| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. By Nikhil Pal Singh. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 285 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01300-X.)
At a time when images of suffering black and poor people in America's Gulf States revealingly compare to those typically associated with citizens of the world's poorest nations, Nikhil Pal Singh's Black Is a Country is a timely and essential read. This book is an erudite addition to a revisionist trend in the historiography of the modern black freedom struggle, presenting a narrative that greatly broadens the ideological, spatial, and temporal scope of the movement.	1
Singh counters what he describes as "mythic" historical conceptions of the civil rights movement that bracket its duration by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the rise of black power in the mid-1960s. In its place, he persuasively argues for a "long" historical understanding of the civil rights movement in which anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and the politics of wealth redistribution are located at the center of black activism from the New Deal era to the 1970s. The book situates the origins of the long civil rights movement in the 1930s, with the "Keynesian transformation of the liberal capitalist state and the emergence of Black social movements" (p. 6). It regards the black power phase as a return to previous radical and internationalist tendencies, suppressed by the Cold War/civil rights alliance and subsequent disaggregation of "questions of Black equality from the critique of empire" (p. 147).	. . .

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