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Biondi, Martha. _To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City_. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 360pp. Illustrations, notes, index, $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-01060-4. Reviewed for H-1960s by Timothy N. Thurber, Department of History, State University of New York at Oswego Racism, Northern Style It is no secret that during the 1990s tensions ran high between African Americans and the New York Police Department (NYPD). In 1997, several officers sodomized Abner Louima with a plunger handle. Two years later, officers fired forty-one shots at an unarmed Amadou Diallo, hitting him nineteen times. The NYPD's ongoing stop-and-search policy, moreover, angered many African Americans and white liberals throughout the Rudolph Guiliani era. They routinely voiced their anger at what they regarded as a department that was far too eager to trample on the rights of minorities and a mayor who was far too indifferent to the problems. As Martha Biondi shows in this important work, recent events have an eerily similar ring to developments half a century earlier. On May 26, 1951 a white police officer named Sam Applebaum rammed his car into the vehicle of Henry Fields, an African American, to stop him for a traffic violation. Witnesses noted that Fields exited his car with his hands raised. Applebaum nevertheless fired his gun twice, killing the motorist. An all- white jury refused to indict the officer, although Fields's widow won $130,000 in a wrongful death suit in 1961. The Fields tragedy was but one of many cases of police brutality in the 1950s. During a four-month period in 1951, police offices killed ten African American males. William Delany, crippled from polio, was beaten unconscious and kicked in the face by white officers. In December 1950, two white officers shot and killed unarmed veteran John Derrick just twelve hours after his discharge from the armed services. The mayor at the time, Republican Vincent Impellitteri, did not condemn the killing, show remorse, or offer an apology. The officers were only reassigned after an outraged African American community protested and city leaders feared the onset of violence. These and other incidents led to the creation of the nation's first civilian complaint review board in 1953 and paved the way for other reforms in the 1960s. Police violence was not the only issue of concern for African Americans. Biondi skillfully explores a wide range of topics, including employment, housing, segregation in schools and public accommodations, and political participation. In doing so, she challenges much that still passes for conventional wisdom about the modern African American freedom struggle. The fight for racial justice, she insists, was about group rights and racial equality, not simply the integration of individuals. Color conscious policies did not appear suddenly in the late 1960s and 1970s, but rather were articulated two decades earlier. World War II, Biondi persuasively argues, was the "watershed for the northern civil rights movement" (p. 3). In this regard, she echoes many recent scholars who have rejected the idea that the 1954 _Brown v. Board of Education_ decision or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956 launched the freedom struggle. In tracing the history of the battles for equality in New York, Biondi offers a powerful alternative to the still common, at least among many non-historians, narrative that emphasizes the southern struggle against Jim Crow during the 1950s and 1960s giving way to problems in the urban North in the late 1960s. Her portrayal of New York City, Thomas Sugrue's work on Detroit, and several other studies suggest that it makes more sense to speak of simultaneous arenas of conflict during the 1940s and 1950s [1]. Montgomery, Alabama and other cities in the South were not the only places where African Americans were demanding justice. As World War II came to an end, jobs topped the agenda of African Americans in New York City. The war had brought substantial economic gains for many, but now they feared a loss of those advances. African American activists, along with their white allies, helped persuade the New York state legislature to create the nation's first fair employment practices committee in 1945. When enforcement proved to be timid, they lobbied repeatedly, though usually unsuccessfully, for bolder efforts to open employment opportunities. Likewise, activists challenged union seniority rules and other labor policies that prevented African Americans from obtaining well-paying jobs. Tactics included filing lawsuits over control of the longshoreman's union, forming picket lines, and staging a sit-in at the office of a corrupt and racist union boss. Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph complained of a "climate of terror, nepotism in the acquisition of jobs and exclusion because of race" on the city's piers (p. 256). The relatively few gains made during this era, however, often proved to be short-lived as jobs on the piers were soon relocated or phased out due to automation. Black leaders often took a race-conscious approach to employment issues by stressing the need for employers to recruit African American workers and to compile statistics as measures of progress. Such arguments would foreshadow the affirmative action debate of later decades. African Americans also sought to advance their interests in the political arena. They often worked through third parties, especially the American Labor Party. Several African Americans ran for office as the Party's candidate, and though most lost Biondi contends that their presence put racial issues on the public agenda and eventually forced the Democrats to pay closer attention to African Americans. Black activists also lobbied at the state level for more appointments, more representation, and more of a voice in policymaking. At the national level, African Americans pressured members of Congress for anti-lynching and voting rights legislation to aid the struggle for racial justice in the South (some activists even took their case to the United Nations). The problem of housing discrimination receives careful scrutiny from Biondi. Developers, bankers, insurers, real estate agents, and government officials worked in various ways to limit housing options for African Americans. The issue was spotlighted