Empowering the Black Masses
Book chronicles civil rights, Black power movements in America’s ‘first capital.’
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia
By Matthew Countryman
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006,
413 pp.
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia joins a growing body of literature on the civil rights and Black power movements in the North that is radically challenging the way historians conceptualize those movements in particular and the post-World War II period generally. Chronicling the struggle for civil rights in a city rich in the icons of freedom, Matthew Countryman skillfully illuminates how America’s first capital and “cradle of liberty” left much to be desired in the arena of Black civil rights.
Countryman’s rich study begins in the 1940s and ’50s, when the future looked bright for civil rights organizers and activists. Adding to an increasingly familiar scholarly narrative, he notes how the promise of these liberal reforms failed to reach the masses of Blacks outside the South. Despite an impressive public record on civil rights, which included one of the nation’s first fair employment practice laws and a 1951 ban on racial discrimination, the majority of Philadelphia’s Black population endured high unemployment, poor housing and substandard education, indicative of Northern-style apartheid. In stark contrast to its commitment to civil rights on paper, in practice the city often failed to guarantee not only fair employment practices but also suitable access to a broad range of social and human services as well. The inability to achieve redress through established channels of communication like the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission eventually led large numbers of Black Philadelphians to seek alternatives outside of the system.
In the early 1960s, Philadelphia activists flourished, led in large part by Baptist minister Leon Sullivan and the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sullivan and the NAACP spearheaded a large number of boycotts and other demonstrations aimed at defeating discrimination by labor unions, corporations and even government agencies charged with providing vital services. These highly successful campaigns not only bore fruit in the city itself — in the form of new employment opportunities for Blacks — but also influenced the U.S. Department of Labor, which eventually adopted the “Philadelphia Plan” as a model for its highly touted national program to root out discrimination and prejudice in the construction industry.
But there remained rumblings of discontent, especially among those still not benefiting from the gains made by civil rights activists. Thus, by the mid-1960s, a new crop of leaders, many of whom were increasingly influenced by the Black power movement, helped to reshape the contours of civil rights activism in Philadelphia. By focusing attention on this often overlooked segment of the Black community, more militant leaders, like Cecil Moore, endeavored not only to engage the needs of working people in the struggle for civil rights but also to make a case for community control over community institutions. As Countryman explains, Moore and his supporters were able to marshal preexisting “civic and social networks” from “church women’s groups and Black-led trade unions to North Philadelphia youth gangs” to participate in many successful protest campaigns.
