The struggle for racial equality in the North has been a footnote in most books about civil rights in America. Now this monumental new work from one of the most brilliant historians of his generation sets the record straight.Sweet Land of Libertyis an epic, revelatory account of the abiding quest for justice in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Thomas Sugrue's panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the presentmore than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Appearing throughout these tumultuous tales of bigotry and resistance are the people who propelled progress, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a dedicated churchwoman who in the 1930s became both a member of New York's black elite and an increasingly radical activist; A. Philip Randolph, who as America teetered on the brink of World War II dared to threaten FDR with a march on Washington to protest discriminationand got the Fair Employment Practices Committee ("the second Emancipation Proclamation") as a result; Morris Milgram, a white activist who built the Concord Park housing development, the interracial answer to white Levittown; and Herman Ferguson, a mild-mannered New York teacher whose protest of a Queens construction site led him to become a key player in the militant Malcolm X's movement. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups,Sweet Land of Libertycreates an indelible history. Thomas Sugrue has written a narrative bound to become the standard source on this essential subject. From the Hardcover edition.

Thomas J. Sugrue is a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology. Sugrue’s first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, and the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Urban History. He has also published essays and reviews in The Washington Post, The Nation, London Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Detroit Free Press.


From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter 1



“Sweet Land of Liberty”

And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.


As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to a thundering close, Anna Arnold Hedgeman sat a few feet away. It was a long-overdue moment of recognition for the sixty-four-year-old civil rights activist, though it was bittersweet. The only woman on the steering committee for the march, Hedgeman had a place of honor on the dais at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. It was only at the last minute, at her insistence, that march organizers gave a few minutes on the program to Little Rock leader Daisy Bates and “casually” introduced Rosa Parks to the crowd. Hedgeman remained unacknowledged, her presence mute testimony to the importance of decades of grassroots organizing, much of it in the North, that had brought a quarter of a million people to the greatest demonstration in the nation’s history. It is safe to say that most of the marchers gathered that hot August afternoon had no idea who she was. At a moment when the black freedom struggle was growing younger and more militant, Hedgeman was part of a largely forgotten generation of activists, women and men, black and white, religious and secular, whose lives embodied the long history of civil rights in the North.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman’s journey began in the small-town Midwest at the dawn of the twentieth century, took her through the North, and brought her into the heart of a remarkable and diverse political and social movement to challenge racial inequality in America. She came of age as millions of blacks headed north in search of opportunity but faced a regime of racial proscription there that was every bit as deeply entrenched as the southern system of Jim Crow. During her lifetime of activism, she encountered grassroots school desegregation activists and angry Klansmen; black and white churchwomen committed to dialogue on race relations; poor black migrants and struggling women workers; hypocritical white liberals who mouthed their commitment to racial equality but continued to profit from it; musicians, activists, and intellectuals who created the Harlem Renaissance; black separatists dreaming of a proud black nation; and blue-collar activists committed to building an interracial labor movement. A tireless woman of political savvy and considerable charm, she worked with nearly every important civil rights activist in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hedgeman started life born into the “talented tenth,” a term coined by W. E. B. DuBois for the highly educated, deeply religious, and well-connected black men and women who saw their mission as uplifting the race. Pious and proper, she was the embodiment of the black churchwoman, sometimes prone to self-righteousness but deeply committed to leading a life of faith in service of social change. For Hedgeman, as it was for many early-twentieth-century black activists, there was no boundary bet

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Excerpted from Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue
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