Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America by Harvard Sitkoff (review)

BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2010 93 In recent years, historians of the civil rights struggle in the United States have expanded the chronological barriers of the movement forward and back from the traditional “Montgomery to Memphis” (1956 to 1965) narrative that has so long dominated the public memory of the era. As the essays in Toward Freedom Land make clear, Harvard Sitkoff stands at the leading edge of this scholarship, focusing early in his career on the roots of the modern struggle in the Great Depression and World War II. In these essays, Sitkoff examines the social, economic, and political forces that facilitated the rise of civil rights protest, the impact of World War II, and the development of racial equality as a political issue in the immediate postwar years. But the author also provides an extensive biographical reflection on his career and contextualizing introductions for each essay, enabling the book to serve as a peek into the intellectual development of a historian—and of history—over time. Thus, Toward Freedom Land works on two levels, and the combination makes it enlightening and enjoyable for a variety of audiences. The content of the early chapters will be familiar to many historians, in large part because Sitkoff’s interpretations of race relations in the New Deal and World War II era have had so much influence, both well-cited by scholars and appearing in many college syllabi. His work on the New Deal, summarized here in two essays, demonstrates how despite the real weaknesses in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program and the negative impact of the Depression on African Americans, there were still real seeds laid for later civil rights advances. Most important, the era saw shifts not only in the way people thought about race, but about the role of government. The later movement would have been impossible without a conception of an active federal government as an agent for social change. The three essays about the impact of World War II on race relations document the Double V campaign and African Americans’ rising expectations and activism , which many scholars see as the roots of the modern movement. But these essays also show the development of a more subtle Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America Harvard Sitkoff Harvard Sitkoff. Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780813125831 (cloth), $50.00. BOOK REVIEWS 94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY argument: that the wartime context limited black militancy and that racial violence and the reaction to it shaped the postwar movement by nudging it toward an emphasis on the immorality of segregation—rather than the injustice of economic inequality—and to interracialism as the primary solution. In his commentary on these chapters, Sitkoff breaks from the historical narrative of a long continuous movement. He emphasizes instead that while the wartime experience planted seeds for the later movement, wartime activism differed substantially from what would come. Shifting attention to the political arena, Sitkoff tells the relatively unknown story of how Republican Wendell Willkie devoted his energies to pushing his party to a pro-Civil Rights position. He uses the more familiar story of the 1948 election to demonstrate how Harry Truman struggled in his own party—and to some extent within himself —to embrace civil rights. Both essays focus on the process by which civil rights became a national political issue by the eve of what popular memory views as the start of the movement in the 1950s. Toward Freedom Land is also about the intellectual development of one historian over the past thirty years. In the introduction, Sitkoff describes his family history and personal experiences to explain how he became a self-described argumentative iconoclast. He situates himself in a generation of scholars willing to take on the established consensus, and as part of the New Left that challenged the reputations of liberal leaders and institutions . Each chapter introduction describes what influenced Sitkoff at the time of the essay’s original publication, what he was trying to accomplish, and the reactions to the piece. The introductions enable Sitkoff to situate each essay in the history of...