| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. By Martha Biondi. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 360 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-01060-4.)

During World War II, "social changes fostered a new rights consciousness among African-Americans" (p. 16), writes Martha Biondi in a study of organizing and protest in New York City. This book challenges the current synthesis of the civil rights movement by emphasizing Communist and radical influences, and it locates a left agenda that prioritized the search for self-determination, not only racial integration, in what historians are beginning to see as a national, not only southern, struggle for freedom that originated in major cities, especially in the Northeast. Interesting research questions in this burgeoning area range from analyzing the origins, composition, timing, and tactics of various groups to untangling their ideological exchanges and dynamic personalities. Biondi casts a wide revisionist net to recover a black freedom struggle in which mainstream leaders such as Walter White or Rev. Adam Clayton Powell impacted equally with the Old Left, the Communist party, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and fringe groups such as the American Labor party or the Harlem Affairs Committee.

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