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Review: 'Sweet Land of Liberty' by Thomas J. Sugrue

BY DAVID L. CHAPPELL | Special to Newsday

January 4, 2009

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, by Thomas J. Sugrue. Random House, 720 pp., $35.

The election of Barack Obama - whose biography unifies Third World immigrant and hardscrabble prairie pioneer, black and white - calls into question the rigid dichotomies that have defined the American conflict over inequality. Thomas Sugrue's evocative and richly documented new book, "Sweet Land of Liberty," is well timed because it addresses the most blinding and fundamental of these dichotomies, that between the southern land of slavery and Jim Crow and the ill-defined rest of the country (the part Obama comes from).

Until the mid-l960s, when Martin Luther King Jr. brought "the" movement to Chicago, and riots incomprehensibly broke out all over, the North was at best a sideshow to the dangerous and often thrilling moral drama in the South.

The North had a racial history of its own, however, as Sugrue painstakingly demonstrates. It is above all a history of complexity, where incremental struggles in places like New Rochelle, N.Y., and Plainfield, N.J., get as much ink as epic Supreme Court cases and ghetto riots. One of his central - and most fascinating - characters grew up in the only black family in a small town in rural Minnesota.

Sugrue has been at the forefront of academic research on race since his prizewinning first book, "Origins of the Urban Crisis," in l996. But he writes in a readable, accessible style. Unlike other popular histories, Sugrue emphasizes previously unsung activists in the streets and the courthouses, rather than presidents and their courtiers.

Sugrue goes a long way toward correcting a habit whereby northerners see racial problems originating in the backward South, and thus in a distant past beyond their control. By moving the story of race northward, he shows how the most crippling forms of discrimination originate not in preindustrial slavery and Jim Crow laws, but in very modern, recent policies. Those policies are inseparable from the comforts and freedoms that most readers take for granted - generously subsidized private housing and public schools, for example.

A series of arresting characters vivifies Sugrue's often grim material. One of the most startling is Morris Milgram, a Jewish garment worker's son who, with his own skills and savings, built integrated housing developments in six states. Given the huge black and scant white demand for his houses, Milgram found he had to discriminate against black buyers to keep his neighborhoods integrated. Otherwise, the occupants would soon be all black.

The great strength of this book is to show the political diversity among black Americans and their often conflicting tactics and goals. Historians have long established that the average protester might join several groups whose strategies contradicted each other over the course of a life - sometimes at the same time. Leaders might demand ideological purity. But their followers, especially the vast majority who contributed money, participated in boycotts, or observed picket lines without formally joining organizations, were often less dogmatic, more experimental.

The book's main weakness is that Sugrue lets his readers see far more of this trial-and-error pragmatism in people who fancied themselves revolutionaries and militants than in the less dramatic but more effective black leaders - whom Sugrue sometimes invidiously labels moderate or mainstream. This weakness is especially pronounced in sections on the l930s and l960s.

Sugrue is right to add his voice to the chorus of scholars who laud the bravery of many Communists who stuck their necks out for civil rights in the l930s. But he doesn't let his readers see the full extent of anticommunism within the civil rights movement - starting with the disillusionment that overtook many who joined the Party or worked closely with it. Anticommunists divided and diverted the movement, as Sugrue insists with some heat. But they were greatly assisted by the ruthlessness and rigidity of the Communists.

Sugrue is scrupulously honest in acknowledging that the vocal militants who take center stage in the l960s represented only a small fraction of the black population. But he insists, with suspicious frequency, "they would have an impact far beyond their numbers. They would become the public face of the black rebellion." Sugrue often measures radicals' historical significance by their stated intentions rather than by actual accomplishments. That does not improve much upon the measure taken at the time by the sensationalist media or the paranoid FBI. To trumpet insurrectionary aims - or pretensions - was a good way to get into the headlines or into jail. Successful revolutionaries found it behooved them to speak more moderately than they acted. Sugrue acknowledges that radical rhetoric sometimes had a "romantic" and "therapeutic" quality. But generally he sees a vanguard where seasoned veterans of the struggle often saw a distraction or a nuisance.

Sugrue's lavish attention to extreme rhetoricians only occasionally distorts his story. More often, it spices it up - and his notes will lead skeptical readers to a more balanced view. For a readership that is emerging from perhaps the most conservative period in American history, Sugrue's heavy doses of radical rhetoric may be refreshing. The book covers more fresh ground than any history of race has in many years. Despite its occasional cheerleading tone, it opens up a lot of complexities and hard questions in an engaging, absorbing manner.