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Thomas J. Sugrue . Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008. xxviii + 688 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Clearly written and unfailingly intelligent, Sweet Land of Liberty is a major contribution to our understanding of the racial history of the past eighty years. It is a sprawling, capacious book, at once a synthesis and an encyclopedia. Resting on Thomas J. Sugrue's wide-ranging reading in the historical, journalistic, and social scientific literature, SLL chronicles and analyzes scores of protests, judicial proceedings, grass-roots campaigns, policy debates, and political initiatives. Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, and Lyndon Johnson are here. For those of a certain age, other figures evoke a flicker of recall: Jesse Gray; Rev. Albert Cleage; Paul Zuber; Bobby Seale; George Wiley. Many of the principals in SLL, however, are less widely known. Thus, for example, Sugrue begins the book by introducing Anna Arnold Hedgeman, whose long career as an activist brought her from race uplift in the 1920s to militant protest in the 1930s and 1940s. He devotes much of the last chapter to the life and achievements of Roxanne Jones, a Philadelphia welfare recipient–cum–state legislator who fought through the grim 1970s and into the 1980s to resist attacks on public assistance and to mobilize poor and working-class blacks against the Reagan-era abandonment of the inner cities. Open housing advocate Clarence Funnyé; New York City activist-radical Herman Ferguson; Detroit school desegregation advocate Verda Bradley; Philadelphia attorney Cecil B. Moore; reparations advocate Audley "Queen Mother" Moore—the pages of SLL teem with accounts of the initiatives of these and other activists, some pursuing an ideological agenda, many others seeking immediate and practical solutions to glaring problems of discrimination, segregation, and poverty.

Sweet Land of Liberty is not a thesis-driven book. Even so, Sugrue has definite views about key aspects of the struggle of African Americans in the North for equal rights and opportunities during the period 1925–c. 1985. The activist generation of the 1930s and 1940s, he argues, rightly believed that structural economic factors lay at the root of racial discrimination, a perspective that [End Page 572] after World War II yielded to a strategy of changing the hearts and minds of white people. He holds that historians, journalists, social scientists, and other commentators have neglected the importance of local grass-roots activism in shaping the programs and agendas of such "peak" organizations as the National Urban League and the NAACP. He rejects the oft-invoked dichotomy between confrontational militancy, on the one hand, and accommodationist self-help on the other hand, insisting rather that civil rights organizations and even individual activists have constantly moved back and forth across a spectrum of tactical options in the quest for full citizenship. In analyzing the reasons for the continuing crisis in northern central cities, Sugrue, while acknowledging the importance of unemployment and sub-par schools, stresses housing discrimination as the crucial factor in creating and perpetuating black metropolitan disadvantage.

Of necessity, Surgue treats familiar episodes in the black freedom struggle in the North. Thus, SLL contains brief, thoughtful accounts of the March on Washington, the urban uprisings of the 1960s, critical Supreme Court rulings such as Bradley v. Milliken (1974), Martin Luther King Jr.'s efforts to bring the "beloved community" of the Southern-based civil rights movement to Chicago, the Boston school boycott, and the War on Poverty. There are insightful accounts of various strains of black radicalism, the diverse meanings attached to the slogan "black power," the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the rise of black urban politics in the 1970s. Sugrue is particularly astute in treating the tension that existed, sometimes within individual activists, between advocacy of integration and the embrace of separatist responses to black disempowerment and poverty.

Probably the least familiar part of the story Sugrue tells occurs in chapters five through seven in which he surveys efforts to end segregation in Northern schools, neighborhoods, and recreational sites. This is in part a story of success. By...

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