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Book Review
| Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. By Matthew J. Countryman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 417 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8122-3894-X.)
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| Matthew J. Countryman's award-winning study of civil rights and black power in Philadelphia joins a growing body of scholarship that reinterprets postwar black freedom struggles, northern civil rights activism, and the contours of black power in American society. Up South's first half chronicles the evolution of civil rights activism in Philadelphia, from the hopeful optimism surrounding the 1951 antidiscrimination clauses in the city charter to the selective patronage campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s, through the robust demonstrations led by the Philadelphia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) maverick, Cecil B. Moore. Countryman chronicles how, over time, postwar liberalism both expanded opportunities for racial protest and shaped the strategies and tactics of the mainstream rights leaders. Moore's leadership pushed beyond those confines by embracing black nationalist rhetoric as "a means to very traditional civil rights goals," which included racial justice in education, housing, and employment (p. 124). Rioting in North Philadelphia in the spring of 1964 spoke to the slow pace of racial progress and liberalism's ineffectiveness in dealing with not only the demands of rights leaders, but also the growing alienation of the black poor. |
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