| Review | Journal of Social History, 41.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 41.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean (New York and Cambridge, MA.: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2006. 496 pp.).
For the past four decades, analysts have drawn a distinction between the civil rights movement's successes in ending formal discrimination against African Americans and its failure to secure the economic rights of black Americans. In this telling, the Southern focus of the movement on the edifice of Jim Crow discrimination could not easily translate into an agenda for addressing the institutional racism experienced by African Americans in Northern cities where formal legal barriers were fewer, but unequal opportunity, training, and remuneration were the norm. Martin Luther King's failed Chicago campaign and the twisted history of the Philadelphia Plan to integrate the building trades are touchstones for the movement's shortcomings.	1
Clearly, the civil rights movements successes and failures had consequences. By the turn of the 21st century, the old system of racial stratification had been replaced by the new African American inequality. Instead of formal exclusion, black inequality was the product of a set of screens that sorted black Americans into less attractive schools, neighborhoods, and jobs. Although the new inequality did produce a black middle class, it did less to change the economic fortunes of the majority of black Americans.	2
In Freedom Is Not Enough, Nancy MacLean retells the story of the civil rights movement by focusing on the lynchpin between formal rights and economic opportunity—the struggles to end employment discrimination. Rather than focusing on the disjuncture, MacLean is interested in connections. On the one hand, she wants to show how central the battle over economic rights was to the goals of the civil rights movement. On the other hand, she want to show how the black struggle forced other social groups in American society—especially women and Latin Americans—to rethink their place in society. To extremely good effect, she uses as her epigraph a quotation from James Baldwin: "If you move out of your place everything is changed. If I'm not what that white man thinks I am, then he has to find out what he is."	. . .

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