To Stand and Fight

"Biondi’s book makes the counterintuitive point that the modern civil rights movement began in the north, not in the south. It did not begin with the Montgomery bus boycott; it did not begin with the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954. In the aftermath of World War II, the civil rights movement came alive in northern cities. She focuses on New York City. Biondi highlights the moment when racial egalitarianism became a core element of modern liberalism. It wasn’t before. In the 1930s Roosevelt worked closely with racist, segregationist Southern Democrats who controlled important committees. He needed them to get measures through Congress. In other words, you could be a good New Deal liberal and be a total racist. Many liberals were racial egalitarians but many liberals were racists. Views on race were not part of the definition of liberalism. Today you can’t be a racist and a liberal. There are two key elements. Number one, the black migration to the north, which begins around the time of World War I and then accelerates during World War II. Suddenly blacks are a major voting bloc in northern cities and an important political factor in the Democratic Party. Labour unions also wanted to organise these new migrants to manufacturing centres, so they too became forces for racial justice. Secondly, after the war against Nazism, racism of any type became intolerable for large numbers of whites, particularly communists and Jews. As did many other northern states. State-level civil rights legislation preceded federal laws by two decades. And, in many ways, were much stronger than the federal laws eventually passed during the 1960s. Southern control of Congress blocked federal civil rights reform, so the movement had to deal with these issues on the state level. Biondi also underscores that in the late 1940s liberalism went way beyond desegregation. In the North, the issue was not whether you could sit at a lunch counter: It was access to jobs, housing discrimination, police brutality and numerous other issues. She shows that there was this broad coalition of groups – African-American groups, but also labour unions, church groups and civil liberties groups – united in fighting for greater rights. That coalition basically falls apart during the Cold War. In the 1930s, communists were almost the only white people who gave a damn about the condition of black people. But the involvement of communists opened the civil rights movement to considerable criticism during the Cold War and led to the fragmentation of the emerging civil rights coalition. That’s a good question – the answer is complicated. The Cold War stultified political and social thinking in the United States for a decade or more. The 1950s was often called “the decade of conformism”, when criticism of American life was considered subversive or unpatriotic. Congress had an Un-American Activities Committee that investigated people on the left, not segregationists. People were putting out alternative visions of America, but they were very marginalised. The culture of conformism made dissent more difficult, no question about that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . On the other hand, the Cold War in some ways encouraged civil rights activism. Segregation and racism embarrassed the United States on the world stage. Particularly as the United States was vying for influence over the newly independent nations of Africa and South Asia, the treatment of non-white people in America became a liability for this country. So when the Brown vs Board of Ed case came up before the Supreme Court in 1954, the State Department filed a brief saying segregation is a big problem for American foreign policy. On that level the Cold War actually encouraged racial progress. But while the Cold War might have encouraged racial progress in some ways, it discouraged structural critiques of American society. The bigot became the problem but the structural reasons for black unemployment were beyond comment. So the Cold War encouraged civil rights progress but closed off a broad critique of postwar society. That’s what Biondi writes about."