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Revisiting the Roots of 1960s Civil Rights Activism: Class and Gender in Up South
| When we think of important cities in the modern civil rights movement, Philadelphia rarely comes to mind. However, in his important new book, Up South, Matthew Countryman deftly establishes the city's centrality to the postwar history of the civil rights movement and changes our understanding of the twentieth-century African American freedom struggle. Countryman's rich social, political, and intellectual history explores the evolution of two traditions of African American protest: African Americans' efforts to claim their "Americanness" and achieve equality under the law as well as their attempts to celebrate their distinct heritage and control independent institutions. Like many of the best recent works on the civil rights movement, Countryman resists the tendency to portray the movement as either assimilationist or nationalist. Rather, he illustrates how postwar activists frequently incorporated parts of both traditions into their work and how the balance between the two shifted as the movement evolved from a liberal one advocating integration, equal opportunity, interracial alliances, and government activism, to a more nationalist one focused on fostering racial pride, African American solidarity, and community control of institutions. |
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Countryman begins his study in the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which liberal civil rights activists achieved many important victories. In 1948 Philadelphia was one of the first cities in the country to establish a fair employment practices law, and in 1951 a coalition of civil rights activists and liberal reformers succeeded in incorporating clauses explicitly banning racial discrimination in municipal employment, services, and contracts into the new city charter. By the mid-1950s, most of the city's segregated public accommodations had disappeared and a significant sector of the African American population had gained access to decent jobs and housing. However, for the majority of Philadelphia's African Americans, who still lived in slum housing and still faced limited employment and educational opportunities, the civil rights activism of the 1940s and 1950s inspired a great deal of frustration because it failed to substantially improve their lives. |
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In the 1960s, the Black Power movement substantially changed the landscape of civil rights activism in Philadelphia by focusing attention on the city's most vulnerable citizens. Countryman emphasizes that Black Power in the North was not just empty slogans, a publicity ploy, or a mimicking of southern activism. Rather, the movement represented activists' conscious decision to move beyond the strategies and ideologies of the liberal activists who had been unable to improve the lives of the majority of working-class African Americans. Black Power activists sought to involve working-class people in the civil rights struggle and launched campaigns to improve their educational and job opportunities and gain greater autonomy and community control over institutions. Countryman highlights an important difference between civil rights activism in the North and the South by emphasizing that the trajectory of the Philadelphia movement turns our understanding of the southern "organizing tradition" on its head: while the southern civil rights narrative frequently describes an initial emphasis on the empowerment of ordinary people and voting giving way to calls for "Black Power," in Philadelphia it was Black Power leaders who introduced a strong commitment to indigenous community mobilization into the civil rights struggle and developed sophisticated electoral strategies.1 |
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Although other scholars have made similar arguments about Black Power ideology and activism, Countryman is uniquely adept at illuminating how movement leaders' ideas about social change and racial justice changed over time in response to their everyday experiences and organized political campaigns.2 His melding of social, political, and intellectual history is useful for studying all social movements, but is particularly important for a study of Black Power because the movement is so frequently portrayed as driven purely by emotions instead of a carefully considered political ideology. By closely analyzing how and why leaders' ideas about racial justice changed over time, Countryman has provided Black Power with a rich and sophisticated intellectual history, deeply contextualized in material reality. |
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