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Wesley Hogan: Review of Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle of Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008)

[Wesley Hogan is Professor of History and Philosophy and Co-Director, Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginia State University.]

Energizing this 500-page book is Thomas Sugrue’s driving curiosity to understand the racial geography of the 30-plus American states loosely referred to as “the North.” He wants to share widely the stories of unheralded heroes and heroines of the northern freedom struggle. He wants to know how and why power-brokers in U.S. cities and suburbs created and then supported unequal access to education, housing, jobs, and “the good life.”

Along the way, we learn quite a bit about white power, northern-style: how leaders used tax policy, government subsidies to real-estate developers and banks, federal grants, zoning boards, and even the 14th Amendment to make sure that between the years 1945 and 2006, “whites -–whatever they personally thought of blacks-- returned home to white neighborhoods, continued to send their children to segregated schools, and fought to maintain local control over taxation, education and land use in ways that were far more damaging to the cause of racial equality than any negative feelings they might harbor toward black people.”

Sweet Land of Liberty inverts the theme of invisibility long-explored by black writers like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Paule Marshall, and most famously Ralph Ellison. Rather than focus on the ways whites ignored blacks, making the latter feel largely invisible, Sugrue shows how whites consciously and relentlessly pursued racial demarcations in their workplaces, housing, and hearts. Initially, he states, “the lack of state-sponsored racial discrimination had the ironic effect of blinding northern whites to the Negro problem” in their midst. But forced to confront black demands for fair employment practices, northern white Republicans who had supported southern civil rights legislation suddenly experienced a “double consciousness” when major constituents like the National Association of Manufacturers and local chambers of commerce opposed Fair Employment laws.

While signs for “colored” and “whites” might not be publicly displayed, “northern cities were invisibly divided by race. There were colored hotels and white hotels, Negro bars and white bars, black restaurants and white restaurants.” Chicago’s NAACP branch head, Carl Fuqua, noted that “nobody pays any attention to the laws against discrimination if they don’t want to.” Whites consistently used “the market” as an excuse for northern Jim Crow. “Regardless of our personal feelings…we have to cater to the majority,” explained one Pittsburgh pool manager. Whites often claimed support for integrated housing, but moved out in droves when blacks arrived, fearing “loss of market value” if they stayed. Parents who mobilized against busing and integrated education claimed “white” and “black” schools weren’t Jim Crow’ed, but were instead “the result of the inexorable workings of the [real-estate] market.” Any attempt to desegregate housing, accommodations, or schools, these people claimed, violated whites’ “freedom of choice.”

But Sugrue snatches away the veil of “innocence” the vast majority of whites attempted to wear. “The term ‘choice’ obscured more than it revealed. For the vast majority of African Americans in the postwar city, the right to choose schools or neighborhoods was nonexistent. That whites, even those with modest incomes, could choose to send their children to well-provisioned schools in white suburbs or in white-dominated neighborhoods was the consequence of racial privilege. The language of choice masked white privilege: It rested on the false assumption that blacks and whites were equal players in a market that was deeply structured by race.” Today, anyone listening to Fox News’ commentators or right-wing radio will recognize that TV and radio hosts continue to portray civil rights’ gains as major threats to “choice” and the “free market.” Sugrue’s work puts such ostensibly race-neutral pronouncements in historical context, unmasking their racist, northern origins. Its greatest strength is its brilliant illumination of the conscious intent undergirding allegedly “invisible” and “unintentional” structural white supremacy.

Sugrue also largely succeeds in stitching together a fresh narrative for the culture as a whole in giving voice to the mostly forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North. This alone makes his book a valuable resource for people in the North today (like himself), who continue “as community activists trying to better the neighborhood’s schools, to challenge slumlords, and to spark community development.” Stark statistics in the first decade of the twenty-first century highlight how far the nation still must travel: The black middle class is larger than ever, but median household income is still only 62% of whites and 25% of blacks live below the poverty line. While this is true for only 10% of whites. 80% of Black children attend schools that are nearly or all black & Latino, while 90% of white children attend schools that are overwhelmingly white. Statistics for wealth accumulation tell the most damning story. White households’ median net worth was $74,900 at the time of the last census, while black households’ median net worth came in at $7,500. Such disparities will continue into future generations, since as a result of these wealth disparities, “many whites can expect financial support at crucial junctures in their lives (going to college, getting married, buying a home) and inheritance as the result of their parents’ accumulated wealth, few blacks can expect such good fortune.”

