A Matter of Perspective: Local Approaches to Studying Civil Rights Activism and Liberal Policymaking in the Urban North

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, 600 supporters of African American voting rights marched, two abreast, across the steeply arched Edmund Pettus Bridge. Awaiting them at the bridge's eastern end were scores of mounted Alabama state troopers and Dallas County police. When the marchers refused an order to disperse, the officers attacked, firing dozens of canisters of tear gas and smoke into the crowd and beating the demonstrators as they fled. That evening, film footage of the brutal attack was broadcast nationwide, transforming Selma into a symbol of violent white opposition to the civil rights movement. ¹

Two and a half years later, the violence of "Bloody Sunday" repeated itself, but this time it occurred beyond Dixie's borders. On Tuesday, August 29, 1967, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 200 advocates of open housing marched across the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, which separated the city's black community from several white ethnic communities. Not long after the demonstrators crossed the span, a riotous mob of more than 1,000 whites attacked. The brutality of the assault reminded observers of "Bloody Sunday" and earned Milwaukee the designation "The Selma of the North."

Milwaukee's version of "Bloody Sunday" serves as the opening for Patrick Jones' book The Selma of the North, which examines Civil Rights and Black Power activism in Milwaukee in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the confrontations in Selma and Milwaukee were strikingly similar, they were also starkly different. Among other things, in Milwaukee, public officials ordered the police to protect the demonstrators; whereas in Selma, Governor George Wallace instructed his men to lead the charge against them. The Milwaukee demonstrators, having embraced self-defense, also defended themselves against the white mob (and against the police when the police turned against them); in Selma, the demonstrators remained true to nonviolence.

The differences between the two events are attributable in large part to the regional character of the Selma and Milwaukee civil rights insurgencies. As Jones points out in his introduction, the black freedom struggle in Milwaukee was shaped by the city's industrial base; strong labor movement; the presence of white ethnic groups; the dominance of the Catholic Church; the inexorable link between race, ethnicity, and urban geography; African American access to the ballot box; and the fluidity of racial discrimination (p. 5). In short, the bridge clashes in Selma and Milwaukee were different because the movements that gave rise to them were not wholly alike, owing to the dissimilar local contexts out of which they emerged.

In recent years, a growing number of historians have sought to make sense of the black freedom struggle outside of the South in places just like Milwaukee. ² By broadening the movement's geography, these scholars have reconfigured the movement's normative narrative. Collectively, they have extended the movement's chronology, expanded its aims and objectives, widened its leadership ranks, complicated its strategies and tactics, and demystified its radical traditions. The very best of these works—a list that now includes Jones' The Selma of the North—approach the movement from a local perspective. ³

Although civil rights historians have used the local approach to great effect, other scholars of the modern American experience have been slow to adopt this perspective. Those who study American liberalism, particularly the New Deal and its legacy, for example, more commonly employ a national framework, using the federal government as the primary prism through which to examine political developments at the state and city levels. ⁴ Guian McKee, however, goes against this tendency. In The Problem of Jobs, he uses a local approach to explore liberal politics and public policy in Philadelphia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as the city confronted...