Off Camera: Civil Rights in the North (Page 3)

Open-housing advocates faced a similar dilemma by the mid-'60s. They had targeted restrictive covenants in the courts and sponsored several "move-ins," in which middle-class black families were recruited to open up a wedge in all-white enclaves like Levittown, Pennsylvania. But white resistance was intense, and the rewards, while symbolically large, were logistically meager. It took several years to recruit a single black family, William and Daisy Myers and their three children, for the Levittown move-in, and then white Levittowners led an extended "war of nerves" against them, rallying outside their home during the day, breaking their windows at night and intimidating their supporters. The violence recalled segregation battles in the South, but the logic behind it had a Northern stamp: one white neighbor confessed to a reporter that William Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house." Two years after moving into Levittown, the Myerses moved out, tired of the experiment. Like education activists, then, housing activists started turning away from the integrationist ideal and toward the thorny problems faced by poor and working-class blacks, who had been left behind in the search for "model" move-in families. The ghetto, not the suburbs, would become the new proving ground for housing reform, as tenant organizing and community-based economic development captured the imagination of the movement.

By the mid-'60s, even those desegregated RKO theaters seemed like a hollow prize, devalued by the same one-way flow of wealth to the suburbs that frustrated activists on other fronts. As whites fled cities for suburbia, the movie theaters followed--along with the swimming pools and amusement parks that had also just been integrated. Blacks ended up with fewer choices for diversion in the cities where they lived and were made to feel less than welcome in the suburban neighborhoods favored by entertainment chains; the consumer's republic did not extend to them. Ever the structuralist, Sugrue concludes this relatively heartening chapter with a grim observation: "It was not coincidental that just as black consumers gained access to urban commerce, it began to decentralize."

By this point in his story, Sugrue has offered a sharp corrective to prevailing civil rights narratives that place the movement's center of gravity in the South before 1965. He has shifted our attention from the movement's front-page victories to its "paradoxes and ambiguities." In the process, by accounting for the deep-seated frustrations that surfaced dramatically in the urban riots of the mid-'60s, he has also altered our sense of the political battles of the late '60s. It's hard to see the white resistance to Black Power as a "backlash," given that such resistance dogged the civil rights movement from its inception and was among the factors that sapped black activists' faith in the project of integration.

What Sugrue does next, though, is more surprising still, and refreshingly independent-minded. While he pays tribute to Black Power's ideological diversity and its search for alternatives to racial liberalism, he reassesses its usual exponents, the Black Panthers. He takes a dim view of the Panthers' "romanticization of violence," arguing that it became "a self-fulfilling prophecy" when authorities took literally the threats of police assassination illustrated, quite graphically, in the party newspaper. Sugrue also puts the Panthers' community service programs in a rarely noted broader context: "Claims that there was something new and revolutionary about the establishment of free breakfast programs and health clinics revealed a willful ignorance of the extraordinary array of black-led and interracial social service agencies, meal programs, and health clinics, most of which operated off camera."

Not coincidentally, "off camera" was precisely where women activists were likely to be at the height of Black Power, and Sugrue has kinder words for the alternative, and less theatrical, strand of black radicalism they sponsored. Generally speaking, the radicalism spearheaded by black men in the late '60s was suspicious of the state. In the rhetoric of the Panthers, the state was a police state, and the "pigs" were the enemy; the language of revolutionary honor brooked little room for compromise. By contrast, female activists were more likely to exploit the opening provided by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and to see the state as a provider of services, a welfare state. When Johnson's war on poverty channeled funding to Community Action Agencies, women assumed positions of leadership: in Philadelphia, more than 70 percent of elected Community Action board members were women.

The welfare rights movement was, by Sugrue's lights, the Northern civil rights movement at its finest--as rigorous as it needed to be to define a problem, and as supple as it needed to be to tackle it. Ideologically pioneering, it rebutted the prevalent notion that there was a "culture of poverty," arguing instead that state policies around welfare created a poverty trap; moreover, it forced policy-makers, who previously had disparaged "matriarchal" families, to recognize the plight of poor women with children. Strategically resourceful, it asked poor mothers to march, social workers to change the system from within and activist lawyers to challenge the arbitrariness of eligibility standards in the courts. And through the creation of the umbrella National Welfare Rights Organization, it knitted together hundreds of local grassroots groups into a coalition that could press for changes on the largest structural level.

This broad-based interracial coalition was not only admirable; it was effective--a rare example of political success in a book full of campaigns that, however heroic, could not budge the systems they took on. The Supreme Court ruled that welfare was "not a gratuity" but an entitlement, and that welfare recipients had the right to a hearing before their relief payments were cut off. Politicians modified eligibility rules at the same time that poor women became more conscious of the benefits they were entitled to, and consequently there was a sea change in the administration of the system: in the space of ten years, the percentage of eligible families receiving benefits climbed from one-third to nearly 90 percent. Insofar as the war on poverty reduced black poverty, studies have concluded, it was due to this change in welfare disbursal.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.