Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980

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The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking and scholarly work on post-1945 US history. Yet the dominant narrative of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be derailed by the twin forces of black power and white backlash when it sought to move outside the South after 1965. African American protest and political movements outside the South appear as ancillary and subsequent to the real movement in the South, despite the fact that black activism existed in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1940s, and persisted well into the 1970s. This book brings together new scholarship on black social movements outside the South to rethink the civil rights narrative and the place of race in recent history. Each chapter focuses on a different location and movement outside the South, revealing distinctive forms of US racism according to place, the varieties of tactics that community members used to attack these inequalities, and the prevalence of integrationist and nationalist thinking between the 1940s and the 1970s.