Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

== Summary ==
Thomas
Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty “turns
northward” and examines the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North.
Most accounts focuses on the South and the battles between nonviolent
protestors and the defenders of Jim Crow, making it a sectional rather than a national
history. The histories of the northern experience are only post-1965, when
cities exploded and black power came onto the scene. Sugrue contends, “to
understand the history of civil rights – indeed, to understand modern America –
it is essential to bring the North back in.” (xiv) Long before 1965, a coalition
of black and white (and some Latin and Asian allies) fought for a prohibition
against discrimination in the workplace, opening of housing markets, the
provision of quality education, and the economic development of impoverished
communities. Their battles broaden the term “civil rights movement” beyond just
an issue of race and Jim Crow. Sugrue writes: “The keyword linking these
battles was ‘rights.’” This book thus focuses on the “rights revolution” – “the
extension of citizenship to include positive rights” – in the North. These
activists used “civil rights” and “freedom struggle” interchangeably and to
“separate these terms artificially, or to favor one over the others, would
obscure than clarify.” It is a political history that explores the social
movements that “civil rights activists created, joined, and transformed – from
churches to civil rights advocacy groups to political parties.” (xxiii) These
activists in the north, in particular black activists, cultivated a politics
not easily defined by nonviolent or violent, integrationist or separationist.