Rethinking the Boundaries of the Modern Freedom Struggle
BY THE LATE 1990S, growing numbers of scholars lamented the dearth of scholarship on the northern and western arms of the modern civil rights movement.1 Scholars of civil rights and midtwentieth-century political movements have privileged the southern story. They have written eloquently about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Little Rock school desegregation cases, and the dramatic and usually violent confrontations between civil rights activists and segregationists in Greensboro, North Carolina; Philadelphia, Mississippi; and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Emphasis on the southern movement implies that the modern civil rights struggle had its primary roots in the Jim Crow South and that blacks in the urban North and West followed the lead of their southern brothers and sisters in making demands for their own rights. In recent years, however, an emerging body of scholarship on the North and West has broadened our understanding of the modern civil rights movement in African American and U.S. culture and politics.2 Matthew Countryman powerfully reinforces this trend toward a fuller and more appropriate understanding of the modern freedom struggle. Countryman provides a model urban case study of the northern African American freedom struggle in the years after World War II. In addition to addressing the prevailing southern bias in scholarship on the subject, Countryman also confronts certain unevenness in the gradually expanding body of scholarship on the urban North and West. Existing