The Jim Crow North: A CBFS Interview

September 28, 2024

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS) is a monthly discussion series held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Curated by Jeanne Theoharis and Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine with Komozi Woodard, the series was established as a space to discuss the latest scholarship in Black freedom studies, bringing the campus and community together as scholars and activists challenge the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture, and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. In anticipation of the discussion on “Jim Crow North / Black Freedom Struggle Outside the South,” scheduled for October 3rd, we are highlighting the scholarship of the four guests.

Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School. Her research engages public education, urban space, rights, and the state in relation to gendered political subjectivities, kinship, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and anti-carceral studies. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States, was published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her current project, Education Against Enclosure, is supported by the Spencer Foundation. Ujju also brings along history working to build organizing for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and abolition as well as projects at the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy. She serves on the Board of Teachers Unite, on the Advisory Boards of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP), PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education, Organizing), and the The Public Scholarship Practice Space (CUNY Graduate Center).

Say Burgin is a historian of the 20th century US focusing on social movement and African American history. She is an assistant professor in the Department of History and contributing faculty to Africana Studies at Dickinson College. Her first book, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit, was published by New York University Press in April 2024. It provides a new way of understanding the Black Power movement’s relationship to white America. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Women’s History Review, the Journal of American Studies, The Nation, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She has helped to develop numerous lesson plans and open-platform materials that allow educators to teach the fuller, more radical history of Rosa Parks and the Black freedom movement. Follow her on Twitter @sayburgin.

Laura Warren Hill currently serves as an Associate Professor of Human Development in the College of Community and Public Affairs at Binghamton University. She is the author of Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY, 1940-1970, the co-editor of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, and the author of several articles on Malcolm X's relationship with the Rochester, NY community. Dr. Hill is a co-founder of the Upstate New York Policing Research Consortium (UNY-PRC) which seeks to create greater accountability in policing through research and action in upstate New York communities. Her current project examines the life and times of Betty Tyson, a Rochester woman who spent 25 years in New York's Bedford Hills for a murder she did not commit before she was exonerated and released in 1998.

Shannon King is Associate Professor of History and director of the Black Studies program at Fairfield University where he teaches courses on the Black Freedom Struggle, Urban and Social History, Gender and Women's History, carceral studies, and racial capitalism. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Reviews in American History; and essays in Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North, and Escape from New York! He is the author of Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era and The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia's New York.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write your recently published books?

Ujju Aggarwal (UA): How I came to write the book is connected to how I came to this work more generally. I had been working for many years as a community organizer. A lot of this work focused on joining with others to build The Center for Immigrant Families (CIF), a collectively run, community based, popular education center of poor and working-class immigrant women of color and community members. As our organizing grew, we focused increasingly on the intersections between gentrification, school segregation, and school choice. My own research picked up on some of the contradictions that we encountered in this work. The combination of mayoral control—which had brought sweeps of school closing in Black and Brown neighborhoods as well as the rapid expansion of charter schools—made it seem to many that the problem we needed to fight was privatization. That was not untrue. But it also didn’t always fit with people’s experiences. So one of the things I focus on in the book is the idea of choice, as a way to expand how we think about not only the stretch or capaciousness of neoliberal restructuring as a counterinsurgent response to Black freedom struggles, but also, the public we have yet to win. So while there is no doubt about the need to protect public education as one of the last remaining public infrastructures we have in the United States, as DuBois teaches us, we also have to radically transform what we imagine the public to be.

Say Burgin (SB): Organizing Your Own came out of my sense that historians really hadn't tackled one of the major ways that the Black Power movement got demonized in its own time and ever since – namely, that it represented an "anti-white" turn in the movement. There is this long-standing myth that stems from some misunderstood history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The myth holds that Black Power was about kicking white people out of the movement. But the more I talked to movement veterans, other historians and my students, the more I started to see how important it was that we tackle that myth and show that, in fact, Black Power's vision called for white people's roles in the movement to change but not to stop. Black-led groups like SNCC and the Northern Student Movement were asking white people to stop organizing in Black communities and start organizing in white communities, to build support for Black self-determination among white people. We need histories that show this strategic shift and this call from Black leaders, as well as histories that show how white people responded to this call. With Organizing Your Own, I offer some of this history.

Laura Warren Hill (LWH): I was born and raised in upstate New York. My entire undergraduate and graduate education took place in SUNY schools across upstate New York, and yet, I never learned about the Black Freedom Struggle in New York beyond brief narratives about Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad. It was as if Black activists ceased to exist in the North after the Civil War. Initially, I was going to write about an uprising (one of the nation's first in the postwar era) that occurred in Rochester in 1964. There was a considerable amount of contemporary media coverage of the event because both Eastman Kodak and Xerox were headquartered there at the time, however, historians had not yet paid the event too much attention. I wanted to find and memorialize the activists and their 20th century struggles.

Shannon King (SK): I was interested in the incongruence between Fiorello H. La Guardia being dubbed Gotham City’s most liberal mayor and the occurrence of two uprisings—1935 and 1943—during his mayoral administrations. This led me to interrogate “liberalism,” but also Black New Yorkers’ views and practices around safety.

CBFS: How do the histories of Black freedom struggles and racist policies in the North shift our understandings of liberation?

