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Matthew Countryman's Up South and Urban Political History
| Matthew Countryman's Up South arrives at just the right time. Historical interpretations of the civil rights movement are undergoing a profound shift. Urban history is enjoying a renaissance. And political history is again receiving its due. Countryman sits astride all of these developments and contributes in ways both remarkable and subtle to an emerging historiography of race and politics in the post–World War II United States. His study of the "Philadelphia movement," as he calls the city's civil rights and Black Power politics, traces an arc from the Popular Front of the immediate postwar years through the civil rights liberalism of the 1950s to the nationalist insurgency of the 1960s. He argues for a political continuum that no longer privileges the national movement and does not presume that a liberal civil rights coalition was natural and inevitable. Instead, Countryman shows that the Philadelphia movement was shaped by a decades-long battle over liberal strategies to achieve racial justice and the tension between rights-based reform and communal or group interests. The result is a marvelous book that extends Aldon Morris's observation that the civil rights movement was in fact a series of linked "indigenous" movements that emerged in specific local contexts and institutional environments.1 |
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Countryman organizes his argument around a periodization of the civil rights movement that historians increasingly associate with the North and West. This periodization begins with the New Deal–era idea that the state could both protect individual rights and subsidize group advancement. Inspired by that spirit, black Americans grasped the significance of the federal government's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) during World War II and made extending the FEPC into the postwar period a political priority. The wartime and postwar Popular Front alliance between civil rights advocates, trade unionists, progressives, leftists, and liberals pushed for laws guaranteeing equal opportunity in employment and housing and backed those demands with protest and political organizing—even as the left and liberal wings differed over strategy. Southern power in Congress forced that alliance toward state and local politics to advance what was an increasingly broad economic and social agenda in the late 1940s. However, by the early 1950s cold war anticommunism had marginalized the left, discredited protest, and valorized a centrist, gradualist, and legalistic civil rights liberalism. The successful passage of fair employment and housing ordinances and laws across the country nevertheless inspired black hopes. But the failure of such remedies to change patterns of black disadvantage in the 1950s and early 1960s, coupled with the dramatic reorganization of American cities around white suburbanization, radicalized the movement. That radicalization occurred initially within a liberal framework but relatively quickly gave way to various forms of nationalism and Black Power and ultimately to an ethnic politics strategy that by the 1970s was ascendant among African Americans in major cities.2 |
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As Martha Biondi, Gerald Horne, Komozi Woodard, and others have shown, the periodization sketched above varied from city to city and state to state. Philadelphia was not New York or Chicago. Oakland was not Detroit. Indeed, Oakland was not even Los Angeles. But the fact that no single periodization precisely describes every locale should not forestall efforts to identify patterns and parallels among them. The larger significance of this literature is its reworking of the triumphant narrative of progress toward civil rights between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In Up South, Countryman joins a scholarship that sees the urban North and West as places where African American organizing confronted not a de facto racial segregation that was de jure Jim Crow's weak cousin but a complex and embedded structure of laws, social practices, public policy, municipal political machines, and spatial history that produced ferocious racial and class inequality. Efforts to dismantle that structure were not contained solely within the Brown-to-Selma story. A more accurate periodization, suggested though not made explicit by Countryman, would place the FEPC in 1941 at one end and the Gary, Indiana, meeting of the National Black Convention Movement in 1972 at the other. In between, the modern urban black political agenda was forged.3 |
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