How New York Changes the Story of the Civil Rights Movement‪.‬

When most people say "the civil rights movement" they are referring to the struggle against southern Jim Crow. They don't think to call it the southern civil rights movement because the southern-ness of the movement is taken for granted. But we actually should call it the southern civil rights movement, because there was a northern civil rights movement that needs to be recognized and understood on its own unique terms. The southern civil rights movement was preceded for over a decade by the northern civil rights movement. This northern civil rights movement had as its major center, New York City. The movement arose during the mass migration of Black southerners in the 1940s, which gave New York the largest urban black population in the world. The early civil rights movement in New York is the story of Jackie Robinson to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X, a trajectory from integrationist optimism to Black Nationalist critique, with a flourishing African American left at its center. Since this trajectory foreshadows what would happen nationally in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the move from liberalism to Black Power, the early experience in New York has much to teach us about activism and resistance in the urban North. Yet despite this significance, the northern civil rights movement has been largely "forgotten," and omitted from the standard narrative of the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. (2)