"Sweet Land of Liberty"

This new book by Thomas J. Sugrue is titled: “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.”



Publishers Weekly states:

“Sugrue highlights seminal people, books and organizations in his tightly focused study that restores many largely forgotten Northern activists as integral participants in the civil rights movement—such as Philadelphia pastor Leon Sullivan; Roxanne Jones of the welfare rights movement and first black woman elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate; and James Forman, advocate for reparations. The National Negro Congress, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the National Black Political Convention share history with the NAACP and the Urban League, as Sugrue traces the phoenixlike risings from the ashes of old organizations into new. Dense with boycotts, pickets, agitation, riots, lobbying, litigation, and legislation, the
book is heavily detailed but consistently readable with unparalleled scope and fresh focus.”

The NYT notes that the author:

“…spends a disproportionate amount of time writing about Marxist extremists and crackpot demagogues, devoting a dozen pages, for example, to the Revolutionary Action Movement, a violence-spouting Maoist sect. Yet he manages only two paragraphs for the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy in Brooklyn, which did so much to fracture the alliance between blacks and Jews. Sugrue’s book all too often focuses on the positions that black organizations took with respect to global issues rather than on the domestic conditions that produced urban poverty and segregated schools.”

The NYT has provided a first chapter excerpt which can be found here.