The standard narrative of the civil rights movement is often cast as a Southern story. A region scarred by segregation, disenfranchisement and racial violence, the South appears as a historic battleground between the forces of progress and reaction, with black activists in the civil rights movement valiantly struggling against the desperate and angry supporters of Jim Crow.
In popular renditions, the North is usually absent from the narrative, at least until the mid-1960s urban riots and black-power demonstrations reminded Americans that race was a national — not merely a regional — problem. Even then, Northerners stuck to what historian Jason Sokol calls “the Northern mystique” — a belief that theirs was a land of liberty that little resembled the former states of the Confederacy.
“No reflective historian any longer believes it,” Sokol rightly observes, and many scholars in recent years have “focused on the North’s dark side.” But that doesn’t mean that the Northern mystique didn’t serve very real purposes, such as allowing Northern whites from the mid-20th century onward to experiment with interracial democracy and to mask racial inequality with the language of color- blindness.
A skilled storyteller, Sokol offers a series of interwoven case studies on topics that are sometimes familiar but, more often, not well known. In Springfield, Mass., for example, officials experimented with multicultural education in public schools in the late 1930s and the ’40s, promoting tolerance and pluralism to considerable public acclaim.
When the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black major league baseball player in 1947, Brooklyn’s reputation as “the most tolerant and diverse place in America,” as one black minister put it, seemed secure. Decades later, the election of Shirley Chis holm as Brooklyn’s — and the nation’s — first black congresswoman rested on the receptiveness of white voters to a black candidate’s effort to construct a “multiracial and multilingual” coalition amid the city’s intensifying racial conflicts.
In the 1960s the political success of the late Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, an African-American Republican, showed that an overwhelmingly white and Democratic electorate could overlook race at the polling booth in the “color-blind commonwealth.”
At a time when Southern white politicians were declaring “segregation forever,” white Northerners were demonstrating that their region was a more peaceful and civilized place when it came to race.
It was and it wasn’t, Sokol concludes. Springfield’s experiment in multicultural education eventually foundered, and city officials invoked color-blindness as a defense against litigation aimed at integrating segregated schools.
Brooke’s political “ascent served as a parable of progress,” but in the 1960s and ’70s Massachusetts blacks confronted growing segregation, “solidifying ghettoes, deepening black poverty and endless battles against a resilient white prejudice”; Brooke’s defense of busing to achieve school integration in Boston earned him the enmity of whites, who voted him out of office in 1978. The interracial coalition that made Hartford Democrat Thirman Milner New England’s first black mayor in 1981 did little to halt the city’s growing economic inequality in the years that followed.
The Northern mystique took a beating in the late 1960s. In his chapter on “Abraham Ribicoff’s Crusade,” Sokol recounts the largely forgotten indictment of Northern racism leveled by the senator from Connecticut.
The North was as guilty as the South in denying blacks the opportunities available to whites, Ribicoff charged on the Senate floor in 1970. In so arguing, he set off a political firestorm, with white Southerners congratulating him for his brutal honesty and various liberals condemning him for diminishing the crime of Southern segregation.
The NAACP’s John Morsell was one who maintained that the “fundamental and inescapable fact is that the South is not the North. The North may well be hypocritical; but the South has been blind, vicious, hateful and despotic.” Ultimately, though, it was less Ribicoff who “pierced the heart of the Northern mystique” than “all those white Northerners who foamed at the mouth at the very mention of school busing.”
The explosive and ugly racial violence displayed by white Bostonians resisting the court-ordered integration of schools drove a stake through the heart of the mystique. “In its place,” Sokol observes, “stood hatred and blood, lies and hypocrisy.”
But the mystique didn’t die; it retained a political utility in the years to come. David Dinkins invoked it to some effect in his successful 1989 campaign to become New York’s first black mayor, as did Deval Patrick in the 2006 campaign that made him Massachusetts’s first black governor. But did the mystique amount to mere symbolism that allowed Northerners to evade the very real inequality that persisted and even intensified? Sokol does not write off the mystique, arguing that the “aspirational aspect” of American democracy has “always been critical to the success of interracial politics.” It also undergirded genuine efforts at “grand experiments on the frontier of interracial democracy.” The North’s “lofty ideals, its dreams of justice, its noble heritage” matter. At the same time they have coexisted with a far more problematic tradition — of color-blindness as a cover for segregation, discrimination and economic inequality that were not identical to the forms of oppression in the Jim Crow South but were pernicious nonetheless.
To his credit, Sokol recognizes both the power and the limits of the mystique. Carefully balancing an appreciation of the symbolism of interracial politics with recognition of the forces that remain untouched by it, “All Eyes Are Upon Us” reminds us — if we need reminding — that the events unfolding in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and too many other communities are embedded in a complex and problematic history of both racial advances and obstacles to progress.
HISTORY: CIVIL RIGHTS
CIVIL RIGHTS
All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn
by Jason Sokol (Basic)
