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to a thundering close, Anna Arnold Hedgeman sat a few feet away. It was a long-overdue moment of recognition for the sixty-four-year-old civil rights activist, though it was bittersweet. The only woman on the steering committee for the march, Hedgeman had a place of honor on the dais at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. It was only at the last minute, at her insistence, that march organizers gave a few minutes on the program to Little Rock leader Daisy Bates and “casually” introduced Rosa Parks to the crowd. Hedgeman remained unacknowledged, her presence mute testimony to the importance of decades of grassroots organizing, much of it in the North, that had brought a quarter of a million people to the greatest demonstration in the nation’s history. It is safe to say that most of the marchers gathered that hot August afternoon had no idea who she was. At a moment when the black freedom struggle was growing younger and more militant, Hedgeman was part of a largely forgotten generation of activists, women and men, black and white, religious and secular, whose lives embodied the long history of civil rights in the North.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman’s journey began in the small-town Midwest at the dawn of the twentieth century, took her through the North, and brought her into the heart of a remarkable and diverse political and social movement to challenge racial inequality in America. She came of age as millions of blacks headed north in search of opportunity but faced a regime of racial proscription there that was every bit as deeply entrenched as the southern system of Jim Crow. During her lifetime of activism, she encountered grassroots school desegregation activists and angry Klansmen; black and white churchwomen committed to dialogue on race relations; poor black migrants and struggling women workers; hypocritical white liberals who mouthed their commitment to racial equality but continued to profit from it; musicians, activists, and intellectuals who created the Harlem Renaissance; black separatists dreaming of a proud black nation; and blue-collar activists committed to building an interracial labor movement. A tireless woman of political savvy and considerable charm, she worked with nearly every important civil rights activist in the first half of the twentieth century.
Hedgeman started life born into the “talented tenth,” a term coined by W. E. B. DuBois for the highly educated, deeply religious, and well-connected black men and women who saw their mission as uplifting the race. 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. For Hedgeman, as it was for many early-twentieth-century black activists, there was no boundary between politics and piety, between prayer and protest. Her calling was both spiritual and practical but also open to the dramatically changing circumstances of America as it was remade by the massive black diaspora. Hedgeman’s encounter with the troubled and unresolved history of race and inequality in the North profoundly altered her vocation. She found herself drawn to the plight of poor and working-class Americans, especially the black women born in circumstances far less fortunate than her own. Even if she never jettisoned her intense religiosity or her sense of propriety, she came to see that the project of uplifting the poor into bourgeois respectability by prayer, admonition, or moral education would never be sufficient. Because of her encounter with racial and economic injustice, she came to argue that the plight of the black poor would be overcome only through a wholescale political and economic transformation.
Anna Arnold’s childhood was anything but ordinary. She grew up in a nearly all-white world. Born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1899 and raised in Anoka, Minnesota, in a devout household, she was the daughter of a college-educated southern migrant so light-skinned that he could pass for white. William Arnold was a preacher and educator committed to the prohibition of alcohol. A stern, devout man, he had high ambitions for his children. When Anna was still an infant, the Arnolds found their way to Anoka, a relatively prosperous lumber and mill town on the northernmost reaches of the Mississippi River, twenty miles northwest of Minneapolis. Only 8,809 blacks lived in the entire state in 1920. Anoka’s tiny black population had risen from only 15 to 41 in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The only blacks Arnold knew for most of her childhood were immediate family members. Minnesota was relatively liberal, its white population more indifferent than hostile to the small number of blacks who peppered the state. Anna Arnold did not recall facing any racial hostility as a child, but it did affect others. In 1931, less than ten years after she left her hometown, a black Anokan barely escaped a lynch mob.
Comfortable as the only black person in a room full of whites, she became the first black student at Hamline University, a small Methodist school in St. Paul. It was there, in Minnesota’s capital, where racial tensions were soaring, that she had her first serious encounters with other African Americans. Several thousand blacks had moved into the Twin Cities in the early 1920s, leading to a tightening of racial restrictions in schools, housing, and employment. One member of Arnold’s social circle in St. Paul was Roy Wilkins, two years her junior and later president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Fresh from college, Wilkins wrote a scathing account of their home state, decrying the “complacency” and “indifference” of its black leadership. “The most regrettable and almost tragic feature of life in Minnesota,” wrote Wilkins, “is that Negroes are so satisfied with their condition that they are blind to the signs of a new time.”
