On Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty

...But these indignities were not sanctioned by the states...

...If the efforts of noble activists, employing rich analysis and flawless judgment, produced such results, then there is much that is missing in this book...

...Sugrue ignores these mundane politics that relate black people to power, government, and industry, preferring activists, no matter how small their constituencies may be...

...Vernon, and from Newark to East Orange and Irvington...

...They were no more powerful in 1945 than they had been at the nadir of the Depression...

...Blacks could not eat in some restaurants or buy houses in some neighborhoods...

...And, remarkably, we never meet an activist who had bad politics...

...But the explanation vanishes beneath the symbol...

...Jones's history demonstrates that successful protest movements certify their power in politics...

...Sugrue implies that the push for retail and clerical jobs by the National Urban League was a reversion to moral suasion and education...

...Sugrue does better with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which channeled resources to black communities...

...What does this mean...

...In the North, blacks were always an ancillary labor force...

...But it is difficult to get at these trends through movement activists...

...This is thin gruel...

...So for the rest of the 1960s and early 1970s cities, black and white urban residents staged mini-wars over schools and jobs...

...King believed that northern blacks would take satisfaction and pride from southern victories...

...Quoting northern blacks who called Cleveland "Alabama North" or Philadelphia "Up South," does not expunge distinctions...

...Self tells the story of the UAW's creation of Sunnyhills, an interracial cooperative near a Ford plant in the 1950s...

...Sugrue narrates many campaigns to integrate suburban housing in the 1950s...

...If not the "forgotten struggle" that he advertises, it is the fullest onevolume history we have of northern civil rights activity...

...But Sugrue argues that Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma (1944) tamed this radical movement...

...The middle and late 1960s have been the most contentious parts of civil rights history— then and now...

...We are informed that Black Power was a doctrine that "thought globally and acted locally...

...In 1964, Johnson, despite appeals from the labor wing of the Democratic Party, had preferred the tax cut, an easier sell...

...The price of the NAACP's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s support for the march was adding the southern issues to the jobs protest...

...And, politicians representing black areas and black power leaders preferred to maintain and expand their bases...

...By the mid-1970s, the major expression of civil rights politics was the elected black official and black union activists...

...Their timing was unfortunate...

...The story cannot be told from the perspective of black activists...

...Sugrue is correct that northern protest did not begin with the Watts uprising of the summer of 1965...

...In 1966, Randolph and his aide Bayard Rustin urged a Freedom Budget for All Americans, to produce public works jobs that would both employ people and cement working-class solidarity...

...All of this is well known, but Sugrue's conclusions are opaque: The various lefts did not accomplish their goals of creating God's kingdom on earth or ushering in the Revolution...

...Affluent suburbs opened to middle-class and wealthy blacks in the 1970s...

...African Americans voted and joined unions...

...He escaped to Guyana, but Sugrue assures us that he remained "firmly committed to the goals of black revolution," whatever that might mean...

...It posited a psychological understanding of racism and privileged masculinity...

...In Sugrue's narrative, the structure of the housing market is hidden...

...A huge public works program lacked the macroeconomic argument that the economy needed a boost...

...During the war, blacks had solidified their place in the factories of Gary, Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities...

...Sugrue teils many fascinating stories of challenges to racial barriers in housing, public accommodations, employment, and schools...

...National reform in the South—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights of 1965—opened up political space for the social and economic issues that made up northern activism...

...At the turn of the twentieth century, the southern white planter class had convinced other southern whites that black subordination and suppression were in the interest of all whites...

...Sugrue does not make up for the failure...

...African Americans generally worked the most difficult or poorly paid jobs...

...And, if Cleveland was Alabama, one wonders why Alabama blacks traveled to Cleveland from World War I until 1970...

...Sugrue attributes them simply to sentiment "against gradualism and tokenism...

...The passage of Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) laws in the North was always the result of organizing coalitions of labor, civil rights activists, and liberal Democrats opposing mostly Republican and business antagonists...

