To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

by Martha Biondi

The story of the Civil Rights Movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the rise of the movement in the South. This story is an essential first chapter, not only to the southern movement that followed, but to the riots that erupted in northern and western cities just as the Civil Rights Movement was achieving major victories.



Biondi tells the story of African Americans who mobilized to make the war against fascism a launching pad for a postwar struggle against white supremacy at home. Rather than seeking integration in the abstract, Black New Yorkers demanded first-class citizenship--jobs for all, affordable housing, protection from police violence, access to higher education, and political representation. This powerful local push for economic and political equality met broad resistance, yet managed to win several landmark laws barring discrimination and segregation.

To Stand and Fight demonstrates how Black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle and left a rich legacy.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

Reviews

[John Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appreciate that the author covered the politics of the era but wanted more on Ray Jones, Earl Brown and co.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

In To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, published in 2003, Martha Biondi stakes out large claims for the movement in New York, arguing that the genesis of the civil rights movement was in the radical left politics of the city in the years following World War II. “In 1945, New York City had the largest urban Black population in the world,” she begins, outlining the constituency that would host aggressive challenges to legal, residential and employment discrimination. While the NAACP filed legal challenges, a Popular Front coalition of leftist labor, liberals and socialists held together by the organizational exertions of the small but committed membership of the Communist Party fought without success to protect and extend wartime fair employment and price control policies. While unsuccessful at the federal level, at the state and municipal levels activists were able to successfully repeal segregation laws and win the passage of the nation’s first laws banning discrimination in private employment and housing built with public assistance. Despite its legislative victories the postwar movement was mainly one of defeats and “intense struggle for small gains.” Biondi credits the New York movement with pushing issues of racial discrimination into Democratic Party politics, laying the groundwork for later Supreme Court expansions of the rights of the accused, and creating an interracial political alliance between African Americans and Jews who together forged the city’s liberal self-image.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution that To Stand and Fight makes is by providing detailed coverage of an era of urban political organizing prior to the Cold War assault on domestic leftist politics. While few joined the Communist Party, and fewer remained long term members, many appreciated its willingness to organize for mass politics at the grass roots, its rejection of the legalistic gradualism of the NAACP, and its advocacy of total integration in the North and West coupled with a separate Black nation in the Deep South. By connecting the northern movement to an earlier period of popular organizing Biondi contextualizes the civil rights liberalism of the 1950s and the reemergence of black radicalism and protest politics in the 1960s. Rather than a narrative of natural progression, or as some would have it decay, from idealistic integrationism to violent racial nationalism, Biondi frames middle years of the 1950s as a temporary outlier within which popular organizing was repressed by the opportunistic smothering of dissent under the aegis of anti-communism. The Philadelphia described by Countryman in Up South followed a progression from liberalism to protest to Black Power. To Stand and Fight points out that the rise of protest and black nationalism in the 1960s may have been less a result of disappointment with the outcomes of liberal anti-discrimination policy, although there was surely that, so much as the resurfacing of a temporarily suppressed popular politics.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important and informative, but very detailed so, like "Or Does It Explode?" definitely more for academic readers or people who are really really interested in this topic.

[Johorse · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda annoying slant to things at times