In the 1920s, blacks faced growing hostility in the North. Throughout the region, restrictive covenants—clauses in home deeds that forbade blacks and other minorities from purchasing or renting homes— proliferated. Nearly every new housing development built during the booming 1920s was closed to blacks. Those who attempted to breach the invisible color lines that separated neighborhoods faced violent reprisals. The result was a steep rise in housing segregation. The Ku Klux Klan gained strongholds in nearly every northern city in the 1920s. Chicago’s Klan, for example, had nearly forty thousand members, and nearly one in three white men in Indiana belonged to the group at its peak in the mid-1920s. In Detroit, a Klansman lost election to the Detroit mayoralty on a technicality in 1924. Blacks faced growing restrictions. Shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and theater managers proclaimed their premises for whites only. And racially separate schools proliferated, particularly in northern towns that attracted large numbers of black migrants. Nearly all of these proscriptions—as Wilkins called them—were defended by law enforcement authorities.
Anna Arnold had her first serious encounter with discrimination as a twenty-two-year-old. An ambitious student, she pursued one of the few professions open to educated black women—teaching. But St. Paul had a very small black population, and its school district had no interest in placing a “colored” teacher in one of its white schools. (With few exceptions, hardly any black teachers taught white students in the North until the mid-1950s.) Frustrated by her experience and eager to see the larger world, she took a teaching job at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a small, all-black “citadel of moralistic Methodism.” The students at Rust were, for the most part, poorly educated; the school had a small budget; and Holly Springs could not have been more different from Anoka or St. Paul. Arnold found the indignities of southern-style Jim Crow difficult to negotiate, though she learned a great deal about the history of race relations from her mentor, Rust College dean J. Leonard Farmer, whose son James would later move north and spearhead the Congress of Racial Equality. Embittered by the “overwhelming difficulties” of life in the segregated South, she headed back north after two years, feeling a “deep hate” toward southern whites.
In 1924, Anna Arnold was hired by the YWCA, starting out in Springfield, Ohio. The town was hardly a refuge from the indignities that she had experienced in the South, but the Y provided a springboard for her ambition. A bastion of liberal Protestantism amid the fundamentalist revival of the 1920s, the Y attracted young, idealistic, churchgoing women who used their talents to reform and uplift poor and working-class women through continuing education, moral training, cultural events, and physical ...
“Sweet Land of Liberty”
And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to a thundering close, Anna Arnold Hedgeman sat a few feet away. It was a long-overdue moment of recognition for the sixty-four-year-old civil rights activist, though it was bittersweet. The only woman on the steering committee for the march, Hedgeman had a place of honor on the dais at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. It was only at the last minute, at her insistence, that march organizers gave a few minutes on the program to Little Rock leader Daisy Bates and “casually” introduced Rosa Parks to the crowd. Hedgeman remained unacknowledged, her presence mute testimony to the importance of decades of grassroots organizing, much of it in the North, that had brought a quarter of a million people to the greatest demonstration in the nation’s history. It is safe to say that most of the marchers gathered that hot August afternoon had no idea who she was. At a moment when the black freedom struggle was growing younger and more militant, Hedgeman was part of a largely forgotten generation of activists, women and men, black and white, religious and secular, whose lives embodied the long history of civil rights in the North.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman’s journey began in the small-town Midwest at the dawn of the twentieth century, took her through the North, and brought her into the heart of a remarkable and diverse political and social movement to challenge racial inequality in America. She came of age as millions of blacks headed north in search of opportunity but faced a regime of racial proscription there that was every bit as deeply entrenched as the southern system of Jim Crow. During her lifetime of activism, she encountered grassroots school desegregation activists and angry Klansmen; black and white churchwomen committed to dialogue on race relations; poor black migrants and struggling women workers; hypocritical white liberals who mouthed their commitment to racial equality but continued to profit from it; musicians, activists, and intellectuals who created the Harlem Renaissance; black separatists dreaming of a proud black nation; and blue-collar activists committed to building an interracial labor movement. A tireless woman of political savvy and considerable charm, she worked with nearly every important civil rights activist in the first half of the twentieth century.
Hedgeman started life born into the “talented tenth,” a term coined by W. E. B. DuBois for the highly educated, deeply religious, and well-connected black men and women who saw their mission as uplifting the race. 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. For Hedgeman, as it was for many early-twentieth-century black activists, there was no boundary between politics and piety, between prayer and protest. Her calling was both spiritual and practical but also open to the dramatically changing circumstances of America as it was remade by the massive black diaspora. Hedgeman’s encounter with the troubled and unresolved history of race and inequality in the North profoundly altered her vocation. She found herself drawn to the plight of poor and working-class Americans, especially the black women born in circumstances far less fortunate than her own. Even if she never jettisoned her intense religiosity or her sense of propriety, she came to see that the project of uplifting the poor into bourgeois respectability by prayer, admonition, or moral education would never be sufficient. Because of her encounter with racial and economic injustice, she came to argue that the plight of the black poor would be overcome only through a wholescale political and economic transformation.
