Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era

Introduction: Civil Rights in New York City

Introduction: Civil Rights in New York City C L A R E N C E TAY L O R Since the 1960s, most U.S. history has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a southern history. Of course, this is incorrect. The fight for civil rights has always been a national struggle, although the historian Thomas Sugrue writes: ‘‘Most northern communities did not erect signs to mark separate black and white facilities. . . . Northern blacks lived as second-class citizens, unencumbered by the most blatant of southern-style Jim Crow laws but still trapped in an economic, political, and legal regime that seldom recognized them as equals.’’ Northern activists mounted campaigns to confront racial discrimination. ‘‘Throughout the twentieth century, black and white activists (and occasionally Latino and Asian allies, who were a minuscule segment of the region’s population until recently) rose to challenge racial inequality in the North.’’1 For many years now historians have been attempting to correct this view. My own contribution to this effort has focused on the struggle in New York City, through a history of the black churches in Brooklyn, a biography of one of the most prominent religious leaders in New York City, and a forthcoming history of the teachers’ union. I also coedited a survey history of the civil rights movement that emphasizes the national—both northern and southern— character of this ongoing struggle. One of the first chapters in that book discuses the fight for school integration in Boston in 1787.2 Of course, no one has been alone in this work. There is a new generation of scholarship rewriting our understanding of this history.3 Civil 1 2 Clarence Taylor Rights in New York City represents one of the first compilations surveying this effort. The chapters in this volume focus on this northern history from a New York perspective. Brian Purnell points out that the focus on the South in civil rights scholarship prevents us from grasping the significant role that the civil rights movement in Brooklyn as well as other places in New York City played in persuading the political elites and even ordinary New Yorkers that racial discrimination was a reality in the Big Apple. In their challenge to the southern paradigm, scholars not only have questioned the 1954 starting date of the civil rights movement but have argued that voting rights, public accommodation, and integration were not the only goals of civil rights campaigns. Jeanne F. Theoharis, for instance, has argued that the northern wing of the movement embraced black economic empowerment and a fairer distribution of governmental services and resources. Campaigns outside the South, she argues, did not limit their approach to nonviolent protest but adopted self-defense, and some campaigns were influenced by Black Nationalism. Theoharis and other scholars of northern civil rights struggles also challenge the portrayal of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s as a force that derailed the ‘‘triumphant’’ struggle for civil rights. Periodization is also an important question in this literature. Some contend that the objective that would later be identified with the black freedom struggle of the late 1960s was evident in the late 1940s and 1950s. Not only have northern civil right studies been more geographically inclusive; they have also moved beyond the white-black dichotomy so pervasive in studies on the South and have turned to the plight and agency of other people of color, especially Latinos and Asians. There are at least four important components noted by scholars studying northern civil rights. The first component was a secular left that included members of the American Communist Party. Communists, especially during the Popular Front years, pushed a far-reaching civil rights agenda. However, Communists were not the only leftists fighting for racial justice. Other members of the secular left included antiCommunist democratic socialists and social democrats. A good example is Bayard Rustin, who was the main organizer of the February 3, 1964, New York City School Boycott and who would later support the United Federation of Teachers in its battle against a black and Latino school board in Ocean Hill–Brownsville in 1968. Some historians have also noted the pivotal role of labor in civil rights campaigns outside the South. Introduction 3 A second component was liberalism. The Cold War was, in part, a war of propaganda between the capitalist and Communist nations. One of the...