To understand segregation and civil rights in economic as well as political terms is to get to the heart of Terry’s “tragic vision” of the movement. The “long civil rights historiography” he espouses takes as its origin not the fight for equality in the South, starting with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision that ruled segregation of public schools unconstitutional, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year later, but the Great Migration that began in the early twentieth century, which eventually saw some six million Blacks flee the American South to northern cities for political freedom and economic opportunity. The reshaping of the industrial workforce that followed enabled a new era of labor activism, led by figures such as A. Philip Randolph, that merged class and race interests. Moreover, the urban Black vote in the north became a new political dynamic that helped compel Franklin Roosevelt to ban racial discrimination by defense contractors in 1941 and Harry Truman to desegregate the military in 1948.
However, northern cities fought to contain the demographic and political earthquake of the Great Migration by devising more discreet forms of second-class citizenship. In the 2014 article “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of the ways that predatory white lenders replaced “the acquisitive warlords of the South” as the agents bent on seizing properties from Black owners in cities like Chicago, abetted by redlining and other discriminatory policies that denied Black migrants equal access to housing. It’s this systematic subversion of Black economic security and uplift that makes less defensible the view of civil rights as “a self-reflexive ethical transformation that restored the American creed to pride of place,” in Terry’s words.
An analogy can be found in post-apartheid South Africa. The country’s liberal 1996 constitution was once deemed the apotheosis of the country’s democratic transition. But the constitutional settlement, including strong protections of private property, failed to reverse fundamental features of class domination, leaving countless black South Africans without access to opportunity and true social emancipation.
In the “master narrative,” the civil rights era peaked with the mid-60s legal victories and then, following King’s assassination in 1968, gave way to “a spasm of militancy and ‘identity politics’ that crested under the sign of Black Power [marking] the embittered denouement of the civil rights movement,” as Terry writes. The liberalism associated with King and civil rights has its foil in the Black nationalism of various political and intellectual programs, most prominently Marcus Garvey’s self-determinationist politics of the early twentieth century, the Nation of Islam’s separatist creed, and the revolutionary militancy of the Black Panthers. By the late 1960s and 1970s, the nationalists who accused integrationists of being Uncle Toms had replaced their ostensible rivals at the center of Black political struggle.