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In tracing the long history of the civil rights movement in the North, Sugrue hammers home a few key themes. First, racial segregation in the North was both highly visible and at the same time "invisible." In the present day, the fifteen most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are in the Northeast and Midwest, while the five states with the most segregated schools are New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, and California. Racial segregation is painfully visible. Yet, the North did not have a tradition of deliberate, southern-style Jim Crow segregation. Thus, northern segregation, real as it was, appeared to most whites as "natural," an inevitable outcome of the aggregate of individual decisions, of "choice." It was invisible because whites could pretend that it was not constructed.
There are few urban myths more deeply rooted than this one, but it is fatuous. As Sugrue systematically shows, northern segregation was anything but an accident of market-based individual choice, but was instead deliberately fostered through discriminatory policies in banking, mortgage, "urban renewal," and education. And while southern segregation could be dramatically confronted through lunch counter sit-ins and the like, it proved far more difficult to challenge real-estate redlining, federal home loan guarantees that virtually mandated a racially segregated suburbia, and neighborhood schools that defended white racial privilege as a democratic right.
Sugrue returns throughout the book to the systemic roots of racial and economic inequality, and the deep interconnections between the two. Before the 1950s, a powerful alliance of religious idealists (including remarkable individuals such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, James Farmer, and the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality and other civil rights groups) and secular activists (usually Socialist) empowered a variety of movements that simultaneously attacked racial and economic inequality. In their journey from "uplift" to "militancy," they brought struggles for equality to a national audience and provided a model for a future generation of southern civil rights protestors to follow. Religious activists played a far more central part of the struggle in the North than most understand. As a result, religious figures people this work to a degree that surprised even me. The very first chapter, for example, a beautifully rendered mini-biography of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, is alone worth the price of the book. The contrast with another recent book of note, Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie, is striking, for Gilmore's story of the long history of the southern civil rights movement excludes religious figures almost entirely, focusing instead on black secular radicals. Thus, the historiography of religion in civil rights scholarship has shifted dramatically, as evidenced by a comparison of these two landmark works.
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