Anna Arnold’s childhood was anything but ordinary. She grew up in a nearly all-white world. Born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1899 and raised in Anoka, Minnesota, in a devout household, she was the daughter of a college-educated southern migrant so light-skinned that he could pass for white. William Arnold was a preacher and educator committed to the prohibition of alcohol. A stern, devout man, he had high ambitions for his children. When Anna was still an infant, the Arnolds found their way to Anoka, a relatively prosperous lumber and mill town on the northernmost reaches of the Mississippi River, twenty miles northwest of Minneapolis. Only 8,809 blacks lived in the entire state in 1920. Anoka’s tiny black population had risen from only 15 to 41 in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The only blacks Arnold knew for most of her childhood were immediate family members. Minnesota was relatively liberal, its white population more indifferent than hostile to the small number of blacks who peppered the state. Anna Arnold did not recall facing any racial hostility as a child, but it did affect others. In 1931, less than ten years after she left her hometown, a black Anokan barely escaped a lynch mob.
Comfortable as the only black person in a room full of whites, she became the first black student at Hamline University, a small Methodist school in St. Paul. It was there, in Minnesota’s capital, where racial tensions were soaring, that she had her first serious encounters with other African Americans. Several thousand blacks had moved into the Twin Cities in the early 1920s, leading to a tightening of racial restrictions in schools, housing, and employment. One member of Arnold’s social circle in St. Paul was Roy Wilkins, two years her junior and later president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Fresh from college, Wilkins wrote a scathing account of their home state, decrying the “complacency” and “indifference” of its black leadership. “The most regrettable and almost tragic feature of life in Minnesota,” wrote Wilkins, “is that Negroes are so satisfied with their condition that they are blind to the signs of a new time.”
In the 1920s, blacks faced growing hostility in the North. Throughout the region, restrictive covenants—clauses in home deeds that forbade blacks and other minorities from purchasing or renting homes— proliferated. Nearly every new housing development built during the booming 1920s was closed to blacks. Those who attempted to breach the invisible color lines that separated neighborhoods faced violent reprisals. The result was a steep rise in housing segregation. The Ku Klux Klan gained strongholds in nearly every northern city in the 1920s. Chicago’s Klan, for example, had nearly forty thousand members, and nearly one in three white men in Indiana belonged to the group at its peak in the mid-1920s. In Detroit, a Klansman lost election to the Detroit mayoralty on a technicality in 1924. Blacks faced growing restrictions. Shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and theater managers proclaimed their premises for whites only. And racially separate schools proliferated, particularly in northern towns that attracted large numbers of black migrants. Nearly all of these proscriptions—as Wilkins called them—were defended by law enforcement authorities.
Anna Arnold had her first serious encounter with discrimination as a twenty-two-year-old. An ambitious student, she pursued one of the few professions open to educated black women—teaching. But St. Paul had a very small black population, and its school district had no interest in placing a “colored” teacher in one of its white schools. (With few exceptions, hardly any black teachers taught white students in the North until the mid-1950s.) Frustrated by her experience and eager to see the larger world, she took a teaching job at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a small, all-black “citadel of moralistic Methodism.” The students at Rust were, for the most part, poorly educated; the school had a small budget; and Holly Springs could not have been more different from Anoka or St. Paul. Arnold found the indignities of southern-style Jim Crow difficult to negotiate, though she learned a great deal about the history of race relations from her mentor, Rust College dean J. Leonard Farmer, whose son James would later move north and spearhead the Congress of Racial Equality. Embittered by the “overwhelming difficulties” of life in the segregated South, she headed back north after two years, feeling a “deep hate” toward southern whites.
In 1924, Anna Arnold was hired by the YWCA, starting out in Springfield, Ohio. The town was hardly a refuge from the indignities that she had experienced in the South, but the Y provided a springboard for her ambition. A bastion of liberal Protestantism amid the fundamentalist revival of the 1920s, the Y attracted young, idealistic, churchgoing women who used their talents to reform and uplift poor and working-class women through continuing education, moral training, cultural events, and physical ...
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; 1st edition (November 4, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679643036
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679643036
- Item Weight : 2.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.42 x 1.76 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #577 in Civil Rights Law (Books)
- #2,514 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
- #6,840 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Thomas J. Sugrue is a prizewinning twentieth-century American historian who teaches at New York University. His newest book is These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (with Glenda Gilmore). He's working on a history of real estate in modern America. Sugrue grew up in Detroit.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 2, 2017
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 13, 2021
Rec'd in better than expected condition - arrived quickly and well-packaged. Thanks!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2010
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.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2014
A very interesting book, very clear. Perfect to learn more about this subject as it is rightly entitled "the forgotten struggle for Civil Rights in the North", the case of the North being too often overlooked. I highly recommend this book.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2016
Sweet Land of Liberty worked out very well with my sons Truthquest history curriculum! My son enjoyed this book :)
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 31, 2017
Excellent book!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 25, 2015
Good read but the text is a bit redundant. Makes free a good refresher.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2009
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.
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.
