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Rethinking the Boundaries of the Modern Freedom Struggle
| By the late 1990s, growing numbers of scholars lamented the dearth of scholarship on the northern and western arms of the modern civil rights movement.1 Scholars of civil rights and mid-twentieth-century political movements have privileged the southern story. They have written eloquently about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Little Rock school desegregation cases, and the dramatic and usually violent confrontations between civil rights activists and segregationists in Greensboro, North Carolina; Philadelphia, Mississippi; and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Emphasis on the southern movement implies that the modern civil rights struggle had its primary roots in the Jim Crow South and that blacks in the urban North and West followed the lead of their southern brothers and sisters in making demands for their own rights. In recent years, however, an emerging body of scholarship on the North and West has broadened our understanding of the modern civil rights movement in African American and U.S. culture and politics.2 Matthew Countryman powerfully reinforces this trend toward a fuller and more appropriate understanding of the modern freedom struggle. |
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Countryman provides a model urban case study of the northern African American freedom struggle in the years after World War II. In addition to addressing the prevailing southern bias in scholarship on the subject, Countryman also confronts certain unevenness in the gradually expanding body of scholarship on the urban North and West. Existing studies focus on the better-known racial conflicts in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York—particularly the emergence of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, during the late 1960s, the Watts Riot of 1965, the violent white reaction to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as the southern movement hit the streets of Chicago in 1967, and the growing political influence of the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Malcolm X in Harlem. |
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Up South ably responds to twin biases in prevailing civil rights and political historiography and makes an excellent case for Philadelphia as a significant site for research on the northern black freedom struggle. Philadelphia blacks participated in the wartime March on Washington Movement to end racial discrimination in defense industries and escalated their struggle for fair employment in the years after World War II. African American activists and their white allies secured one of the nation's earliest municipal fair employment practices committees in 1948; established the principles of antidiscrimination in the city's newly revised charter in 1951; and set up the city's Commission on Human Relations to combat racial discrimination in municipal services, contracts, and employment. According to Countryman, these racial reforms were the product of a black-white liberal alliance within the Democratic Party. As such, this study clarifies the link between the intensification of civil rights activism during the 1940s and 1950s and the emergence and spread of a new faith in liberalism unleashed by the politics of the New Deal state. |
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Growing numbers of postwar blacks and whites articulated a faith in the use of state power to protect individual rights and encourage upward mobility. They believed that "steady progress" toward "the goal of racial equality" (p. 1) in Philadelphia was not only possible but close at hand in the city's new charter. This vision of liberalism entailed support for New Deal social insurance programs like social security, the G.I. Bill, and small business loans. In scholarship and intellectual life, liberals also redefined the race problem in American society (particularly the lowly place of blacks in the political economy) as one of biased white racial attitudes and social practices rather than the biological inferiority of black people. At the same time, blacks and their white supporters channeled their vision for a just and colorblind society into a national movement for new federal, state, and local antidiscrimination legislation and enforcement machinery to ensure necessary social changes. |
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