Description
Book SynopsisUp South traces the efforts of two generations of black Philadelphians to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and opportunity for all. Although Philadelphia rarely appears in histories of the modern civil rights struggle, the city was home to a vibrant and groundbreaking movement for racial justice in the years between World War II and the 1970s. By broadening the chronological and geographic parameters of the civil rights movement, Up South explores the origins of civil rights liberalism, the failure of the liberal program of antidiscrimination legislation and interracial coalition-building to deliver on its promise of racial equality, and the subsequent rise of the Black Power movement.
The Philadelphia movement occurred in three stages. During the 1940s and 1950s, liberal civil rights groups in the city successfully campaigned for Philadelphia''s new City Charter to be the first in the nation to include a ban on racial discrimination in muni
Trade Review
"Matthew Countryman has presented us with a real treasure house in his history of Civil Rights and Black Power in the urban North." * Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics *
"Up South is deeply researched, original, and important. It will be impossible to write about Northern Civil Rights and Black Power without grappling with Countryman's powerful book." * Thomas Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit *
"A marvelous book . . . of enormous accomplishment. It challenges historians to rethink the periodization of the civil rights movement and . . . forces us out of the southern success/northern decline framework for understanding movement politics." * Robert O. Self, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography *
"Well argued, extremely well documented, and persuasive. . . . An excellent contribution to the study of how local black leaders reshaped civil rights in the postwar urban North." * American Historical Review *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Liberalism, Civil Rights, and Black Nationalism in the Urban North
PART I. RACE, RIGHTS, AND POSTWAR LIBERALISM
1. Civil Rights Liberalism in Philadelphia
2. The Other Philadelphia Story
PART II. A NORTHERN PROTEST MOVEMENT
3. Don't Buy Where You Can't Work
4. A False Democracy
5. Black Power and the Organizing Tradition
PART III. BLACK POWER IN THE POSTINDUSTRIAL CITY
6. Community Control of the Schools
7. The Gender Politics of Movement Leadership
8. From Protest to Politics
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