when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had developed Stuyvesant Town, the largest urban redevelopment housing plan in the nation, denied blacks the right to live there. As company president Frederick Echer bluntly observed, "Negroes and whites don't mix" (pp. 122-123). African Americans protested this policy, but the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the company was free to discriminate because no state subsidies were allegedly involved in the project, which was eventually integrated in the 1950s largely as a result of ongoing protest from activists. Stuyvesant Town was but one piece of a much broader problem, however. Discrimination also existed in Levittown, and other urban redevelopment programs displaced many African Americans. Between 1946 and 1952, only one percent of rental units built with Federal Housing Administration insurance were open to African Americans. "Government is using our tax money to grind us into the ghetto," complained Roy Wilkins of the NAACP (p. 232). New York state had fair housing laws, but as with equal employment statutes enforcement was usually lax. Official school segregation was, of course, illegal in New York (unlike in the South), but the educational system was hardly free from discrimination. De facto segregation arose in part out of housing patterns, but the city's Board of Education also promoted segregation through its decisions on where to draw school boundaries. In addition, the Board resisted demands for curricular reforms and the hiring of more African American teachers. Once again, race-conscious remedies were integral to the battle for justice. Above all, Biondi paints a vivid picture of grass-roots resistance to segregation in public accommodations and other aspects of city life. When _Birth of a Nation_ was re-released in 1950, African Americans in New York took to the streets. Similarly, they protested against discrimination in the film, theater, and music industries, against rude treatment in restaurants and retail establishments, and over merchants selling cheap merchandise at inflated prices. In this vein, black nationalist James Lawson launched a "Buy Black" campaign in 1948. Throughout her important work, Biondi stresses the activities of the Communist left, which she maintains played a "significant role in the burgeoning civil rights struggle" (p. 4). Many black New Yorkers, she contends, were drawn to the left's "rejection of gradualism and its willingness to engage in an uncompromising struggle for equal rights" (p. 6). Even some non-communist African Americans welcomed the left as an ally in the broader fight. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell stated, "We used the Communists more than they used us" (p. 7). The relationship of Communists to the freedom struggle was, however, complex and ambiguous. Biondi carefully shows how the question of communism divided the African American community. For Walter White and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, the left constituted a dangerous force that threatened progress for African Americans, and they sought to limit its participation and influence. But Biondi's sympathies are clearly with the left, and she echoes recent scholarship which has argued that the Cold War and virulent anti-communism dashed hopes for a more progressive nation. The impact of the Cold War on the African American freedom struggle has received close attention from several scholars lately, and Biondi concedes that at times the confrontation with communism provided a boost to the struggle for racial equality [2]. She contends persuasively, however, that the anti-communist impulse did more harm than good. The Red Scare destroyed the political careers of several black New York leaders, divided the black community, and undermined an alliance between labor and African American groups. Opponents of change in employment, housing, the police department, and the city schools frequently and often successfully raised the specter of communist influence in their confrontations with activists. Throughout, Biondi reminds us that government in the North helped create and perpetuate discrimination and inequality. She is not alone, of course, in that conclusion, but she makes a powerful case that it is wrong to assume, as many Americans do, that only southern state and local governments thwarted black advancement. Governmental action (or lack thereof) in the areas of employment, housing, education, and law enforcement matters made a mockery of the notion that the North, unlike the South, was a democratic society with equal opportunity for all. Even more important, Biondi reminds us of the heroism and courage of many "ordinary" people. The foot soldiers of the southern struggle against Jim Crow have received increased attention over the past couple of decades, but plenty of African Americans and liberal whites in the North were also willing to invest the time and energy to fight for equality. This is a work of tremendous significance for scholars of the modern African-American freedom struggle. Some may question how representative New York City was given its history of labor/left activism in a wide variety of areas, but in making the case that a "critically important Black radical tradition" (p. 273) existed between the Marcus Garvey era of the 1920s and the black nationalism of the 1960s, Biondi has raised important issues about how scholars teach and conceive of the struggle for racial equality in the post-World War II era. To Stand and Fight may contain little that directly relates to the 1960s, but those who wish to understand the roots of debates that flared during that turbulent period will surely want to consult this engaging and thought-provoking book. Notes 1. Thomas Sugrue, _The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arnold Hirsch, _Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960_, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Steven Meyer, _As Long as They Don't Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods_ (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Craig Steven Wilder, _A Covenant With Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 2. Thomas Borstelmann, _The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, _Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H- Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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