Abstract
The historiography and much of the social science theorizing about the post-WWII black freedom struggle draw on the Southern experience. Indeed, the Southern civil rights movement has been rendered so normative as the paradigmatic postwar freedom struggle in the United States that historical surveys like the American Social History Project’s Who Built America? make little mention of the North and West, outside of a brief discussion of Black Power, and offer no framework in which to understand the Northern and Pacific Coast dimensions of African American politics and social movements. The collection of readings edited by Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, includes a section entitled “The North Has Problems Too,” an opaque reference to the North’s status as a secondary site of struggle. Attention to the South is richly deserved, but an over-reliance on the Southern story has shaped national understandings of black politics and given them a spurious twist: As triumphant civil rights supposedly “moved North” after 1965, the movement foundered on the shores of urban rebellions and black nationalism, and whites withdrew critical support in ever larger numbers. North and South have come to represent the binary histories that we tell about black liberation politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The South is “the movement.” The North is the foil.
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Notes
American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1992);
Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
See, among many others, Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981);
Alan J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984);
Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987);
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994);
John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995);
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
For examples of recent work, see William Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996);
Gerald Home, The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997);
Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fighf: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997);
Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998);
Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier. African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998);
Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Robert Self, American Babylon: Class, Race, and Power in Oakland and the East Bay, 1945–1978 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for African American Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Andrew Wiese, Places of Our Own: African American Suburbanization Since 1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003);
Adam Green, “Selling the Race: Cultural Production and Notions of Community in Black Chicago, 1940–1955” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998);
Rhonda Williams, “Living Just Enough in the City: Change and Activism in Baltimore’s Public Housing, 1940–1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998);
Matthew Countryman, “Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, 1945–1971” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1999). For another call to rethink post-1945 African American history,
see Kevin Gaines, “The Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality Since 1945,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, Roy Rosenzweig and Jean-Christophe Agnew, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002).
See George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Shirley Jennifer Lim, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: The Politics Of Asian-American Women’s Public Culture, 1930–1960” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1998);
Eduardo Obregon Pagan, “Sleepy Lagoon: The Politics Of Youth And Race In Wartime Los Angeles, 1940–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1996);
Scott Kurashige “Transforming Los Angeles: Black and Japanese American Struggles for Racial Equality in the 20th Century” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2000).
Oral history interview with Manuel Fernandes by Bill Jersey of Quest Productions and/or Marjorie Dobkin for the documentary film Crossroads: A Story of West Oakland, prepared for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, CALTRANS, District 4, Oakland, 1995, 20–37 (hereafter West Oakland Oral History), oral history Interview with Tom Nash, West Oakland Oral History, 178–185, oral history interview with Vivian Bowie, West Oakland Oral History; interviews with Royal Towns and Arthur Patterson, ASC Oral History. See also, Paul Cobb, interview with author, August 20,1997, Oakland, Calif.; Joe Johnson, interview with author, August 21, 1997, Oakland, California; Marilyn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 97–103. For a broader study of the importance of trade union solidarity among African American railroad workers, see Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color.
Fred Stripp, “The Treatment of Negro-American Workers by the AFL and CIO in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Social Forces 28 (March 1950): 330–332; Albert Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954, 156–157;
Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988);
Bruce Nelson, “Class, Race, and Democracy in the CIO: The ‘New’ Labor History Meets the ‘Wages of Whiteness,’” International Review of Social History 41 (1996): 351–374; Joe Johnson, interview with author; Paul Cobb, interview with author; interview with Royal Towns, ASC Oral History.
Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 83–111; Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage; West Oakland Oral History, 224–232, 261–263, 394–398, 431–440; Paul Groth and Marta Gutman, “Workers’ Houses in West Oakland,” in Sights and Sounds: Essays in Celebration of West Oakland, Suzanne Stewart and Mary Praetzellis, eds. (Rohnert Park, Calif.: Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University Academic Foundation, 1997), Paul Groth, “A Profile of Work in West Oakland in 1952,” in Stewart and Praetzellis, Sights and Sounds. For additional treatments of African Americans in the Bay Area during WWII, see Cy Record, “Willie Stokes at the Golden Gate,” Crisis (June 1949): 175–179; Charles Johnson, Negro War Workers in San Francisco, A Local Self-Survey (San Francisco: n.p., 944); Joseph James, “Profiles, San Francisco,” Journal of Educational Sociology (November 1945): 166–178.
The Chicago Defender quoted in Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000). On the “Double V” campaign,
see Richard Dalfiume, Fighting on Two Fronts: Desegregation of the Armed Forces, 1939–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), Beth Bailey and David Farber, “The ‘Double-V’ Campaign and World War II Hawaii: African Americans, Racial Ideology, and Federal Power,” Journal of Social History 26 (summer 1993). For an analysis of how these two tendencies within mid-century racial liberalism diverged into distinct approaches to black politics in the 1950s, see Thomas J. Sugrue, “Breaking Through: The Troubled Origins of Affirmative Action in the Workplace,” Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–52.
