Seven Oaks Magazine.

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Adding what will surely become a classic contribution to social movement history is Martha Biondi's recent work, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Biondi places the New York struggle for Civil Rights in the context of the international anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of the late '40s and 1950s. In doing so, she has made her work part of a growing canon of literature that relates changes in the struggle for black liberation - for better or worse - to the fate of Left-wing activism during the Cold War. Biondi is particularly concerned with the influence and relationship of left-wing activists in the struggle for African-American liberation and racial equality. However, unlike many historians who construct a post-WWII narrative of decline for the Left in the face of McCarthyist 'red' baiting, Biondi argues that in light of the principled stands of countless radical African-American Civil Rights activists in New York during the late '40s and mid-50s, "the Communist Left continued to play a significant role in racial justice struggles well into the 1950s" (p. 6).

From flamboyant socialist politicians, to rank-and-file communist union organizers, to black nationalist elites - To Stand and Fight describes the complex makeup of the city's post-war Civil Rights movement. From the movement to take on employment discrimination for black rock and tunnel workers; to efforts to elect (and re-elect) left-wing African-Americans like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Benjamin Davis to state and local governments; to the protest for affordable, non-segregated housing and tenants rights in the district of Bedford-Stuyvesant; to communist agitation in the fight to desegregate professional baseball in Brooklyn - the New York Left was in the forefront of the struggle against racial injustice throughout the 1940s and 50s.

Like numerous writers before her, Biondi calls for a re-evaluation of traditional Civil Rights narratives and chronologies. "The traditional portrait of the movement posits a patriotic, straightforward.integrationist spirit that evolves or devolves depending on the writer's perspective, into calls for Black Power, increased militancy, and Black Nationalism," writes Biondi. "Yet in New York, movement leaders called for broad social change, economic empowerment, group advancement, and colonial freedom from the beginning. The traditional narrative omits the movement's full chronology and elides the critically important Black radical tradition" (p. 273).

While Biondi's call for a fuller Civil Rights chronology is not new, her contention that left-oriented, black radical struggles for racial justice in the 1940s continued well into the 1950s begins to fill a gap in the literature. Although Biondi maintains that left-wing Civil Rights activism in New York suffered similar Red-baiting and at times made similar accommodating comprises to Cold War liberalism - developments that effectively halted the movement's momentum - her work also begins to chip away at the uncritical Civil Rights narrative that purports to have exclusively survived the McCarthyist era, and provides an important stepping stone for examining left-wing continuities in the struggle for Civil Rights. This book would interest both social movement scholars and activists alike.