Up South traces the efforts of two generations of black Philadelphians
to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and
opportunity for all. Although Philadelphia rarely appears in histories
of the modern civil rights struggle, the city was home to a vibrant and
groundbreaking movement for racial justice in the years between World
War II and the 1970s. By broadening the chronological and geographic
parameters of the civil rights movement, Up South explores the origins
of civil rights liberalism, the failure of the liberal program of
antidiscrimination legislation and interracial coalition-building to
deliver on its promise of racial equality, and the subsequent rise of
the Black Power movement.
The Philadelphia movement occurred in three stages. During the 1940s and
1950s, liberal civil rights groups in the city successfully campaigned
for Philadelphia's new City Charter to be the first in the nation to
include a ban on racial discrimination in municipal employment,
services, and contracts. Within a decade, however, black activists in
the city were leading consumer boycotts and street protests against the
city's liberal establishment for failing to overcome entrenched
structures of racial inequality in labor markets, residential
neighborhoods, and public schools. These protests set the stage both for
some of the earliest experiments in affirmative action and for the
emergence of the Black Power movement in Philadelphia.
Challenging the view that it was the inflammatory rhetoric of Black
Power and the rising demands of black activists that derailed the civil
rights movement, Up South documents the efforts of Black Power
activists in Philadelphia to construct a vital and effective social
movement that combined black nationalism's analysis of racism's
constitutive role in American society with a program of grassroots
community organizing and empowerment. On issues ranging from public
education and urban renewal to police brutality and welfare,
Philadelphia's Black Power movement remade the city's political
landscape. And, in contrast to the top-down middle-class leadership of
traditional civil rights groups, Black Power in Philadelphia
fundamentally altered the composition of black leadership in the city to
include a new cohort of neighborhood-based working-class and female
black community activists.
