Introduction to Special Issue: "the Civil Rights Movement in New York City"‪.‬

Since the 1960s most US history has been written as if the civil rights movement was primarily or entirely a southern history. Of course this is incorrect. The fight for civil rights has always been a national struggle. For many years now historians have been attempting to correct this view. My own contribution to this effort has focused on the struggle in New York City through a history of the black churches in Brooklyn, a biography of one of the most prominent religious leaders in New York City, and a forthcoming history of the teachers union. I also co-edited a survey history of the civil rights movement that emphasizes the national-both northern and southern--character of this ongoing struggle. One of the first chapters in that book discuses the fight for school integration in Boston in 1787. (2) Of course, no one has been alone in this work. There is a new generation of scholarship rewriting our understanding of this history. This special issue of Afro-Americans in New York Life and History represents one of the first compilations surveying this effort. The essays chosen for this volume, which will later be expanded in book form, focus on this northern history from a New York perspective. (3)