For people interested in why so many neighborhoods and schools still resist integration, Sugrue’s first chapter on housing (“No Right More Elemental”), and his final chapter on schools (“It’s Not the Bus, It’s Us”) are simply essential reading. By placing his work, and that of other pioneering scholars of the northern freedom struggle like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Ronald Takaki and Roger Daniels alongside the new crop of histories of local civil rights’ struggles in the South and West, we are able to see new connections among activists, patterns in government response that resonate to our own day, and an obvious set of similarities emerge among white reactionaries across regions. Sugrue’s work makes comparisons between regions richer and more nuanced. Facile assumptions about northern blacks or whites are now as untenable as those many historians held a generation ago about southerners.

Sugrue’s narrative ambitions are considerably broader because he wants to reorder our collective timeline, storyline, and map of the civil rights movement writ large. In this task, he is less persuasive. He argues up front that in order to understand why racial hostility and inequality persist today, “we must give as much attention to the unheralded struggles for civil rights in the factories, churches and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit, the schools of Harlem and New Rochelle and Gary and Chicago, and the movie theaters of Cincinnati as we have to the now-epic events of Greensboro, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma.”

It’s a high bar to raise for a single book, and Sugrue has his hands full synthesizing the Northern story. But to truly reorder our understanding of the larger civil rights/black power movements, such a book would need to compare and contrast northern activism to the southern-based struggle, examine more closely the impact and interaction between northern and southern movement cultures, activists and activist networks, and examine the emerging organizing traditions in these different regional settings.

This book does not. However, Sugrue successfully traces the timeline back to the 1920s and 30s up through the 1980s and 1990s, following recent scholarly trends in examining the “long civil rights movement.” By doing so, he challenges “the tired clichés of recent books that fixate on the 1960s as the fundamental turning point in the history of race in modern America.”

In power struggles, who tells the story always matters: The father or the son? The worker or the boss? The king or the people? Sugrue tackles this narrative challenge by selecting a wide range of northern black activists, and chapter by chapter, introducing one or two of these people as guides to the multitude of strategies northern civil rights and black power activists used in reaching for “liberty and justice for all.” Some are well known (A. Philip Randolph and the Reverend Albert Cleage), but most are unheralded organizers with unique visions: Roxanne Jones, Herman Ferguson, and Henry Lee Moon. Rather than pigeon-holing these activists as having fixed belief systems, Sugrue artfully shows their philosophies emerging over time. Many of his central protagonists layer new beliefs atop strongly-held convictions. He also situates their activism within the domestic politics, intellectual trends, economic settings, and international events of the day. It’s a complicated set of interconnected storylines, and one that at times appears fragmented, not unlike the movement itself.

While such a strategy has obvious advantages in conveying breadth and depth, when individuals stand in for political and intellectual tendencies, the reader has very little sense of how and why people work together. How do people come together to challenge the racial status quo? How do they form networks? It is extremely difficult – if not impossible- to understand social movements without this piece of the story. To put it boldly: In the face of the extraordinary power of organized money, only organized people can succeed. As was the case in the South, the central task for activists, and particularly for civil rights activists, is to recruit and organize. They need people coming together, and for a time staying together. Without it, there will be no movement. Nothing changes.

The strength of Sweet Land’s movement story is its range and in-depth focus on powerful individuals. Its challenge is seeing how these individuals organized, interacted, learned, grouped and re-grouped, and collectively succeeded (or failed) in pushing their agenda forward.

In other words, we still await the story of northern movement cultures. Nonetheless, the end result is an impressive accomplishment useful for scholars and the general public. This is no small feat. My eighth grade son saw the book and asked about its content. Raised in the South, and fresh from a year-long U.S. history course, he seemed a bit incredulous: “Civil rights in the North?” he said. “Was there really that much to talk about?” Sugrue’s work deserves the wide readership that will make such a question illogical, even absurd, among the next generation.