OPINION . Slant

Fables of Reconstruction


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Published: Nov 5, 2008

Lately, I've been lugging around Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House), the definitive new book by Penn historian Tom Sugrue. I've read much of it while crisscrossing the city on SEPTA, through pocked and sullenly eviscerated central North Philadelphia on the R6, and collapsing Strawberry Mansion on the 32, out into West Philly on the El and the 13 and the 34. One doesn't need a book like this to understand the amalgam of failure, disappointment and resilience that the civil rights struggle produced. It's plainly here, in the sometimes disheartening, sometimes exhilarating fact of this great black city.

But Sugrue asks us to confront the brutal reality of it. In these 500-plus pages are the countless hours of organizing, filing lawsuits, marching, boycotting and putting up with derision and scorn that came to define the lives of most black Americans in the North. Here is Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who in the 1930s worked to put a stop to a Bronx "slave market," where rich white women could pluck black domestics of their liking. Here is A. Philip Randolph, a socialist who kept organizing mass protests through the 1940s in an attempt to open defense employment to blacks during World War II. Here is Whitney Young and Philadelphia's Leon Sullivan. Here, in 1950, is Martin Luther King Jr. and three white friends, Penn students, trying to eat at a restaurant in Maple Shade only to be chased into the parking lot by the owner, who fired a shot into the air. Here are the members of the leftist National Negro Congress, the NAACP, the incrementalist Union League and the Ghandi-inspired Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Here, in sum, is so much overcoming, so much tireless and seemingly endless struggle that as I read I couldn't help but imagine a much different scenario. What if, in 1865, Reconstruction had granted African-Americans full political and economic rights? That year, in reversing the restriction against blacks riding the streetcar, a Philadelphia judge declared, "The logic of the past four years has in many respects cleared our vision and corrected our judgment ... that the men who have been deemed worthy to become defenders of the country, to wear the uniform of the soldier of the United States, should not be denied the rights common to humanity."

What if, right then and there, white vision had decisively cleared?

It's a simple — and naïve — conceit, something akin to the writer Alan Weisman asking readers in The World Without Us to "picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished." By 1885, or so, with access to proper education and jobs, blacks would have been more or less integrated into the economic life of the nation. By the 1920s, instead of having to redouble efforts just to gather the crumbs on the table, African-Americans would have risen to leadership in science, medicine and the arts, in business and literature, in agriculture and technology. The military would have been well-integrated by the time of World War II, and the United States itself the clearest counterargument to Nazi claims of white superiority. And of those North Philly neighborhoods that exploded in riots in the 1960s and that today are the inchoate ruins of the forgotten struggle? We'd speak of stoops and libraries and block parties instead of homicide, incarceration and abandonment.

Perhaps such wonderings are just too painful to consider; spin out the conceit and there vanishes our national psychosis; there, too, vanishes the immense production of art and literature and music that has emerged from so much hurt, and all the time and energy spent working to dignify our national ideals. Perhaps, without the struggle, those ideals would now be even further worn or lost. Without it, certainly, what happened on Tuesday wouldn't feel, as it does, melancholic and profoundly exhilarating, a culmination, and a cry. There is so much more yet to do.

Nathaniel Popkin will read from his book The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia (Camino Books) on Sat., Nov. 8 at 2 p.m. at the Central Branch of the Free Library.