...Instead of an analysis of the gains and losses of the turn to Black Power, we are treated to disquisitions on revolutionary politics by people like Max Stanford, the head of the Revolutionary Action Movement, who even Sugrue acknowledges could not organize anyone, much less a revolution...

...The poor and working class settled in inner-ring suburbs: African Americans moved from Chicago's South Side to Maywood and Chicago Heights, from the Bronx to Mt...

...Thomas Sugrue, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has read a rich, secondary literature and added much research of his own...

...He rarely evaluates strategies that transformed institutions and social relations and those that did not...

...Without a discussion of this economy, the growth of black union caucuses of all sorts at the end of the decade is incomprehensible...

...Ferguson was convicted for planning the death of civil rights leaders...

...There were turf battles over public amusements and parks...

...The changing political economy of the nation during the 1970s and 1980s, which was not simply a racial matter, is central to the story...

...Such expressive proofs make it unnecessary to ask how race and racism functioned in the North...

...African Americans no longer politely petitioned the philanthropists...

...Sugrue rightly places A. Philip Randolph at the center of the black struggle in the 1940s...

...Sugrue fails to discuss the politics of housing...

...Deeper analysis is surely needed if we are to accept the book's conclusions that segregation remains the norm in the North and unemployment, underemployment, and poverty reaches third world levels in northern cities...

...Many of the black women who had worked in industry during the war did not return to domestic service, as Sugrue claims, but filled these new commercial jobs...

...Blacks debated whether to break up the ghetto or improve it...

...Sugrue tries to keep his eye on the North during the early 1960s, but events make it difficult...

...But they did succeed beyond their great hopes in raising popular consciousness about race and unleashing a mass movement...

...He and the nation changed their minds only after the Watts riot in 1965, when northern conditions took center stage...

...Whether it was revitalized Popular Front politics, the expansion of the organized black working class in the CIO, increased black power within the Democratic Party, or the growing NAACP, blacks gained mightily through this period and transformed many institutions that had been lily white in 1933...

...The situation of black males was less happy, and its source had nothing to do with racism...

...Nevertheless, the reduction of manufacturing jobs in the cities and continuing migration of blacks from the mechanizing southern farms meant more targeted efforts were needed...

...But Sugrue goes further, stating that the "North was never a place of primeval racial innocence," as if anyone seriously made that claim...

...Northern protest could not compete with the freedom rides, sit-ins, and sheriffs of the South...

...Assuming that the problem was lack of training, not jobs, Johnson's Job Corps stressed preparation, not jobs...

...For Self, the role of the real estate industry in maintaining housing segregation in the suburbs was central...

...True enough...

...Even if white communities had been more open than they were, you were not going to move hundreds of thousands of people from the South Side of Chicago...

...After Watts, they were on the national agenda...

...The relationship between the ending of welfare and the civil rights movement, however defined, is neither linear nor causal...

...But her story is no substitute for an analysis of the rise of black mayors and politics during the 1970s...

...At the time, many blacks were critical of this analysis, which diminished the role of black activism in producing change...

...Blacks were, too...

...He then divides postwar civil rights activists between those who battled "for the soul of America" and others, who were for "revolution...

...How a book could be so potent is a good question...

...Although these stories are often very interesting, he makes a strange choice to concentrate in suburbia, where successes were rare, when most black efforts were in the cities...

...He rarely explicates the activists' ideas, and when he does, they seem too simple and contemporary...

...Where Randolph fits in this scheme is unclear...

...Sugrue's story really gets under way during the Great Depression when the labor Left allied with blacks...

...Still, he fails to discuss the most important Johnson effort on employment, the tax cut of 1964...

...Although racism existed in the North, race was never the organizing principle of northern society the way it was in the South...

...The union put together a coalition of the local Democratic Party, Quakers, other unions, and black political leaders and successfully battled local real estate developers who opposed an interracial community...

...His definition of civil rights is broad, as is appropriate...

...He arranges the narrative chronologically, although this organization is cloaked by expressive chapter titles that suggest mood more than subject or time—"God Have Pity on Such a City," "Unconditional War...

