Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

Summary
Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty “turns northward” and examines the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North. Most accounts focuses on the South and the battles between nonviolent protestors and the defenders of Jim Crow, making it a sectional rather than a national history. The histories of the northern experience are only post-1965, when cities exploded and black power came onto the scene. Sugrue contends, “to understand the history of civil rights – indeed, to understand modern America – it is essential to bring the North back in.” (xiv) Long before 1965, a coalition of black and white (and some Latin and Asian allies) fought for a prohibition against discrimination in the workplace, opening of housing markets, the provision of quality education, and the economic development of impoverished communities. Their battles broaden the term “civil rights movement” beyond just an issue of race and Jim Crow. Sugrue writes: “The keyword linking these battles was ‘rights.’” This book thus focuses on the “rights revolution” – “the extension of citizenship to include positive rights” – in the North. These activists used “civil rights” and “freedom struggle” interchangeably and to “separate these terms artificially, or to favor one over the others, would obscure than clarify.” It is a political history that explores the social movements that “civil rights activists created, joined, and transformed – from churches to civil rights advocacy groups to political parties.” (xxiii) These activists in the north, in particular black activists, cultivated a politics not easily defined by nonviolent or violent, integrationist or separationist.