UA: The NEH seminar on Rethinking Black Freedom Studies from the Jim Crow North to the Jim Crow West that Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard convened—and the histories they centered that you mention—were extremely formative to this work. They helped me locate how the struggles we faced in our organizing were part of a much larger arc of Black freedom struggles that clarified the fallacy of the de facto/de jure binary as well as the violence embedded in liberalism. That is, these histories helped me locate and trace the continuity of choice as a strategy of enclosure in the post-Brown period. They also helped me center a continuity of struggle—one that required a place-based understanding of what people were fighting for when they fought for desegregated schools; one that requires us to ask, what was the larger collective desire and vision for freedom that undergirded a very practical demand? This continuity of struggle also helps illuminate that the schools we encounter in present-day contestations are often not representative of what people in a given place had envisioned or fought for, but rather, the result of differentiated power, rather than political will. And so as we work for more just schools, we can understand ourselves stepping into unfinished struggles for justice that are as much about public schools as they are about place-keeping, social reproduction, housing, and more generally, collective life.

SB: One of the facets that distinguished northern racism from its southern counterpart was the way in which racial liberalism minimized or denied racial stratification even while giving lip service to the problem. So, in a place like Detroit, liberal mayor Jerome Cavanaugh both acknowledged that there were problems with policing but also funneled a lot of resources to the Detroit Police Department. And he marched with Reverend King in Detroit but did not make de-segregation in schools or equal justice in the courts central to his vision for the Motor City. Ultimately, these scripts of denial and the limitations of interracial organizing pushed Black freedom activists to innovate. The call for white people to organize against racism in white communities actually came from Southern and Northern Black freedom organizations. Given how much denial is central to upholding Northern racial liberalism, we shouldn't be surprised that it was a Northern group that was the first to turn this call into a clear directive for its white members.

LWH: The tactics used against Black communities in the North were arguably different, more insidious, than those used in the South. Thus the emergence of a freedom movement was also qualitatively different. By studying the movement in the North, we accomplish several key goals. First, we're better able to understand racism and repression as a national project. This makes it more difficult for people to dismiss racism and repression as a Southern phenomenon. Second, by studying the movement in the North, we are better able to articulate and identify both the overt and covert means by which inequality continues to be reproduced on a national scale with each passing generation. By studying the movements for liberation in the North, we gain access to an entirely new set of strategies for freedom building.

SK: Black freedom struggles outside the south force us to think beyond laws and especially what appears to be “colorblind” policies and laws—as solutions to our problems. In The Politics of Safety, the criminalization of Black neighborhoods by the white media, then followed by public officials, and citizens, black and white—augmented the police presence in those neighborhoods.

CBFS: What lessons can organizers today learn from the struggles you write about in your books?

UA: Maybe not a lesson, but a set of questions and a methodology that, I hope, can help clarify the relationship of our present to our history, and thereby, what we fight for—and against—when it comes to questions of choice as well as questions exceeding choice; that helps make clear the violence of certain reforms that only tweak a system that is built on the stability of whiteness (as a baseline against which “equity” is measured) instead of its abolition. I also hope it helps us, to some degree, navigate what has come to be an all too common (and often, I think often unnecessary) debate about how we go about working for change: about questions having to do with the state and what has come to be referred to as prefigurative politics. What I hope I show, building on the work of Black and third world feminists, is that the practices and infrastructures of radical care work created and carried out by the women at the Head Start Center, who I accompanied in my research, can serve as a north star—but only if we are able to recognize them as such. That’s not to say it’s a happy, model, or perfect community—there is no such thing. But it is to say that practices of care often forged through the everyday spaces that make up the marginalized exclusions that choice (and racial capitalism) necessitates, are not merely reactive. Rather, they are grounded in an epistemology of enclosure as well as expansive possibility. And I believe that the sensibilities generated here—which are materially grounded—can serve as an already-existing guide for the radical reimagining of our relationalities and of what a public education can be.

SB: Today, the idea that white people have a specific role to play in racial justice organizing is a given within many activist circles. Especially over the past five years, organizers have articulated the importance of white people being in conversation with white family, friends, co-workers, and comrades about racial justice issues like anti-Black violence. And there are a number of white-led groups, like Standing Up for Racial Justice or the Catalyst Project, that work to organize white people. Organizing Your Own offers stories of white people who tried to do this in an earlier time. These are folks who grappled with so many of the same questions that white activists grapple with today: which white people should they organize and how, which Black-led groups should they take direction from and why, and when did heeding Black direction become mere sycophancy. Organizing Your Own doesn't offer a blueprint for this organizing but it does offer a lot of rich lessons.

LWH: Strike The Hammer shows that a multitude of strategies, from a multitude of thinkers and activists, made change possible. Black ministers steeped in a Black theology asked themselves if Jesus was for Black Power, and then concluded that he was. An embrace of Black capitalism in Rochester led to the creation of community development corporations that continued to provide jobs and housing into the 21st century. It also led to the development of strategies for divestment that activists continue to draw on today. By consciously weighing, debating and rejecting some of the time-tested strategies of social movements, such as boycotts and protests, the various elements of the Rochester community developed new, and arguably more effective, strategies for their particular place and time.

SK: That’s difficult to say, but I think organizers are quite familiar with the kinds of struggles I document. I think organizers will see how old many of these anti-Black punitive practices are, and that for well over a hundred years, Black people have waged battles against police violence—whether its cases of under-protection or brutality, and that calls for police reform are often a strategy to avoid real, meaningful change.