A Comparative Study of the NAACP in Birmingham, Alabama, and Detroit, Michigan 1940-1965.

This dissertation is a historical investigation into the relationship between the North and South during the civil rights movement and into the struggle for racial equality and justice between 1940 and 1965. It challenges the notion that the civil rights movement was a southern phenomenon that moved North during the 1960s. Too often, civil rights literature has considered the southern movement, while excluding northern struggles. The dominance of the southern narrative is reinforced by a frequently articulated assertion that African-Americans in the urban North found non-violent direction irrelevant. The latter’s turn to the North results in analysis that posit a passive, disorganised inarticulate northern African-American population that became impulsive when the southern civil rights movement failed to change black lives. What my study hopes to do is quite simply to place the southern movement in a comparative context by examining the civil rights movement outside the South. Unlike much of the historiography of the civil rights movement, the experiences of northern activists, in addition to activists in the South, are of importance in my narrative. Employing organisational documents, letters, newspapers, private collections, and over thirty personal interviews, this work demonstrates that, well before the urban rebellions, northern activists employed research, rallies, and sit-ins to forward integration. It moves between the civil rights movement in one city in the South, Birmingham, and the civil rights movement in one city in the North, Detroit, demonstrating the continual connections and mutual reinforcement that occurred between northern and southern movements throughout the twenty five-year struggle