...Because his purpose is to record the long history of black activism and demonstrate that there is still much to be done today, Sugrue slights assessments, non-racial sources of change, and the structure of power that activists faced...

...Sugrue begins by telling us that we know only one civil rights story, the "morality play" that eliminated the two signatures of southern racism—Jim Crow and black disenfranchisement...

...Northern politics were never organized simply about race...

...A history of activism divorced from a history of political and economic power can tell us interesting stories but ultimately is unsatisfactory because it cannot explain what happened, which is what we need to know...

...But the progressive advance was blunted in the South...

...The Left was a great deal more powerful in 1945 than it was in 1933, however one measures power...

...Jobs were always the foremost goal in the North, but public accommodations, schooling, and housing were also important...

...There was no one group, like the planter class, that depended upon black oppression...

...So, the march became one for Jobs and Freedom...

...The Communist and Socialist parties and the Congress of Industrial Organizations injected mass organization into the cautious black uplift politics of the early twentieth century...

...One does not need to idealize the North to conclude that southern proscriptions were different and, yes, more comprehensive than those in the North...

...He begins in the wake of the Great Migration of World War I, when significant numbers of southern blacks migrated to northern cities and ends in the present...

...Even the National Urban League, which had lobbied employers for jobs before the Great Depression, tried to organize workers...

...Without an acknowledgment of sectional differences, northern black gains during the 1930s are incomprehensible...

...Robert Self, in his study of postwar Oakland, California, American Babylon_(2003), also addresses the subject, but situates it in the context of the real estate industry...

...Over time, the open housing movement succeeded, but took different forms reflecting the black class structure, a subject that could make Sugrue's stories clearer...

...It was also a cultural politics that celebrated the virtues of blackness and unity...

...Caricaturing does not help...

...Sugrue relates the story of Herman Ferguson, another middleclass activist spouting revolutionary talk...

...But there was a key change that he ignores...

...Myrdal asserted that there was a dilemma in the white American mind between its espousal of the principle of equality and its practice of inequality, which whites would eventually resolve in favor of equality...

...they were not uniformly enforced by police...

...Characterizing colonial America in Many Thousands Gone (1998), Ira Berlin wrote that the North was a society with slaves...

...By 1966, the economy had taken off, aided by additional spending on Vietnam...

...the South was a slave society...

...Sugrue does acknowledge the importance of politics with a symbolic portrait of Roxanne Jones, one of the founders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, who was elected to the Pennsylvania state senate in 1983...

...They demonstrated, demanded, and organized...

...Previously, northern issues were local...

...Many people treasured neighborhoods...

...She does remind us that the right to welfare ended in 1995...

...Then, automation in northern industry and the two recessions of the 1950s produced rising black unemployment, especially among young men...

...In the South, blacks were the major labor force for a good part of its history...

...Concluding this way, Sugrue implies that the civil rights movement was incomplete...

...Through most of his book Sugrue argues that racism was a structure of power, and here he reverts to racism as prejudice...

...The growing sectors in the 1950s were clerical and retail, so it made sense for the league to concentrate efforts there...

...But they were silent because this was the first major American book that blamed whites, not blacks, for the race problem...

...The book's flaw, according to Sugrue, was that Myrdal did not realize the depth of racial animosity in the North...

...But the blue-collar battle in industry was largely won...

...That was why the key civil rights strategy until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 was to accumulate black power in the North to assault southern racism...

...The head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and architect of the March on Washington movement of the early 1940s, Randolph embodied a new labor-infused civil rights movement that took many of its tactics and strategies from the CIO...

...He privileges the confrontation over the outcome, the revolutionary manifesto over mundane politics...

...Whatever black and white activists thought about Myrdal and the American mind, they showed a healthy respect for organizing...

...That was why Randolph planned the March on Washington in 1963 to bring attention to black unemployment in the North...

...The northern migration continued, impelled by mechanization in southern agriculture...

...The press simplified black power ideology and reduced it to sound bites...

...But the book lacks a structure that can sustain 543 pages of text...

...In this script, the northern movement, which did not confront the legalized proscriptions, does not exist...