AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN STRUGGLES

To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. By Martha Biondi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 360 pp. Photos, illustration, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth).

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. By Josh Sides. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. ix + 288 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Peter B. Levy
York College

The great migration of the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed the racial geography of the nation, compelling all Americans to grapple with racial matters. Nonetheless, the traditional narrative of the twentieth century has tended to place greater emphasis on the southern struggle for civil rights than on the concurrent fight for racial equality in the North. Fortunately, a number of scholarly works have begun to compel us to reconsider the chronology, geography, and trajectory of the civil rights years. By examining the fight for equality in New York and Los Angeles, America's two largest cities, Biondi and Sides contribute further to our understanding of race in America, in general, and the nature and course of the civil rights movement, more specifically.