Up South and Down South: Insurgents and Counter-insurgents in the Political Struggle to Define America

On June 23^rd 1963, in Detroit, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed one of the largest rallies in the country supporting the civil rights movement prior to the March on Washington. King charged his audience at the Great March to continue in their support of the civil rights struggle in the South by challenging racial inequities in Detroit. He stated:

What can we do here in Detroit to help in the struggle in the South? Well, there are several things that you can do. One of them you've done already, and I hope you will do it in even greater dimensions before we leave this meeting.… Now the second thing that you can do to help us down in Alabama and Mississippi and all over the South is to work with determination to get rid of any segregation and discrimination in Detroit.… No community in this country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Now in the North it's different in that it doesn't have the legal sanction that it has in the South. But it has its subtle and hidden forms and it exists in three areas: in the area of employment discrimination, in the area of housing discrimination, and in the area of de facto segregation in the public schools. And we must come to see that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South.… And so if you want to help us in Alabama and Mississippi and over the South, do all that you can to get rid of the problem here.¹

King knew from firsthand experience that the North was not a racial panacea.² In 1950, King had experienced overt racial discrimination while attending Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and had filed a complaint against a New Jersey diner for denying him and a group of interracial friends dinner. While Northern racial discrimination was a harsh reality, it was not as visually dramatic as in the South. Although civil rights leaders focused their attention on actions in the South after the Brown decision, they were never under any illusion that what had been occurring in the South was a separate movement from what was going on elsewhere in the United States. For civil rights leaders the political movement to fully enfranchise black Americans was never simply a southern movement—down South was also up North too. "Up North" had its "Down South" sides too, or, as black Philadelphians coined the matter, the North was "Up South."³

From 1954 until 1965, in every northern and western city, civil rights protest and organizing efforts took place in the shadow of what was occurring throughout the South. The southern movement, with its emphasis on moral suasion and non-violent protest, garnered the lion's share of journalistic coverage until the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles ignited.⁴ From fundraising events to large protest rallies, along with other strategies—consumer boycotts, sit-ins and freedom rides—the southern movement followed the northern precedent of civil disobedience. If there was anything original in the southern movement, it was the ability of organizations like King's SCLC and SNCC to mobilize black southerners into concerted action, which in turn motivated black people "Up South" to ramp up their local struggles.⁵ Yet until recently the historical writing about civil rights protest outside the South had been on the back burner of American history. However, in the last decade there has been a rich bevy of local and regional histories about the black-led civil rights protest in the north and the west.⁶

Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty is a wide sweeping political history of the black-led civil rights movement from north of the imaginary Mason-Dixon line. In...