On the multiple political crosscurrents and debates within African American communities in the first half of the century, one that is critical of the class dimensions of uplift ideology in particular, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); for an account of mid-century black politics that stresses everyday forms of resistance and cultural politics,
see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).
See also Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991);
Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interest: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1981);
Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a perspective on African American internationalists in the United States in this period,
see Penny M. Von Eshen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997),
and Nikhil Singh, Black Is a Country: Politics and Theory in the Long Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage; Jacqueline Jones, Labor and Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985);
Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (New York: Kodansha International, 1994).
On California liberalism, see James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962);
Philip Taft, Labor Politics American Style: The California Federation of Labor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984);
Peter Iverson, “A Half-Century of Conflict: The Rise and Fall of Liberalism in California Politics, 1943–1993,” in Politics in the Postwar American West, Richard Lowitt, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995);
Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step From the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2000). Needless to say, we should not regress into nostalgia for California’s liberal age. Far too many contradictions lay at its heart. But neither should we dismiss its accomplishments nor overlook the potential that it represented in the 1950s. For works that explore the transfiguration of liberalism by the cold war,
see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Roger Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Rumford and Brown , quoted in “D.G. Gibson: A Black Who Led the People and Built the Democratic Party in the East Bay,” in Experiment and Change in Berkeley: Essays on City Politics, 1950–1975, Harriet Nathan and Stanley Scott, eds. (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 12, 24.
Charles Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991);
Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Biondi, To Stand and Fight.
Author interview with William Patterson, September 3, 1997, Oakland, California. See also Cary D. Wintz, ed., African American Political Thought, 1890–1930: Washington, DuBois, Garvey, and Randolph (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). For a discussion of racial projects in the late twentieth-century United States,
see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Harriet Nathan and Stanley Scott, eds., Experiment and Change in Berkeley: Essays on City Politics, 1950–1975 (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1978).
See the Introduction to this volume. See also Robert Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965–1977,” Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000): 759–792.
For the purposes of this essay, I am lumping rather than splitting the landscape of Black Power and black nationalism. The very real differences between various kinds of nationalism and debates over the relative inclusiveness of the term “black power” can be followed more profitably elsewhere. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994);
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” The Black Scholar 31/3–4 (fall/winter 2001), 2–19; Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation;
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Nikhil Singh, Black Is a Country; Biondi, To Stand and Fight.
This emphasis on community organizing has a deep history in social science and policy literature, a briefer one in historical literature. See Sheldon Danziger and Daniel H. Weinberg, eds., Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986);
Thomas F. Jackson, “The State, the Movement, and the Poor: The War on Poverty and Political Mobilization in the 1960s,” in The “Underclass” Debate, Michael Katz, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion; Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation; Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Von Eshen, Race Against Empire. This brief description does not do justice to the trajectory of black nationalist and Black Power thought across the middle of the century. For a more detailed account, see the essay by Peniel Joseph “Black Liberation Without Apology” and Singh, Black Is a Country
The reengineering of West Oakland from 1959 through the late 1960s can be followed in a variety of local periodicals, including the California Voice, Flatlands, the Black Panther, and the Oakland Post. See also Louise Resnikoff, The EDA in Oakland: An Evaluation (Berkeley: University of California Oakland Project, 1969, mimeographed); William L. Nicholls, Poverty and Poverty Programs in Oakland (Berkeley: Survey Research Center, 1967); Oakland’s Formula for the Future (Oakland: Oakland City Planning Commission, 1957); General Neighborhood Renewal Plan (Oakland: Oakland City Planning Department, October 1958).
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982);
Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983);
Michael Wallace and Joyce Rothschild, eds., Deindustrialization and the Restructuring of American Industry (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1988);
Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves : RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). On the position of cities within the capitalist marketplace,
see Paul E. Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
and John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983);
Richard A. Walker, “Industry Builds the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940” (Department of Geography, photocopy);
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). On housing and mortgage markets,
see Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981);
David Freund, “Making it Home: Race, Development, and the Politics of Place in Suburban Detroit, 1940–1967” (Ph. D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999).
Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a systematic study and typology of black incorporation into municipal politics from the perspective of political science,
see Rufus P. Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb, Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in Urban Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984f). Also see Self, American Babylon.
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© 2003 Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, with Matthew Countryman
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Self, R.O. (2003). “Negro Leadership and Negro Money”: African American Political Organizing in Oakland before the Panthers. In: Theoharis, J., Woodard, K. (eds) Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_5
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