Beyond Civil Rights

Martha Biondi. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. 360 pp. Notes and index. $39.95.

Ever since the 1960s, the term "civil rights" has come to mean many things. It is now synonymous with campaigns both against police brutality and for affirmative action. After the successes of the civil rights movement in eradicating formal segregation in the mid-1960s, civil rights leaders have pushed for enforcement of laws against discrimination as well as advancement into the political and economic mainstream. The term also invokes the legacy of mass protest of the 1960s, suggesting that, if necessary, activists will march, sit-in, and launch other public actions in order to attain their goals.

Yet in To Stand and Fight, Martha Biondi shows that in the postwar New York City variation of the civil rights struggle, the ideal that most galvanized progressives of all colors to action was "equality"—or, more precisely, the cause of "Negro equality." As the black actor Canada Lee stated in a 1945 commencement speech at Vassar College, "Our struggle must be for equality with meaning . . . toward economic equality—an equality with significance" (p. 21). Lee, of course, would later be blacklisted, and the movement itself soon would be irrevocably fissured by the Red Scare.

But a half-century later, the cause of racial equality is no less pressing. Neither is the struggle for civil rights—or equality before the law—over. Today, the efforts to preserve legal equality and to attain economic equality can be waged simultaneously. As Biondi shows, this two-front strategy was indeed present after World War II. In so doing, her work complicates the conventional timeline—put forth most prominently by William Julius Wilson—that identifies a key shift occurring in 1965, after which civil rights leaders moved from ending legal segregation toward the pursuit of economic equality. ¹ "With its large Black population, progressive race leadership, strong trade unions, and progressive print media," Biondi writes, New York City "became a major battleground in the postwar push for racial equality"(p. 37). There are numerous lessons to be learned from those battles, precisely because the terrain in New York City is increasingly similar today.

The conventional timeline of the civil rights movement begins with Rosa Parks initiating the Montgomery bus boycott in late 1955. Yet, according to Biondi, by this time in New York City "the civil rights struggle was already ten years old and had already endured a volatile rise and fall" (p. 2). The racial climate, of course, was not the same in New York as it was in Montgomery, or between the North and South in general. The North had neither legal segregation nor as entrenched a problem of racial violence (although both problems did exist), and the South had not seen the rise of an industrial black working class. As blacks fled the South to find wartime work, the black population of northern cities grew rapidly—New York's more than doubled during the 1940s, reaching over one million by 1950.

Why New York City saw the growth of more black activism than other northern cities during this time is an important question. Biondi's implicit answer—because New York City was home to the Communist Party and its affiliated unions—is sure to set off alarm bells among scholars who instinctively reject any such activism as Stalin's handiwork. But, as Biondi argues, the Communist-led left's "appeal to African Americans flowed not from its advocacy of a Soviet-style government, but from its rejection of gradualism and its willingness to engage in an uncompromising struggle for civil rights" (p. 6). Rather than rely on the farsightedness of the courts or the goodwill of liberal politicians, the Communist-led left advocated mass protest as the surest means of effecting social change.

Not every labor strike or mass rally necessarily proved successful, of course, but the threat was always there. Take the...